802.11b Network Scanning In London And Amsterdam

jbrw writes: "Beware of cat skulls in sombreros! Bicycle + laptop + gps unit + 80I.11 magic = WarPeddlaz, currently scanning London. Replacing the bike with a canal boat, and you have the WarFloataz in Amsterdam. Pics, info and raw scan data available at free2air.org." Some amusingly altered photos in here, too. Now that I have an 802.11 card working, this is getting even more interesting.

Comments

Slashdotted already?

[Squash]

That was quick. Anyone able to post a mirror?

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Rackemup]

someone should really warn these smaller sites that they're about to be posted on Slashdot.. their max-users is probably set to 20.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[mini me]

I guess the website wouldn't have been Slashdotted so quickly if only they hadn't used other people's 802.11b networks.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[Anomynous Coward]

Hey fellow /.'ers - thanks for all the interest,

We caught the deluge pretty quickly & we're tuning the host as best we can. Please bear with us.

.vortex

free2air.org

Re:Slashdotted already?

[no_such_user]

What Slashdot NEEDS to do is setup a cache for links to non-major and non-dynamic sites. Every time a link is posted to a smaller site, that site gets thrashed and nobody gets a view.

Pseudo example:
802.11b Network Scanning In London And Amsterdam
Posted by timothy on Sat Sep 15, '01 11:21 AM
from the brief-window-of-opportunity dept.
jbrw writes: "Beware of cat skulls in sombreros! Bicycle + laptop + gps unit + 80I.11 magic = WarPeddlaz, currently scanning London. Replacing the bike with a canal boat, and you have the WarFloataz in Amsterdam. Pics, info and raw scan data available at free2air.org slashcached." Some amusingly altered photos in here, too. Now that I have an 802.11 card working, this is getting even more interesting.

Re:Slashdotted already?

[jbrw]

free2air.org provides 802.11b network access in the East End of London. They're not leeching anything (erm, but I do - I get my bandwidth from them)... In fact, they're one of the few organisations openly providing wireless access.

Hosting system

[autocracy]

"free2air proudly hosts over wireless free2air public networks" Yeah, like that doesn't have mistake written all over it. SLASHDOTTING!

Free 802.11 Networks

[The Jake]

I just recently set up a Linksys BEFW11S4 router with wireless access in my apartment.

Shortly after I set it up, I found a guy using my network via the wireless access point. At first, I was fine with it, but I realized quickly that this wasn't some guy passing on a bike, but rather someone in the same apartment building.

I tracked him down, and told him that I wasn't in the business of providing free internet to the entire building. Now he pays half the DSL cost. Not a bad deal.

The point is this: I still leave my network open. Anyone wandering by is free to use my 802.11 network. In fact, the settings are such that anyone with a computer set up to connect to the local university's wiress network will get a connection here.

The lesson learned: keep your network open. Smile when some wandering soul conencts for a while. Unless you've got your own T3, though, you better make sure someone isn't getting free, continued, high speed internet, at your expense.

Re:Free 802.11 Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

dude...

I would have kept my mount shut and fscked with him heavily... you could have probably learned a couple of interesting tricks corrupting the bits and they flew past.

...but hey, I guess stupid is as stupid does.

Re:Free 802.11 Networks

[LordNimon]

You shouldn't allow him to use your network. If he abuses it, you will be held liable. If you try to prove that he did it, your DSL provider will then remind you that you're not supposed to share your access with outsiders. Either way, you're screwed.

802.11 is bad idea in an apartment complex.

Re:Free 802.11 Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the hardware store and buy some chickenwire fencing to build a faraday cage around your apartment.

Re:Free 802.11 Networks

[LinuxHam]

I have the same *exact* AP as you. If you had bought the version that has just the single internal port and the parallel printer support, you would have gotten the "MAC accept list" instead of the "MAC reject list" we got stuck with. I use Orinoco Silver cards with it under Linux and Win2k.

Here's something important to look out for. Because I've been getting my network "broadband ready", I run my Linksys behind an autodialing Linux firewall with a 56k modem. I run extremely tight rules on the firewall, too, and just the other day I logged some packets from my network behind my Linksys hitting my oustide firewall with the **protected network** IP network address!

