Wi-Fi

#geeklife: weBoost 4G-X OTR Review

Kyle Rankin — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 12:00:00 +0000

Will a cellular booster help me stay connected on my epic working road trip?

I'm a Linux geek, and I think I safely can assume everyone reading an article in Linux Journal identifies themselves as Linux geeks as well. Through the years I've written about many of my geeky projects here in Linux Journal, such as my Linux-powered beer fermentation fridge or my 3D printer that's remotely controlled using a Raspberry Pi and Octoprint software. The thing is, my interests don't stop strictly at Linux, and I doubt yours do either. While my homebrewing, 3D printing and (more recently) RV interests sometimes involve Linux, often they don't, yet my background means I've taken a geek's perspective and approach to all of those interests. I imagine you take a similar approach to your hobbies and side projects, and readers would find some of those stories interesting, useful and inspirational.

We discussed this at Linux Journal and realized there should be a space for Linux geeks to tell their geeky stories even if they don't directly involve Linux. This new series, #geeklife, aims to provide a place where Linux geeks can talk about interests and projects even if they might not be strictly Linux-related. We invite you to send proposals for #geeklife articles to ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

For this first #geeklife article, I'm telling the story of a geeky, connected working road trip I just took in my RV, and within that context, I also review a particular piece of hardware I hoped would make the trip possible, the weBoost Drive 4G-X OTR. In the interest of full disclosure, Wilson Electronics provided me with this review unit, and I did not purchase it independently.

Working Remotely

My job is 100% remote. It took me many years of braving multi-hour California Bay Area commutes and turning down opportunities to find a job where I finally could work completely from home. Smart organizations are finally beginning to realize the many advantages to having a remote workforce, but I've found it works best if you have the right team, the right tools and the bulk of the workforce is remote. When everyone is distributed, everyone relies on the incredible modern collaboration tools currently available, and you have focus and incredible productivity when you need it while still being able to communicate with your peers.

My wife is a freelance writer and has worked from her home office long before I also worked from home. Once I also landed a job where I was completely remote, we posed the following question to ourselves: in theory, we could work from anywhere with a decent internet connection, but in practice, is that really something we could do? What would that kind of working trip look like?

Go to Full Article

Roll Your Own Enterprise Wi-Fi

Shawn Powers — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 19:31:18 +0000

by Shawn Powers

As you can tell by my Wi-Fi focus in The Open-Source Classroom this month, I really love wireless networking. I've implemented wireless solutions for schools on a shoestring budget, and I've helped plan campus-wide rollouts of redundantly controlled enterprise solutions. The one thing I really like about the enterprise solutions is the single point of management. The problem is those controllers and enterprise-capable access points are so darn expensive! That's why I love Ubiquiti.

The UniFi line of products from Ubiquiti is affordable and reliable, but the really awesome feature is its (free!) Web-based controller app. The only UniFi products I have are wireless access points, even though the company also has added switches, gateways and even VoIP products to the mix. Even with my limited selection of products, however, the Web controller makes designing and maintaining a wireless network not just easy, but fun!

The Web controller runs happily on a little Atom Web server, and if it happens to go off-line, the access points keep working independently. If you'd like robust hardware with a powerful Web controller application, but you're not ready to invest the thousands of dollars for a traditional enterprise solution, check out the UniFi product line. If you're half as nerdy as I am, you won't regret the decision!

Go to Full Article

Wi-Fi Mini Honeypot

Marcin Teodorczyk — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 17:12:27 +0000

by Marcin Teodorczyk

Do you have an old, unused wireless router collecting dust? Have some fun and make a Wi-Fi honeypot with it!

Recently, I've been playing with some new wireless gear. It's nothing special: 200mW Atheros-based transceiver and 18dBi yagi antenna. I'm living in an apartment in a city of about 640,000 people. I've pointed the antenna to a window and passively received about 30 wireless ESSIDs, three of which were unsecured (open) and six secured with WEP (easily crackable). I haven't connected to any of them, of course, but that gave me some ideas.

What if I deployed a wireless access point deliberately open? Some people eventually will connect and try to use it for Internet access—some might be malicious, and some might think that it's a hotspot. And, what if I deployed a similar access point, but secured with easily crackable WEP this time? Well, in my humble opinion, it's not possible to unconsciously crack WEP. If somebody that I don't know connects to this AP, I've just been attacked. All I need to do is to monitor.

That's exactly a wireless honeypot: fake access point, deliberately unsecured or poorly secured and monitored, so you can get as much information about attackers as you want. Such honeypots are especially useful in large networks as early threat indicators, but you also can play with them on your home network, just for fun and research.

You can build a wireless honeypot with old hardware, some spare time and, of course, a Linux-based solution. OpenWrt and DD-WRT are the two most popular Linux-based firmware projects for routers. I use them and some old spare routers in this article to show you how to build three kinds of honeypots: a very basic one that logs only information about packets sent by users into its memory, a little more sophisticated one with USB storage that logs a few more details about malicious clients to the storage, and finally, a solution that redirects HTTP traffic through a proxy that not only can log, but also interfere with communication.

Basic Honeypot with DD-WRT

Building a very basic wireless honeypot shouldn't take you more than an hour or two. Just grab your old router and pick up the firmware. Be sure to look at supported routers for both DD-WRT and OpenWrt. In my case, it came up that the router is supported only by DD-WRT, as it has 32MB of RAM and 4MB of Flash memory. OpenWrt's hardware requirements are a little bigger.

Next, flash your router (that's the risky part). Basically, you need to download the firmware for your machine and upload it to the memory. On some routers, it's as easy as clicking a button on the Web interface. On others, you have to connect through a serial cable, for example. Remember, this step can be dangerous. Make a backup first and be sure to read the instructions carefully on the DD-WRT/OpenWrt sites.

Go to Full Article

Wi-Fi on the Command Line

Joey Bernard — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:53:50 +0000

by Joey Bernard

More people than ever are using wireless networks as their primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11 that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great functionality. But, what if you aren't running X11 and want to manage your wireless card? I don't cover how to install and activate your card here (for that, take a look at projects like madwifi or ndiswrapper). I assume your card is installed and configured properly, and that it is called wlan0. Most of the utilities mentioned below need to talk directly to your wireless card (or at least the card driver), so they need to be run with root privileges (just remember to use sudo).

The first step is to see what wireless networks are available in your area. A utility called iwlist provides all sorts of information about your wireless environment. To scan your environment for available networks, do the following:

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

You'll see output resembling:

Cell 01 - Address: 00:11:22:33:44:55
          ESSID:"network-essid"
          Mode:Master
          Channel:11
          Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
          Quality=100/100  Signal level:-47dBm  Noise level=-100dBm
          Encryption key:off
          .
          .
          .

The details (address and essid) have been changed to protect the guilty. Also, the ... represents extra output that may or may not be available, depending on your hardware. You will get a separate cell entry for each access point within your wireless card's range. For each access point, you can find the hardware address, the essid and the channel on which it's operating. Also, you can learn in what mode the access point is operating (whether master or ad hoc). Usually, you will be most interested in the essid and what encryption is being used.

Once you know what's available in your immediate environment, configure your wireless card to use one of these access points using the iwconfig utility to set the parameters for your wireless card. First, set the essid, which identifies the network access point you want:

sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid network-essid

Depending on your card and its driver, you may have the option to set the essid to the special value “any”. In this case, your card will pick the first available access point. This is called promiscuous mode.

Go to Full Article