Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

The CUWiN folks spent some time recently adding new equipment to the Homer mesh network. My company Metrix has provided them with all the gear for this project to provide the Village of Homer with a low cost tubes.

Recently I have been getting all the stuff for Shmoocon Labs off the ground. In case you don’t know Shmoocon Labs is an event held one day prior to Shmoocon. The basic idea is as follows. Get 30 or so geeks, a handful of vendors with cool gear and spend a day hammering out the production network for Shmoocon. This includes the network that supports registration, the hacker arcade, and of course conference attendees. In addition we attempt to eat our own dogfood and build a tight network that will hopefully hold up against all the potential tomfoolery that happens at hacker cons.

There are couple of things we try to achieve by doing this:

• Give people an opportunity to get hands on experience with the latest security and networking products
• Get the vendors to show us their chops when it comes to rapidly deploying their gear in a real world environment
• Create an open environment in the NOC where people can come by and check out the network, ask questions, etc…
• Do yet another thing to make Shmoocon a unique experience when it comes to security conferences
• Of course have fun doing it

Last year was the first year we did this and it was a success. It seems like every one had a great time, we actually did get the network up and running in time. We implemented and/or played with various technologies including but not limited too:

• IPS
• NAC
• Vulnerability Assesment/Auditing
• Centrally managed wifi using a controller and light weight AP based wireless system
• Network Monitoring including availiblity, utilization, etc…
• Centralized logging

And probably more that I can’t recall at the moment.

So anyways its time to do it again. If you have any suggestions or ideas for things that might make it more interesting this year, please let me know. This is includes things like:

• Vendors interested in participating
• Interesting open source tools to use
• Local network services to offer
• Ideas for contests and or games

Of course if you are going to Shmoocon and interested in participating go to the Labs web page.

While at WWDC John and Daniel turned me on to EaKiu. Its a cool piece of software for the Wi-Spy 2.4Ghz USB Spectrum Analyzer. It touts some pretty cool 3D graphs. Unfortunately its OS X only. For Windows you can use manufacturer provided software, and for Linux you can use Dragorn’s software. Which both sport cool and helpful graphs, just not the same 3D eye candy.

At work we just carrying this cool new device, an access point that fits in a wall box. Looks like it would be great for outfitting apartment buildings and/or condos with wifi coverage. It supports all the usual AP/Bridging/WDS, POE, SSL web management etc… Even supports remote syslog and SNMP.

Usually in a bash script when I want to parse a file line by line I do something like this:
exec < foo.txt
while read LINE;
do
SOMEVAR=$SOMEVAR,$LINE
done


This evening I was writing a bash wrapper for debootstrap to automate the building of chroot environments and for some reason I chose to stray away from my norm and did the following:
cat foo.txt | while read LINE;
do
SOMEVAR=$SOMEVAR,$LINE
done


After a few test runs I noticed $SOMEVAR did not have what I expected after exiting the while loop. After some debugging (bash -x) I discovered the variable was magically empty after the last read LINE of the while loop. I immediately went back to old ways of parsing and sure enough it worked as I expected. Hmm… Well after finding the explanation it makes perfect sense. I am just surprised I hadn’t run into it before.
From the Bash FAQ

E4) If I pipe the output of a command into `read variable’, why doesn’t
the output show up in $variable when the read command finishes?

This has to do with the parent-child relationship between Unix
processes. It affects all commands run in pipelines, not just
simple calls to `read’. For example, piping a command’s output
into a `while’ loop that repeatedly calls `read’ will result in
the same behavior.

Each element of a pipeline runs in a separate process, a child of
the shell running the pipeline. A subprocess cannot affect its
parent’s environment. When the `read’ command sets the variable
to the input, that variable is set only in the subshell, not the
parent shell. When the subshell exits, the value of the variable
is lost.

I mentioned in this email a little while back that I released a new Pyramid LiveCD Installer with the 1.0b5 version of Pyarmid. This CD provides a simple method for boot strapping a Soekris net45XX/net48XX single board computer.

Some models accept normal compact flash cards for the operating system media in which case you could easily install an OS image using another machine and compact flash card reader. However some of the models have soldered on flash and on these systems the PXE boot strap method is the only way to install on the board.

Setting up a “PXE boot” environment can be a little cumbersome if you have never done it before. With the LiveCD everything down to the IP address is configured out of the box so you should be ready to flash images onto boards in 5 minutes or so just by following the simple instructions.

Adam mentioned a mailing list discussion we participated in where I spouted off some suggestions for giving presentations. This is has a slight bent to hacker cons. Funny thing is I am sure I am guilty of quite a few things on that list when it comes to presentation throw down. But eh, I still think they are good.If you want to see the master of hacker con presos see j0hnny talk at least once.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/191/480556169_6d731d2416_o.jpg

Decided to try and get a friend’s u730 cellular data card working in Pyramid Linux last night. I thought it would pretty trivial since the card appears to use the same chipset as other EVDO/HSPDA cards already supported in the airprime module. But it turns out the device/vendor id combo is not in airprime. This simple patch should fix it for you.

This patch adds vendor/device id combination for the Novatel Merlin u730 hspda
card. Tested with a cingluar branded card.

Signed-off-by: Ken Caruso ken@ipl31.net

diff –git a/drivers/usb/serial/airprime.c b/drivers/usb/serial/airprime.c
index f2ca76a..00fa8b2 100644
— a/drivers/usb/serial/airprime.c
+++ b/drivers/usb/serial/airprime.c
@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@ static struct usb_device_id id_table []
{ USB_DEVICE(0×1410, 0×1430) }, /* Novatel Merlin XU870 HSDPA/3G */
{ USB_DEVICE(0×1410, 0×1100) }, /* ExpressCard34 Qualcomm 3G CDMA */
{ USB_DEVICE(0×413c, 0×8115) }, /* Dell Wireless HSDPA 5500 */
+ { USB_DEVICE(0×1410, 0×1400) }, /* Novatel Merlin U730 HSDPA/3G */
+
{ },
};
MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE(usb, id_table);

Just sent this email to the Pyramid Linux mailing list. Make a long story short there is a new image of Pyramid available. As well as a live CD that can PXE bootstrap and install the following Operating Systems on Soekris (and potentially other) hardware:

• Pyramid Linux
• M0n0Wall
• PfSense
• CuWin
• AstLinux