My setup is 56k ppp -> Linux (192.168.2) --xover--> Linksys WAN port --> hub port (192.168.1 w/DHCP) --> 24 port hub

I should *NEVER* see 192.168.1 packets going OUT of the Linksys and hitting the eth0 on my outside firewall, but sure enough.. I logged a few the other day.. they were destined for junkbuster and squid. I'm glad I have the firewall logging anomalies like that or I would never have known.

Luckily the outside firewall stopped the malformed packets from getting out to the net. And no I don't care that much about it on a ppp link, but the cable modem is coming and I don't want my internal network structure revealed on the Internet side.

Re:Free 802.11 Networks

[Anonymous Coward]

But... but... that's communism!

slashdot counter-measures implemented?

[terpia]

This server went down so fast they must have pulled the plug when they got their first slashdot referral. Bastards....the site even sounded interesting.

Re:slashdot counter-measures implemented?

[shermozle]

Hehe. Just got an SMS message from one of the guys who lives where the server is. I suspect its his only means of communication at the moment.

The site is hosted on an IBM laptop at the end of a DSL line.

Re:slashdot counter-measures implemented?

[jbrw]

I'd be that SMSing person...

We're juggling like made here at the moment. Just opening up the firewall a touch so we can move the database on to a beefier machine.

I guess we'll add to our woes by posting some of the traffic graphs once it's calmed down a little.

well

[Anonymous Coward]

"free2air proudly hosts over wireless free2air public networks" Yeah, like that doesn't have mistake written all over it. SLASHDOTTING!

Re:well

[Angry White Guy]

Sounds kinda communist to me. Where are all of the capitolists who should be slamming this?
I guess that pure communism in some forms will work, at least until capitolism and greed set in.

Angry White Guy

GOOGLE Cache To THe Rescue

[terpia]

Arr... Here be the ever fabulous GOOGLE cache: Here

For all the copy and pasters:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ueiKCTXUjOc:w ww.free2air.org/+&hl=en

Re:GOOGLE Cache To THe Rescue

[shermozle]

That's not this story but an old one. The latest will be unavailable until get the site somewhere with >ADSL.

Re:GOOGLE Cache To THe Rescue

[terpia]

DOH! My bad.
/me spanks self

Frankfurt, GE Area

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the Sniffer 4.6 Wireless on my laptop, if anyone who lives in the Frankfurt area and whats to check it out, give me a shout at kruczkowski@hotmail.com (English please :)

Re:hello

[u-238]

the site you are on is run by capiotalists....if you dont like it THEN GET THE FUCK OUT

Re:god you are a retard bradleyjay

[Tonytheloony]

Anyhow your post is idiotic, worthy of a 10 year old and completely offtopic, now scram you troll

Possible Misuse

[bstadil]

What about misuse. Unless you keep excellent log files you might find yourselves in a lot of trouble if the next CodeRed get launched from your IP number. I am not saying this is a reason not to leave it open, just a reminder that it unfortunately has a flip side.

Re:Possible Misuse

[dj28]

And even if he has logs, what is that going to tell him? There's no way to identify people using the network. This is one of the major flaws of this. People could use these type of networks as dropoff points for gaining access to other computers and/or launching viruses.

Re:Possible Misuse

[jerrytcow]

I don't see how that would help. AFAIK hardware routers don't make logs, and if they did how would that prove it wasn't you? All it would show is that some machine sent out a request for a DHCP lease and was assigned 192.168.x.x. Try telling the feds "no, no, that really wasn't me."

The log would need to have the mac address. Even in that case would the feds believe you didn't change the hex values so it didn't look like your machine?

Re:Possible Misuse

[ZoneGray]

For that matter, be careful what you do if you connect to an open wireless network.

It would be simple to set up an access point, leave it open, and sniff traffic of whoever connects. If nothing else, I'd think you could collect POP passwords pretty easily.

Re:Possible Misuse

[The Jake]

Actually, I haven't set up the logging function of the BEFW11S4, but it does have a logging function.

The logging function logs all TCP/UDP traffic, the port, and the IP it was from, and to.

The DHCP function can pair MAC's to the IP's assigned, so with these two tools, I could trace things back.

