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.

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

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 a while back I took over part ownership of a company. As of June 16th I left my full time Security Engineer to become part engineer, part sales person, part support person and part bean counter.  Running your own business is something I would suggest everyone do at least once, even if its in a small/part time capacity. It’s very rewarding and an incredible learning experience that I would imagine never really stops teaching you things. Now that things have settled down a little from the transition, I will try and keep things a little more up to date around here.

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

Next month I will be starting a new job as a Security Engineer for one the major wireless carriers. I am very excited but I am going to miss all the great people at Serials Solutions, you guys rock!.

A picture taken on Jacob’s T616 now represents me to the rest of the company on our employee info intranet page. Look at this mug.

So with my new job has come a new laptop. Its a Dell Inspiron 8500, which touts almost a 16 inch screen with a native resolution of 1680×1050. I have been OSX for over a year now so its wierd to start using windows again. Previous to OSX my main computer ran FreeBSD, but unfortuantely I need windows for alot of stuff at work. Dual Booting just sucks so now its back to using Cygwin which is a must for any Unix geek stuck on win32.

BTW, I need to get rid of some couches and a pool table @ C4 (my shop space in Georgetown we are moving into a smaller space and need to get rid of crap.