Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

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);

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

So I am probably the last person to post something about Field Day 2006 but eh, better late then never. The main idea behind field day is to rapidly deploy a wireless network at various points in the city and do so without relying the grid for communication or power. We do it mostly for a reason to geek out, but being able to this in a state of emergency would be very usefull.

There were three physical sites that participated:

• Magnolia Park
• Alki Beach
• Elliot Bay

All sites were powered via battery. At Alki we have a deep cycle battery that powered our wireless node and 5 or so laptops for the entire day. We arrived at the site around 11am and had the tent, power and network up and running by 12:30.

Probably the most interesting part of the day was playing with OLSR in this situation. Most nodes were Soekris based Metrix boxes running Pyramid Linux. We used OLSR to handle routing for the network. OLSR is the “Optimized Link State Routing” protocol it is a link state routing protocol that is intended for use in MANETs (mobile ad-hoc networks) also commonly referred to as “mesh” networks. It advertised all the host routes for individual nodes running OLSR and provided HNA for subnets that contained hosts not running OLSR. In addition it also provided HNA for networks that Internet gateways. HNA stands for Host and Network Association messages, which are basically routing advertisements for non-mesh nodes.

One major technical issue we spent a lot of time trouble shooting was the Elliot bay node. It was primarly connected via a 802.11 client bridge device. This device had at least one machine behind it. The problem was quite confusing we could ping a node behind the client bridge no problem, we recieved routing information from it, however when we attempted to route packets through the node behind the client bridge they were silently dropped. We verified via packet traces that they left one radio interface however they never reached the machine behind the client bridge. This was because packets being routed through the client bridge had a destination address of a host the client bridge did not know about. Since 802.11 has no specification for bridging in client (STA) or ad-hoc mode, client bridges get around this by using proxy arp and since it knows nothing about the destination address in the packet to be routed it does pass it. A work around was to set the mac address of the bridge to match the mac address of the host behind it running OLSR. I am still not sure why this worked, but have not had the time to think it through.

Other field day posts:

• Brian
• Casey
• Eric
• Matt
• Dan

Myself and Matt will be doing a workshop at Toorcon 8. It will be a one day workshop covering the basics of boot strapping an embedded wireless device ( Soekris based ) and setting up a wireless mesh using OLSR. Participants in the class get an embedded wireless device from my company Metrix that they take home with them in addition to learning the skills required to continue hacking on it. Pre-registration ends this Friday and is currently $1200, after Friday it will be $1500 at the door any open seats will likely sell out fast. There are currently 5 seats left. If you have a group of people (3-5) interested, we might able to get you group discount ( email me: ken at ipl31 net ). But you need to act before Friday midnight!

So tonight at hacknight we are sitting at Cal Anderson park, I was able to fire up a Metrix box running Pyramid Linux with a lithium ion laptop battery to act as a repeater from the local cafe. The cool part is that we are using a single radio which is simultaneously a STA (client) and Access Point using the capabilities of the next generation Madwifi drivers. With MadwifiNG you can create multiple virtual interfaces one being a client and one being an AP but both existing on the same physical radio. Some caveats are that you have to be using the same channel on both virtual interfaces, and you have to create the interfaces in a certain order. You need to create the Access Point interface first, and then create the STA interface. In Pyramid Linux adding the following to the /etc/network/interfaces file, just replace the ssids:

auto ath0

iface ath0 inet static

address 192.168.91.1

netmask 255.255.255.0

broadcast 192.168.91.255

post-down wlanconfig ath0 destroy

pre-up wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap

pre-up iwconfig ath0 essid “SWN-Hacknight” channel 01 rate auto rts off frag off

pre-up ifconfig ath0 up

pre-up sleep 3
auto ath1

iface ath1 inet dhcp

post-down wlanconfig ath1 destroy

pre-up wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta nosbeacon

pre-up iwconfig ath1 essid “Metrix” rate auto rts off frag off

pre-up sleep 3

Nocat Splash binaries for pyramid linux. Tested and seem to work ok.

At the request of Darrin, I just built gpsd for Pyramid Linux. I don’t have all the gps gear to test it fully but I loaded it up on a soekris board at home and it starts up with no problems. I stuck here for now: http://ken.ipl31.net/pyramid/

I stripped out all the man pages per usual, and did not include the python scripts and binaries the make file puts in /usr/bin, its just the gpsd binary and supporting library. Untar it from / and it will stick stuff in the respective /usr/local directories.