So the Linksys BEFW11S4 has the functions necessary to trace things back. The only thing I wish it had was a "MAC address allow list", which is more useful than a "MAC address disallow list" thats in there now.

Re:Possible Misuse

[dj28]

Trace it back to what? You forget that you can spoof MAC addresses. The only thing you would trace it back to is a local lan IP. That will tell you nothing. That could be any computer on the face of the planet. You can't pair it with a person or a name. It's impossible. It isnt like an ISP where you have to give them your name, address, etc. You have no info on the people connecting to your network.

Re:Possible Misuse

[Jburkholder]

Just what I though. As much as I'd like to trust in human nature for everyone to use somthing like this responsibly, I'd be hesitant to leave it open for just the kind of reasons you mention.

Even keeping log files might not be enough to resolve you of responsibility if someone were to use your connection for a malicious attack on someone else using your access point and IP. If it got traced back to you, would having log files be an adequate defense?

"There was a ddos attack carried out yesterday that appears to have been controlled from your DSL IP"

"Oh, I looked through my logs and it looks like someone connected through my wireless access gateway at the time this happened. Here is the info..."

"That's nice, but _why_ are you leaving this open for anyone passing by to use? I'm afraid you had better come with us to answer more questions. Oh, by the way... we had better take any computers and networking equipment you have with us in case we need it later for evidence. Oh, don't worry... you'll get it all back when we are done with our investigation. *chuckle*"

It is a shame, but the potential exposure would probably make this problematic for a lot of people, myself included.

Re:Possible Misuse

[Angry White Guy]

Which brings us to the very point of liberties. If you are running a service where anyone can transmit and receive, and somebody uses that for evil purposes, should you be held responsible if you took precaution, if you logged mac addresses, if you cooperated? You are saying that he would be guilty because the attack ran from a point of acces under his control.
IMHO I think that if it even made it to the courts, there would be insufficient evidence to charge him, assuming he is innocent until proven guilty. By spoofing MAC address, that wouldn't incriminate him, unless it was spoofed to his MAC address, and even then, it would still be difficult to successfully charge him.
The feds wont throw you in jail if somebody living in your apartment was a murderer, they would only have to work harder to catch the real murderer.

Angry White Guy

Re:Possible Misuse

[firewort]

My techworks.com / buffalo / melco Access point has a web page configure page, and it has the "MAC address allow list."

I never considered how inconvenient a disallow list would be.

Re:Possible Misuse

[John Jorsett]

Of course, if he wanted to do some misusing himself, he's now got a fall-guy.

I wonder how he tracked the guy down, by the way?

Re:Possible Misuse

[LinuxHam]

I have the same AP as this guy. There's only like one 802.11b NIC on the planet that supports MAC spoofing, or more like custom MAC addresses. Any MAC starting over "4" is not a "spoof" per se, just taking advantage of a normal feature.

Re:Possible Misuse

[evil_one]

I'm on an open network. I've solved my paranoia with this line in fetchmail:
preconnect 'ssh -C -f -L 20143:server:143 username@server sleep 5'
If I change 143 to 110, I've got pop tunneled instead.

Frankfurt, GE Sniffer

[kruczkowski]

Frankfurt Airport has open 802.11b, all I saw was a bunch of novell and NT.

I have the Sniffer 4.6 Wireless on my laptop, if anyone who lives in the Frankfurt area and whats to check it out, give me a shout at kruczkowski@hotmail.com (English please :)

Anti-slashdotting setup perchance?

[shermozle]

Since /. kills many many sites with interesting stuff on them every time it links to them but is unwilling to cache the pages because the lawyers run the show there, how about Google?

Slashdot should organise with Google to cache the page as they approve a post. Google grabs the site before the hoards and next to the real link /. posts the google cache URL?

Re:Anti-slashdotting setup perchance?

[michaelo]

The problem with google is that it caches only the front page. Or at least it doesn't change the links. That's an annoyance. J.

Re:Anti-slashdotting setup perchance?

[scrytch]

Since /. kills many many sites with interesting stuff on them every time it links to them but is unwilling to cache the pages because the lawyers run the show there, how about Google?

Slashdot likes to think it carries breaking news, and thus the versions in the google cache would be stale. Organizing it with google would just drag google into the lawyers' liability game.

Re:Anti-slashdotting setup perchance?

