f-log

I heard about Mark Russinovich's "Trojan Horse" from the
Hanselminutes podcast and was intrigued.
Although the lead characters had a sizable history from his previous book "Zero day" the story was easy to get into and enjoy.
I especially liked the news articles from faux events and investigations that mirrored the technical side of the story arc. Being interested in this sort of news I was already aware of what was possible but this makes the actualities much more tangible to a less tech savvy audience.
Overall this was a good book, nothing amazing, but I will seek out "Zero day" and anything else he writes in a similar vein.
Note to self: write book reviews shortly after reading them, not three-six months later.

"reamde", possibly the misspelling of "readme"; this is the name of a virus/worm that affects the players of Neal Stephenson's T'Rain online MMPORPG.
It is also the name of the book of over 1000 pages and almost two and half inches think. I hate to think what the weight is but this is the reason I need a kindle!
Having 1000+ pages to evolve over, there are many complex characters with equally complex interactions. The T'Rain online world never feels like a gimmick and instead glues the various characters lives and lifestyles together.
It is difficult to say much about the plot without spoiling it so I will just say that if you like Neal Stephenson's other works you will almost certainly find this another well written,engaging and entertaining experience.

I have had email address on this domain since before the flog even existed so I get my fair share of spam, most of which is successfully filtered.

Today I go the following
From: Lurie Austinser
To: <***@jumpstation.co.uk>
Subject: Updating broken link from your page: jumpstation.co.uk/flog/apr2002.html
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 15:11:50 +0200
Reply-To:
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0

Hello,

I have bumped into your site while seeking for software and found your
website very interesting :)

Just a quick note, www.linux-firewall-tools.com/ is no longer active,
and you are linking to it from page -
jumpstation.co.uk/flog/apr2002.html

I was wondering if you don't mind updating the link to the updated website
en.DownloadAstro.com (en.downloadastro.com/) - A great download site
with more than 300K software and games, including professional reviews and
user ratings.

We are now in a process of updating the links in websites all around the
world and I will appreciate your cooperation.

I am sure your users will find it useful.

Thanks,
Lurie

There is the url from my site and url that(without checking) appears to be one I would have added. It also appears to one that might have died out over the years.
Googling the replacement domain does not set any red flags, only a yellow one that is it is a software download site <cough>twocows<cough>.
To be fair this could be legit but, my guess is it is a broad spread attempt to get gullible web masters to blindly update links and boost their Google juice, Google loves links.
Needless to say my policy with flog is not to update old posts, which is why so many still have spelling and other silly mistakes all over them.

PI stopped responding in one of my ssh windows and I was very close to unplugging the power, when I saw the ethernet light blink. So I tried unplugging the ethernet cable instead.
That resulted in Write failed: Broken pipe so I plugged the LAN cable back in.

Time to power up my drop in replacement for nmapfor i in {1..255}; do ping 192.168.1.$i -W 1 -c 1 >/dev/null&&echo 192.168.1.$i; done.

Unsurprisingly the PI did not show up at the IP address I expected but, one did show up in the list that made me think.

Fed up with doing this every time I want to ssh to a PI, I had decided with the all the other networking to setup static IP is DHCP for the PI's.

The IP address this PI had, was DHCP'd *BEFORE* the static values had been setup. The DHCP lease had then expired and the router had dutifully supplied the new *STATIC* IP, bouncing my connections.

Well at least I know it works ;)

I had a Linksys WRT54G(not the linux one) that I had replaced a previous Linksys wifi router(that I dropped and immediately stopped working).
But over the last six months it has got more an more flaky, where no errors are reported on the admin interface but the wifi just does not work. The fix was straight forward, disconnect power count to ten and reconnect, unfortunately we were not always in a position to do so.

Its worth pointing out that my change in the security had no bearing on this.

I had disabled the wifi on the router Sky gave us for broadband as soon as we got it(Sagemcom), so I turned it on and it just worked, security and all, very happy.
Best of all it also was too old to have WPS insecurities.

Then a couple of months later we had a power cut, no idea what caused it, circuit breakers tripped everything in the house dead.

Reset the breakers, turned everything on and the PC has internet, but there is no wifi.

Check wifi settings, the ESSID is still set but no security or other settings.

hmmmm, so I re-add them and they do not show, try three, four more times, sometimes some settings would stick, but lose others.

Tried factory reset but, no luck.

Found that nowhere sells a Wifi Access point on its own, they are all routers ...

Bought a Netgear N300 wireless router.

For some reason I tried following the setup information included in the box. Step one: "connect Yellow cable from internet socket to 'internet'", what I should have realised was that that was not what I wanted, as I then spent two hours switching networks to try and set it up as a wifi access point.
It was only once all the dust had settled and I had tucked cables away and velcro'd the thing to a unit that I realised that the 'other' ports on the device (marked LAN) were what I really wanted.
Found a nice guide after a number of Netgear forum post said this was just not possible.
After disconnecting the 'Internet' cable and ONLY using the LAN, disabling DHCP and few other tweaks and I was in a sensible place.

The main reason I had chosen Netgear was numerous posts from them stating they DID have the ability to not only disable WPS but that if any brute force attempt was made then the router would lock the WPS for a period before allow any more attempts.
Needless to say I disabled it completely but then ran 'wash' and it showed WPS LOCKED.
'reaver' also confirmed this.
sudo reaver -i mon0 -b 00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF -Avv
Reaver v1.4 WiFi Protected Setup Attack Tool
Copyright (c) 2011, Tactical Network Solutions, Craig Heffner

[+] Waiting for beacon from 00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 1
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 2
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 3
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 4
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 5
[+] Switching mon0 to channel 6
[+] Associated with 00:00:DE:AD:BE:EF (ESSID: MYESSID)
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
[!] WARNING: Detected AP rate limiting, waiting 60 seconds before re-checking
^C
[+] Nothing done, nothing to save.

Why did I test WPS when I knew it was disabled ?
and this Google spreadsheet has a column called "WPS can be disabled (and it stays off!)" that worrying has yes few times than you would expect.