Busy night

Tonight has just been busy like crazy.

Wireless Networking

I’ve been trying to revive my old router (WRT54GS) and started looking for customized firmware to install. Problem I’m running into is that all lights appear to stay on and I can not communicate with it via wireless or a direct LAN connection. I have read in a few ares that this may be due to the power adapter malfunctioning. They appear to be 32 dollars new, and 8 bucks used from one guy selling on amazon. It makes it appear to be better off just buying a new router to try things out rather than repairing the old.

I tightened up security on my current wireless network as well. I stopped the SSID from being broadcasted and also setup MAC address filtering. I was debating on changing the security from WPA2 personal to WPA2 enterprise. With this configuration, I would need a radius server. I was thinking that the old router could be used for that very purpose if I could get it working with some custom firmware such as DD-WRT. Perhaps one day I’ll invest a bit more time down this avenue.

School this week has mainly been focusing on wireless technologies comparing wimax, bluetooth, wifi, and zigbee. There has been a lot of focus on the vulnerabilities of wireless. The instructor apparently thinks that using WEP is secure and hard to crack. I was able to find a lot of tutorials on the internet on how to crack it in under 10 minutes using BackTrack. Some tutorials claim that you can crack it in under 60 seconds with KisMAC. Of course, the guy who cracked within 60 seconds was using a dictionary attack on a weak password. The other attacks that go on for five to ten minutes crack the data from observing lots of iv data packets.

With WPA, the security is better. It doesn’t really matter that I disabled SSID broadcasting. At least, that is the general consensus on the internet. Also, MAC address filtering doesn’t work 100% to keep intruders out since people can spoof mac addresses these days. So, in summary, disabling SSID and enforcing MAC address filtering doesn’t protect you 100%. WEP is unsecure as can be. You have to go wtih WPA. Preferrably WPA2. Setup your encryption to use AES only. TKIP isn’t as secure. Last step is to get a RADIUS service setup so you can use WPA2 Enterprise. Otherwise you are stuck with WPA2 Personal. RADIUS is expensive unless you go with custom firmware. Then it costs roughly 60 US$.

Programming

I’ve been setting up VisualSVN for Visual Studio 2008 Professional. I setup the server that they offer as well. It all worked great, but when I tried to add my web project to SVN, it started complaining that the files were falling outside of the working directory. I understand what this means actually as we have had to setup our projects in a certain way before adding them to VSS and TFS.

I decided to work on a local website instead. Since the built-in webserver doesn’t support PHP, that meant that I had to either install Apache http server or IIS. Oddly enough, IIS refuses to install on vista. My guess is that it is competing with Visual SVN Server for port 80. Apache installed, but complained on the last part explicitly stating another service was using the same port. Visual SVN Server installed apachee before, but I don’t know how to gain access to it to setup websites or change its port. I’ll be pulling my hair out a bit more.

WordPress Upgrades

I also tried upgrading wordpress on my old website (lewismoten.com). I got everything setup and hit the upgrade page. I was presented wth a message that MySQL 4.0 was required. I shot an email over to my websites host and got a prompt reply. It appears that I have to backup everything from my website, email, and databases. They’ll move me over to a new server with an updated control panel, php, and mysql.

Secondlife Integrated Browser

I hadn’t gotten into Second Life yet today, which is pretty rare. My wife tells me that the release candidate opens url’s within a window now just like the onrez client. that has got to be a sight to see. I hope they do the same for windlight as well. Crap Mariner has a request to show only 3 fields on the countdown timer – days, hours, minutes. This is to cut down on server resources since you only need to update it once a minute rather than every second. It sounds like a great idea and could be packaged with the other if I ever get off of my butt and get to work on it.