[terpia]

And that would be only the people that *actually* want to *read* the story *prior* to posting. Considering this, no website should be slashdotted by the 11 people that actually read the story....

Re:Anti-slashdotting setup perchance?

[zenyu]

Perhaphs Slashdot could hurl an e-mail to the site owner asking if they want to be cached 5 minutes before the story is posted. Then if at any point they get the PGP signed, or faxed ok they go ahead and turn on the cache.

In a sane world caches be fair use... maybe they are, but lets let the NYT, Google & Yahoos of the world spend their lawyerly dollars on the eventual lawsuits.

I'll go send a few $$ to the ACLU & EFF now, they'll need it for more important things though.

Scanning Cities

[Jack Auf]

Can't check the link out - still .dot'd. Bummer.

I recently did a wireless scan of Downtown Los Angeles. Found 47 access points in the core area - only about 8 were using any kind of encryption.

I couldn't believe it. I keep wondering if these numbers are a result of 1) altruism 2) ignorance 3) laziness or some combination of the above.

As an aside - what are the best wireless scanning apps for linux?

Re:Scanning Cities

[Anonymous Coward]

airsnort & nmap work for us whilst war _strolling_ in lower nyc..

Re:Scanning Cities

[Russ Steffen]

Or, it could be 4) other security measures. The wireless netrwork here does not use link-level (WEP) encryption becuase it has been shown to be fundamentally broken many, many times. Instead, in order to get out of the wireless network you have to establish a VPN tunnel. And that kind of setup wouldn't be apparent to someone just scanning for networks.

Re:Scanning Cities

[jarodss]

It's also possible that some of these access points have been setup without the knowledge of the admins in the building.

I have seen instances where a "rouge" group of developers found it more productive to work in the board room (it has a great whiteboard) and there were not enough jacks for there puters, their manager put in a request for a new hub, got approved and sent a developer out, he came back with an some wap gear, the admin nearly shot the manager when he found out.

Re:Scanning Cities

[Anonymous Coward]

any free scanners for Win9X ??
my laptop has Win2000...
I know..it sucks..;-)

Success of a free network

[Angry White Guy]

The free2air project sounds interesting, even though it got /.'ed and I couldn't find much information on it, but we have seen in the past the fall of the free dial up and similar plans to create a free internet.
One question: Where does the revenue come from? I imagine that nobody is going to give away bandwidth, and that it would be difficult to force banner ads onto the public to pay for it.
Perhaps if they cached the web and inserted their own banners in the pages, that would genereate some money. But would it be enough? Caching napster traffic to conserve bandwidth would not be a daunting task, and scalability of the networks would also create a problem. How many nodes will 802.11b support, and how much additional equipment would be needed to expand the network would have to be addressed all but immediately.
I'm not saying it wouldn't work, I'm just saying it would be hard to make any money off of it.

Angry White Guy

Re:Success of a free network

[drewbradford]

The very point of a free network is that it is free! Yes, people do give away bandwidth. I do myself.

My setup is my DSL modem is connected a linux firewall/router. I then connect my hub for my wired LAN to the router, and the access point. That way, I maintain security on my LAN, and provide free 'net acess to neighbors and people driving down the street. If I need to, I can even limit the bandwidth to the access point.

Right now, I'm working on setting up a free, unified wireless network in the Chicago area. Let me know if you want to help out!

Security and 802.11b

[paqsys]

I recently purchased the SMC Starter bundle for my laptop. It works great. As far as the security, I could be wrong, but I use 128bit encryption and MAC filtering. The encryption makes the data almost unreadable. The MAC filtering only allows specific MAC addresses to access the access point. Am I missing something?

Re:Security and 802.11b

[Yokaze]

Assuming the encryption is above layer 1, the MAC-addresses can be sniffed.
I'm not sure about wireless NICs, but normally you can adjust the MAC-address as you like.
The production of a NIC is cheaper this way,
so I'd guess, the wireless NICs have the same feature/bug.

Re:Security and 802.11b

[Spruitje]

heheh.
The SMC basestation doesn't even need a password to setup.

Re:Security and 802.11b

[A_Non_Moose]

All your basestation are belong to us?

You knew it was coming sooner or later.

Sad part is, even I laffed at it myself when I said it...a true running gag.

Moose

Re:Security and 802.11b

[Anonymous Coward]

The MAC address is easy to set. Anyone could listen
for MAC addresses that your AP accepts and then later set their card to identify itself with that address.

Flaws in the implementation of WEP mean that someone using a freely available program could probably crack your WEP key in a couple of minutes on a pentiumII. They would need to passively monitor your network to gather 1-3 GIG data.

So no, you're data is not that secure. Use IPSEC,
ssh. https, etc...

Copenhagen

[Hougaard]

I drove around Copenhagen the other night and found ~20 networks, and only 2 had WEP, the rest where wide open.

Re:stupid americans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a known fact that the moderators are retards.

Improving 802.11b security

[nsayer]

For what it's worth, my page at FreeBSD has some instructions on how to set up PPPoE and/or PPTP on a FreeBSD server to use as a way to secure a wireless LAN.

People may find my wireless LAN -- they may even DHCP an IP address from it, but they won't be able to actually do anything once they do. :-)

Re:god you are a retard bradleyjay

[dangermouse]

This is the single most pathetic display of ignorance and illiteracy I've ever seen. Most people just go for one or the other, but the combination presented here is an astounding work of overwhelming stupidity and I think we should all take a few moments to recognize the achievement.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may very well have before us the product of the most absolutely useless human being on the face of the planet.

PRELIMINARY STUPIDITY METRICS:
word count: 155
misspellings: 15 (10.33%)
sentences and sentence fragments: 19
grammatical errors: 42 ( 2.21 per sentence/fragment)

question

[Anonymous Coward]

are there any scanning tools for the mac with an airport card? you canuse the airport software but it doesnt automagically tell you when you find a new network nor does it log it.

ive found about 5 wireless networks in small towns around here in texas, and id like to see what houston has because ive not seen anyone talk about the wireless nets there.

and also, are there any mac tools that can sniff the 802.11 traffic?

thanks if you can help me, because (A)id like to see just what a passerby can see on my network and (B)id like to see what i can finda t other places.

It's all about the cheapness

[Wesley Felter]

People keep wondering why there are so many open wireless networks around. Sure, many of them are probably explained by laziness. But I'll bet a lot of them are due to good old-fashioned cheapness.

When I bought my access point, I got the absolute cheapest one I could find; of course it only has useless 40-bit WEP and the configuration utility only runs on Windows (which I don't have). But I'm not worried about people freeloading; I just turn it off when I'm not using it. :-)

Re:It's all about the cheapness

[Fluffy the Cat]

WEP buys you very little. It's the equivilent of putting a tiny padlock on a bike - it may deter somebody who's just looking for an easy target, but it's not going to stop anyone who wants access. Depending on the traffic levels on your network, WEP can be broken within a few hours. Even worse, the time taken to crack the encryption scales linearly with the number of bits - 128 will only take 3 times as long to break, not 2^88.

Idea for other bicycle project...

[Ed Avis]

This may be OT, but I'd like to see bicycle + gps unit + digital camera == cartography (somehow). Maps are expensive and non-free in many countries (seems the US is lucky here to have govt. information in the public domain), but it seems that somehow you could gather free street map information just by walking around with a GPS-enabled PDA and occasionally typing in information like 'I am crossing over the junction of Fred Street with Jim Road'. Taking pictures and having them automatically associated with your current GPS location and compass direction would also be cool.

(Just an idea, maybe one day I'll get a PDA with GPS and a digital camera and try it out. But the kit seems a bit expensive at the moment.)

Re:Idea for other bicycle project...

[Sagarian]

Maps cost money because the finer details of them change constantly. Who would keep your 'open source' map up to date? I for one, wouldn't spend the time. I'd rather pay someone else to do it, by buying a map.

Re:Idea for other bicycle project...

[rubberpaw]

I've been looking at 2d height maps in openGLfor my Open Racer project. During that time, I came across some people on mailing lists archives who are actually working on that kind of thing. I saw the info when reading the forums for http://www.terrainengine.com.

Re:Idea for other bicycle project...

