Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

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.

Shmoocon tickets have been on sale now for a couple of days and early bird tickets for the first round have sold out! You can still get “Open Reg” and “I love shmoocon” tickets at the registration page.

Myself and Cowboym have been organizing the NOC for the past two Shmoocons, this year in addition to normal NOCiness I will running the Shmoocon Labs. Read the page for a longer description, but basically we are opening the NOC up to vendors and hackers alike to help build and break the network. If you are interested in this (vendor, hacker or otherwise), email “shmooconlabs” aT “shmoocon.org”.

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!

Well the pictures from LayerOne are starting to hit flickr. I only took a couple but a bunch of people were running around with cameras, so I expect there to be quite a few.

So I just wrapped up my presentation for LayerOne. I think it went really well and people had some great questions. As promised to the audience here are a bunch of links for further reading on the subjects we discussed:
Community Wireless:
Seattlewireless.net
Freenetworks.org
Mesh Routing:
OLSR: Optimized Link State Routing Protocol
Hazy Sighted Link State Routing Protocol
OPN, Other Peoples Networks:
OPN Description
Sourceforge Page
Muniwireless:
MuniWireless.com
Captive Portals:
Nocat
WifiDog
Network Neutrality:
FreePress: Net Freedom Now

Myself and bunch of people from DC206 are flying down to LA on Friday for LayerOne. LayerOne is whats generally referred to as a Hacker Con, with topics including things like lock picking, hardware hacking, and information security. I will be leading off the festivities on Saturday morning with a talk about Seattlewireless and Freenetworks in
general. Community Wireless/Freenetworks ( I use the terms synonmously) is a topic that generally has not gotten a ton of attention at hacker cons. I presented at Defcon 5 years ago, Adam and Xam discussed it in a couple of the Shmoo talks around the same time. Wireless in general on the other hand has obviously gotten a ton a coverage at Hacker Cons, because of all the inherent
security problems.

So I guess these are my goals for the talk:

-Reiterate to the hacker community that yes security is important, but so is building networks that benefit the greater good.

-A breif history of Seattlewireless and the Community Wireless Movement

-Some discussion on advancements in this space (mesh routing protocols, radio technology)

-Why the CWN movement is now more important than ever, some discussion on Net Neutrality

-What people can do to help our voices be heard by the FCC, Congress etc…

If anyone has any feedback on other things they would like to hear about, feel free to comment on this post or email me and I will see what I can do. Also LayerOne has a blog, I imagine they will be updating over the course of the conference.

Technorati Tags: LayerOne

So one of the running themes this past weekend was the Quality Inn Hotel. This is where Matt and I stayed. The Canadians stayed there one night and then checked out after being less than impressed with “Quality” of the Quality Inn. When asked how the hotel was, my response was “They definitely got the INN part down”. However they had free wifi in the rooms and it was close to the waffle house.

Anyways, I found it amusing that I received a survey from Choice Hotels, the owner of the Quality Inn. I am not going to fill out, but I figured someone else might want to

We value your input!  Our records indicate that you recently stayed at a Choice Hotels property – thank you for choosing us!  Please take a moment to complete a Choice Hotels guest satisfaction survey for a 03/30/2006 stay at the Quality Inn & Suites Historic St. Charles in Saint Charles, MO. Completing this survey by 04/14/2006 will help us continue to improve our customer service. Thank you.

Survey Link

Technorati Tags: NS4CWN

So it looks like the storm we experienced left some serious devastation in its wake.

So here we are sitting at the Sheraton in St. Charles, MO. It may sound like the beginning to a bad joke: “I am sitting in a bar with an Anthropologist and Physcologist from Intel, people from the and Ghanna Community Wireless Network, Eastern India Community Wireless and of course Matt.”

Bogdan of Belgrade Wireless just got done describing the network in Belgrade which has 30 interconnected nodes and close to 400 users. The kicker is that the majority of people actually use the network for local communications. Currently the nodes are mostly running Atheros G cards in turbo mode for the point to point links and they experience network speeds of close to 80mbs on the turbo mode point to point links. Its awesome to see community wireless taking off in so many places all over the world. One the coolest things wasto here Bogdan say when he started talking about his project was that its not about internet access, first and foremost its about building a local communications network.

John from Wireless Ghana is working on the project on tour with the Peace Corps. He initially joined the Peace Corp to be a math teacher, but is quite happy now working the wireless ghana network which now has 8 interconnected nodes on their network with 1kb VSAT uplink.

Among other things I have been describing to them the Seattle coffee scene, David Schomer’s espresso preparation innovations, and decompressing from the conference and the tornado incident earlier in the day.
The Summit went off with out a hitch, props to Sascha for putting it together and props to everyone that attended to discuss and share their experiences, visions, and inspiration.

So a few moments ago the Community Wireless Summit was wrapping up and a bunch of us were hanging out saying our goodbyes. In the course of 5 minutes a beatiful sunny day with people going shirtless turned into a complete grey sky with large green clouds rolling through fast enough to make everyone turn around and look. In the course of 30 seconds a strong gust turned it to screaming winds. Tornado I thought?? Really loud sirens started sounding, we all scattered to the nearset building waiting for someone with a key to the dorm building to let us in.

So now we are sitting in basement of a dorm at Lindewood University listening to the sound doors clacking and recounting what for a lot of us is our first potential tornado. The quickness with which the storm took over a completely sunny normal day was amazing. It was really just long enough to for you to start thinking “Is this a tornado wind?”, by the time the thought crossed your mind your running.

…

So 15 minutes later the storm has passed over, all thats left now is some steady rain and lightning.

Photo taken by Matt: