Password Security
This is just too crazy. Right now I am sitting in a hotel room of a hotel chain which offers WLAN services itself (a software called “HotSpotCenter” from Dr. Eckhardt + Partner GmbH) and through Swisscom.
Both solutions are far too expensive and I usually do not depend on such things since I have a UMTS flatrate. But for some reason I do not get a connection in my hotel room and so I looked for unsecured wireless networks and of course I found one right away with the hotel name as SSID. Connecting to it and opening a web browser I was presented with a welcome page asking me to present my credentials.
I then figured they have some kind of MAC authentication and wanted to sniff wireless traffic a little bit and see if I could capture a MAC address of an allowed client. So I started MS Netmon and shortly after I had a MAC address to try out. But then my wireless network driver would not let me change my MAC address and with no Internet access I was chasing my own tail.
“What the heck let’s try some passwords” I thought and my first try was the hotel name as user and password. Doing so I found myself confronted with the administrative interface of the HotSpot Software.
Playing around a little but I finally printed myself a nice little voucher and now I am writing this post.
Now this is password security the way I like it.
Tweaking the Nokia N800
I’ve been using the Nokia N800 for quite some time now and never found the time to enable Dual-Boot. The reason one might want to dual boot the device is that you can copy the OS to another SD(HC) card that may be faster in terms of I/O than the internal flash memory.
So I looked for a fast SDHC card and finally chose a SanDisk Extreme III with 8GB. According to Alternate read and write speed is 20 MB/s so it’s far more than the Class 6 standard (6 MB/s) requires.
I then used this How-To from Schmot’s blog to configure dual-boot. Nice walk-through and I had no problems at all. Afterwards the N800 greets you with a new welcome menu:
Now, the big question is if this is really worth the work? Subjectiveley spoken I’d say yes it is faster than before. Objectively I can’t tell. I use mYtube to watch You Tube videos and I hope it a least profits from the fast SD disk it now uses as buffer storage.
Ah yes, the reason for this post is a personal shortcut:
fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2
This command is needed whenever there is a problem with the MMC booted OS and has to be launched from the internal flash OS, of course Hopefully my super trouper SD card will manage any filesystem problems itself.
Cool commandline moves
FOR /L %f IN (1,1,254) DO ping -w 500 -n 1 192.168.1.%f | findstr /I reply >> %TEMP%\ping_results.txt
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)