[Ed Avis]

Streetmap details don't change that frequently (not where I live: an area might be completely redeveloped, but incremental changes to existing street layouts are rare). Of course actually buying a map maintained by professionals will be the best option for a long time to come. I was thinking of applications like route finders: if these are to be free software or usable over the web, they need to have a set of free maps. The quality doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to navigate from A to B.

Re:Idea for other bicycle project...

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of paper map (other than a treasure map) is going to be more expensive than a GPS + digital camera ?

Re:Idea for other bicycle project...

[Ed Avis]

But if you bought a paper map and scanned it in, you wouldn't be able to distribute it with your application.

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[bradleyjay]

Why was this moderated offtopic?

It it precisely ON topic with regards to the parent.

Mod the parent as offtopic, but not this.

Then again, I can see that you just have it in for me, since you modded all my comments offtopic.

dumbass.

Terms & Conditions

[Peter Clary]

Well, I have a cablemodem and my ISP's Terms and Conditions clearly state that I'm not allowed to share my connection. This was probably because some neighbours string network cable between adjoining houses, but it's just as applicable for wireless.

You are responsible for what happens on your connection. If somebody uses your connection for something nasty (accessing illegal material, etc) then you could be in trouble.

I've been dying to go wireless, but I need to be sure that I *can* keep it secure.

Freely shared wireless networks are a lovely ideal, but be careful you don't get burned. Check your ISPs Terms and Conditions.

Paranoid Pete.

Apple airport

[supabeast!]

Anyone know if Apple airport cards are good for leeching bandwidth?

Re:Apple airport

[Anonymous Coward]

sure. they're just 802.11b cards like all the others on the market.

Re:Apple airport

[keelanc]

Yes, Apple uses rebranded Lucent Wavelan cards (whcih then became Lucent Orinoco cards, which then became Agere Orinoco cards). Most Airport cards are of the 40-bit WEP variety, but Apple just started shipping a 128-bit model. An mac program for finding access point can be found at http://homepage.mac.com/typexi/Personal1.html.

Re:Apple airport

[Anonymous Coward]

cool. mod up pls

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[grioghar]

Hate is not what we need right now. Words like this hurt everybody, even other Americans. I wanted to say the same thing, but we need to have a little reproach, analyze the situation, and find out who dunnit. Then, deal with them

Words like this just look to inflame those Indian/Muslim/Middle Eastern people who had nothing to do with this.

Please. Have some compassion.

Re:Slashdotted already? (webcache)

[helixblue]

I've actually been working on a solution, to go with a library of website cache that's been collecting for the last few years.

Unfortunately, it didn't work in this case. I've got a read-ahead public archived webcaching system, through junkbuster/squid, that I'm making public shortly.

I put a cache injector for foreign URL's on slashdot. Every 5 minutes, a ruby script checks for un-cached websites, and tries to browse them. This throws it into my read-ahead caching system, which is archived at http://www.webcache.org/

Unfortunately, this site was dead within 5 minutes, so it couldn't get injected. One solution is almost here, it's not just fully tweaked yet ;)

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[Anonymous Coward]

Naah. Let's lick their women's clits. Middle eastern women are HOT! Especially ones with that egyptian doohickey!

mod parent up

[ljaguar]

Mod this up

Re:god you are a retard bradleyjay

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is 15 out of 155 10.33%? Jeez, you'd think if you were going to flame him for stupidity, you'd at lease get your math right...

War blading!

[Shillo]

Okay, my wishlist for the next spring:

- a handheld or a wearable
- retinal display for it
- a compact 802.11b receiver

And... Time to clean up my rollerblades!

Can't somebody on a phat line host these guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well? I think their cause is just. :) Please, someone with a nice fat line host these poor souls!

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you're a twat.

Re:FP

[Turd Fergus0n]

"Now that I have an 802.11 card working, this is getting even more interesting."
How did you get yours working? I just pluged mine in and windows found it and installed all my drivers automatically!!

Turd Fergus0n! Funny name huh? Turd Fergus0n, remember it!

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[bradleyjay]

But at least I don't post as AC.

screwed link

[Microsofts slave]

the link wont work but mabey thats because im on a 28.8

Client-side 802.11 converter

[LinuxHam]

While we're waiting for the site to become available again, I have a serious question that I hope someone can answer..

has anyone seen a device that will convert a single PC to wireless that absolutely cannot otherwise be converted? I have a small mainframe at home that's really an S/390 chip on a Microchannel card (IBM all the way, baby :) and its in my downstairs office. It will soon have a microchannel ethernet card, but obviously there's no way in hell I could convert that puppy to wireless.

I'm looking for an access point-sized device that will just be a client side relay for one or more PCs connected to it. Has anyone heard of such a thing? Thanks..

Re:Client-side 802.11 converter

[Chirs]

Why not the apple airport?

http://www.apple.com/airport/

Alternately, any of the firewall/NAT/router/wireless home access boxes would do as well.

Re:Client-side 802.11 converter

[Bob_T_Bold]

Actually, there is such a thing. I believe Lucent made an ethernet to PCMCIA card adaptor specificaly for their Orinocco cards for adapting otherwise non-adaptable systems. Cisco also sells their Workgroup Bridge for such systems (it can actually support up to 8 devices off of a hub/switch).

Robert

Re:Client-side 802.11 converter

[LinuxHam]

I appreciate your post, but I may not have been clear in my request. I already have an access point. I cannot run ethernet to where a computer is located, and that PC does not have ISA or PCI slots so it cannot have a PCI to PCMCIA adapter installed. My only choice is to run an ethernet cable from the computer into some kind of device that will make the machine act as a **client** to my **existing** access point, not wire it to another access point that will compete with my existing access point.

Unless I didn't catch something on the airport page stating that the airport can be converted to a client device instead of an access point. I don't need another access point, though. Thanks again for trying to help.

Re:Client-side 802.11 converter

[LinuxHam]

You're awesome! You were exactly correct. Lucent makes the Orinoco/EC (ethernet converter). Its about the size of an external modem with an ethernet port and a pcmcia slot and brings 802.11 to any hardwire ethernet device. $220 at CDW, without a PCMCIA card. A little pricey but exactly what I need.

I haven't looked for the Cisco, with their history of "corporate pricing". I don't even wanna know :)

Thanks!

WEP and Mac address restricting.

[FrankieBoy]

I've seen lots of ways to crack WEP to sniff out someone elses packets but what about just preventing people from sucking up your bandwidth? I've got an Apple Airport with the Mac address restriction ability. Have there been any issues with someone cracking the base station itself?

How's this done?

[Anonymous Coward]

I simply cannot get to the site. Fails every time...how do ya'll do this? I have a prismII-based card and airsnort and am interested in a bit of network-cruising for grins and giggles. There are a number of possible frequencies - do you just choose one, set your card to it and cruise?

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[Anonymous Coward]

and my anus. Ohh... ahhh... the subtle pleasures of anal sex.

Re:sand niggers arent worth the sand ther standing

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a tasty cock. Want to cyber?

Re:FP

[Anonymous Coward]

heh, if you consider the contents of shit and piss. It would be hard not to have them in your breakfast in some form. Hence why they make such good fertalizer for plants.

Only cryptographic spreading will do

[billsf]

Indeed, there is quite some 'leeching' activity
here in Amsterdam. I was going to set up a system,
but realised when my reccomendation to 'spread' in
a cryptographic way was not taken, interest was
lost.

Understandably, governments are scared of losing
their ability to 'license' the airwaves. However,
in the USA, there is an effort to get the FCC to
go along. Too bad for those that paid $Billions
to get their third generation phones some
spectrum. It is because of this, it will flop.

As far as WEP goes, it was an obvious joke from
its inception. We call it "Weak Encryption
Protocol" here in A'dam. The bandwidth of 802.11b
is only 11Mbit/s half duplex max, so it wouldn't
be all that bad to set up something. I am mostly
concerned with the privacy of those that use the
systems I maintain.

As far as people using parts of the Internet, I
feel that "surfing the web" and getting mail and
all "Internet" cafe functions should be free. Here
you just need to go to the public library if you
need access. You get a Windoze box, but you can
download "Putty" or a similar SSH program and have
use of your own box. Bandwidth is fair and better
than ADSL or cable at the library.

Furthermore, if i travel anywhere and school is in
session, no university has ever denied me use of
their Internet, and often, I get a Unix terminal!

Re:god you are a retard bradleyjay

[holt]

he did it backwards. 155/15=10.33