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.

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.

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.

Alot of things have happened in 2007 with my company. We completely revamped our online store to start of the year, we have added a ton of new products and we moved in to a new address located on pine in Capitol Hill. June 16th marked an entire year since I left my full time job as infosec engineer in corporate America.

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);