I’ve already mentioned the Asus WL500G premium wireless lan router in previous posts. Now I finally found some time to write about a few nice tips&tricks for the device: Reacting to button actions, turning the LED on/off by software, configuring VLANs on the different LAN interfaces, using an USB WLan stick with it and switching to a better web interface.
Opera recently released version 3.0 of their Opera Mini Browser for mobile devices. Playing around with it I decided to try to access a SquirrelMail webmail interface with it. It works great, but.. don’t try to use it with HTTP Basic Authentication.
I have a setup where the SquirrelMail interface is reachable via https and protected by HTTP Basic Auth. With Opera Mini one has to enter the Basic Auth user data every time one clicks on a link within the protected area. Solution: Add the userdata in the format of https://user:pass@host – this way you can even bookmark it. But then Opera Mini suddenly stops accepting the SquirrelMail cookie – rendering it completely useless, as one can’t even view a single message 🙁
Solution: No HTTP Basic Auth if you want OperaMini to work with (SquirrelMail-)Cookies. Without this type of additional authentication it works like a charm and the webmail interface is accessible while being on the road.
Opera Mini is a very cool browser and I do hope they’ll fix this issue in one of the next releases. Oh, did I mention MovaMail yet? (but that’s $$) 😉
Even though the technique is more than four years old and everyone should have some sort of firewall in place or the windows messenger service disabled automatically during the Windows XP SP2 installation the “net send” spam seems to be still around. Some examples of these spam popups can be found on this site. If you have issues with this kind of spam you should really consider updating your system, installing some kind of (personal) firewall or follow these instructions.
I was wondering about UDP packets to port 1026 and 1027 on my firewall so I started to log them with tcpdump – that way I discovered that these were still spam messages. Inspecting the dumps there were quite a few reoccuring IP addresses that tried to deliver their “net send” popup spam crap (see below).
So, I have this shiny new Asus toy, now what can we do with it?
I thought that maybe using its ressources for some wardriving fun would make sense. What’s necessary for that? Well, we have the wlan router that has everything “on board” except for a power supply, a huge storage for the results and a device to record its position. Read the complete article for details 😉
I recently bought an Asus WL-500g Premium wireless lan router. I already have a Dlink DI-624+ AP at home which I don’t really need – but I bought the Asus just to play around with 😉
After plugging it in and checking out the webinterface it has been shipped with I immediately changed firmware and flashed OpenWRT WhiteRussian RC6 on the device via diag mode and tftp as described here.
Everything went smooth and after rebooting the device I was able to ssh to the router for the first time.
The first thing I did was enabling the full 32MB of RAM with the following nvram settings – take care to use these only on WL-500g Premium routers! At the same time some networking quirks should be fixed:
nvram set sdram_init=0x0009
nvram set sdram_ncdl=0
nvram set vlan1ports=”0 5*”
nvram set wan_ifname=vlan1
nvram set lan_ifnames=”vlan0 eth2″
nvram set lan_ifname=br0
nvram commit
reboot
After rebooting I had 32MB of RAM and about 6MB of flash available. Using ipkg I installed some packages such as ntpclient (synchronizes the routers clock), strace, tcpdump and wl. Useful ipkg commands:
ipkg update
ipkg list | less
Mounting an USB stick was easy, following this document I installed the following modules via ipkg: kmod-usb2, kmod-usb-storage, kmod-vfat. Afterwards I loaded the newly installed modules with insmod – or just reboot the device. The USB stick ended up mounted as /mnt/disc0_1.
Related links:
Asus WL500g forum
WRT Wiki
hardware-hacking.com (Pictures)
Serial console without opening the cover 🙂
WL500g custom firmware
Running Debian on Asus WL500g
X-bit labs router review (with some technical details)
DebianWRT