aj’s blog

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).

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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 😉

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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

Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers are quite nice to play with. But they have a nice feature that most people don’t seem to use – the built-in “Base Management Controller” (BMC).
Basically it’s a built-in management card that can be controlled locally on the server, via the serial console or remotely over LAN. Besides reading various system information such as temperatures, fan-speeds, eventlogs etc. it supports power switching functions (on/off/reset..) and a really nice thing, Serial over Lan (SoL).
Using this feature you can redirect serial output over the network. If you run some sort of unix on the server that means that you can control everything remotely, including the BIOS screens, RAID setup screens, the bootloader and your console – even if you mess up the OS’s network configuration. When running some other operating system the fun most likely stops after the RAID setup screens 😉

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Google has recently released a Gmail client for mobile phones (Enriques screenshots, downloadsquad review).
I tried to install it on my phone yesterday – but I got an ugly 404 error from google.com. I suppose that happened because it provided me with an internationalized version that didn’t exist. I then decided to visit the installation url with my webbrowser which immediately redirected me to Google Mobile, no chance to download the Java package.
But lynx is your friend!

$ lynx -useragent=Nokia5140i http://gmail.com/app

Using this method I finally got the download links – language code “DE”, but after changing it to “EN” the download worked and I could upload it to my Nokia. Here we go, direct download links for the gmail mobile Java client:

Nokia Advanced-MIDP2 (jad) (e.g. 5140i)
Generic Advanced-MIDP2 (jad) (e.g. LG-LX550)
Motorola V600 (jad)

Googles list of supported phones. If you need other versions try the lynx command line above with some mobile phone version string from this site.

have fun – happy gmailing.