Networking

110 posts in Networking

Yard Sale: GSM signal jammer

· Hardware, Networking

IMG_20140413_173249

Giving away this Chinese GSM signal jammer. Bought it in Shenzhen (summer 2013). While it's working, the range of this is only about 50cm (and not the advertised 5-10m). This jammer probably doesn't give you any more cancer than staying next to a cell tower. Fun thing to play with, but I do not have any use case for it. The jammer has a rechargeable battery. It becomes quite warm, so signal can probably not be boosted any more without burning the components.

Last I checked this is kind of illegal in Belgium, but who cares.

Yard Sale: WiFi adapters

· Hardware, Linux, Networking

Another day, another Yard Sale.

I’m selling about 100 DWA-160 D-Link USB WiFi adapters (Atheros).

These are compatible with Raspberry Pi and do not require an external power source. And are obviously compatible with Linux (firmware-linux-free).

Some of these adapters are new, others are used. Two different generation mixed (see the WPS button in the picture).

These adapters can be used in Master (Acces Point) mode using hostapd, but certain Macbook Pro’s (Broadcom driver afaik) make the driver/firmware crash; last time I checked (1.5 year ago) this bug was known but not solved (yet).

Powerdns no answer on A records and others

· Errors, Linux, Networking, Software

Observed:

mother ~ # dig mother.titify.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.4-rpz2+rl005.12-P1 <<>> mother.titify.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12227
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;mother.titify.com. IN A

;; Query time: 1 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sat Sep 28 18:08:19 2013
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 35

As you can see, there is a QUESTION section, but no ANSWER. This is an example with a CNAME:

Hint of the day: @digitalocean and not mounting sshfs at boot

· Linux, Networking, Software, Virtualisation

In /etc/fstab, be sure to add the option:

_netdev

As it will attempt to start the network mounted sshfs before networking has been started.

The entire line looks like this:

user@host:/some/dir /local/path fuse.sshfs defaults,idmap=user,_netdev  0 0

From the man pages:

_netdev

The filesystem resides on a device that requires network access (used to prevent the system from attempting to mount these filesystems until the network has been enabled on the system).

GCHQ hacks Belgacom

· Misc, Networking, Software

And thus, we can assume, they had (have?) access to a lot of European instances and personnel, both residing here in Belgium and roaming using BGC’s network.

And not a single fuck was giving. Not one. Please remain calm and keep on hypnotoad.

If GCHQ was indeed the agency concerned then this investigation is unlikely to go anywhere and the most that can be expected is some sort of diplomatic complaint from Belgium to the UK, its EU and Nato partner.

Raspberry Pi + ad blocking + nginx

· Linux, Networking, Software, www

There’s this howto that explains how to set up the RPi as ad blocker.

I’ve two RPi’s acting a router and was already running dnsmasq. I decided to give it a try. Note that this howto can actually be used on any DNS serving Linux server.

First of all, don’t go with the pixelserv as it crashes after a few minutes.

Apache is an option that worked fine. A general hint: if you’re already running Apache or whatever on port 80, just add a 2nd static IP and make Apache listen to that.

Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder.

· Apple, Errors, Linux, Networking, Software

5 or so days ago, this error suddenly popped up:

Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while creating the backup folder.

I have a Raspberry Pi, acting as TimeMachine (using afp/Bonjour/Netatalk).

There are several things I tried to solve this, including messing in the sparebundle from Linux (chowning) and deleting my TM .plist. This probably messed up my backup a bit.

But what seemed to ‘solve’ it for me was: