Saturday, October 30, 2010

Aircrack for Droid

I installed Debian onto a 4GB partition of my 16GB sdcard in my Moto Droid. This was quite the fun little adventure. I'll have to go more into it sometime later. While I was messing around with different packages and programs. I decided to pull down the aircrack-ng suite. After a lot of testing and playing, I found out that the Droid hardware just doesn't want to go into monitor mode. You can KINDA get it to work, but it's not reliable. The interface will just continue to disappear and your capture will not have amounted to anything. It also doesn't support injection as far as I can tell which limits much of what you can do with it. About the best that I could do was to have a script run every 30 seconds or so that would restart the interface to begin captures again. I walked around the neighborhood a few times while it was doing this. I was amazed to find that it did work a little. I'm wondering though if maybe using tcpdump wouldn't be a better solution to the aircrack-ng tools. I'll give it a test soon and write back here.

EDIT: Found out today that the wireless card in the Droid supports injection.
10/31/2010

Hacking the Apple tv

So these are my notes over the past week or so on hacking my appletv.

I obtained an appletv generation 1 with a 160GB HD at the Ohio Linux Fest 2010. At first it just sat around for a few days before I could really get to hacking at it. The first thing that I did was to grab a friend's macbook and make a patchstick for it and installed ssh and xbmc. I've never been a big fan of boxee so I just left that off. That friend went back to college (this will come into play later). I installed binaries of rtorrent and irssi from projects on google code.
http://code.google.com/p/rtorrent-appletv/
http://code.google.com/p/irssi-appletv/

The rtorrent binary worked great while the irssi binary ran but coughed up some error about perl not being where it thought it should be. I though about creating a symlink to fix this but just decided that I'd rather get gcc running and build my own sources.
I pulled down the darwinx86-801 release from this link. I then used 'sudo hdiutil mount' to mound the .iso to the system and pulled a few binaries that I thought I would need from it to my ~/bin directory. I.E. screen, nano, vim, xsltproc, wget, and quite a few more. I added ~/bin to the $PATH variable and chmod the binaries so that I could use them. I noted that there were a few gcc packages on the disk, so I also pulled those down and attempted to install them into /usr/local/bin which was just a symlink to /mnt/local. This failed. I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to build my own gcc sources on either an intel Tiger mac or a linux box with the proper toolchain set up. I found a possible guide for the linux setup here. Still need to get this done.
I installed the XAMPP webserver stack just for kicks and giggles. This was a stupid simple install. I had to find an older version of it though so I'm a bit wary about the security of the install. I downloaded the older binary and extracted it to /Applications which was a symlink to /mnt/Applications. Made a few changes to the configurations to what I wanted/needed at the time and fired it up. It worked like a champ. I installed rutorrent there and watched a pretty gui of my torrents. That lasted all of 10 mins.

NOTE: if your wondering why I didn't just install everything into the OSBoot partition and be done with it, the default OSBoot partition is 900MB, not enough space to really play around with installing much of anything. This is the reason for all the symlinks.

Next I installed Python, AGAIN I had to find an older version that would run on the hardware. I really need to get gcc or something working so that I can build the latest sources. I managed to get python 2.5.4 and 2.6 working on the hardware, but I have not tried anything newer yet.
I have a couple different versions of Xcode downloaded to the system. 2.5 being the newest. I've played with the gcc packages there, they run but still do not build anything that will run on the system. I'm pretty sure that this is just misconfiguration on my part and I need to read about how the thing works. I've even pulled down the pre-compiled version of gcc for macs from the sourceforge project HPC. I had to dig in the archives to find the version that worked and found this.

And last but never the least, I needed a *cast catcher. Since getcast wouldn't run with the version of python that I'm running I decided to look over to bashpodder. Bashpodder has saved me some heartache as I messed around with this little white box. I was able to download and listen to *casts through xbmc while I was working. Thanks, Linc.

As I took the device apart at OLF, I noted that the wifi card was in a mini-PCIe slot and very easily removed. After a little research, I found that you could install a HD decoder into the slot instead of wireless. I will be looking to do this in the future sometime after we move into the new house at the first of the year. 

Another way to use Ekiga with google voice on your android phone.

I've already gone over once of how to get your ekiga account to receive phone calls in sipdroid. This will just be a slightly different method of getting an ekiga account to receive phone calls also using sipdroid. This method allows you to either use a Google voice account if you have it.


OK, fairly simple process here. The first thing that you need to do, and the most obvious, register for an ekiga sip account at ekiga.net. if you do not have one already. Write down the sip address that you pick, 'black@ekiga.net' Now run over to ipkall.com and register for their free service. It can take up to a few hours for ipkall to email you back your new US based  DID, but most of the time it's within a few seconds. Log into your new ipkall number. Under 'SIP Phone Number' put in your ekiga username, everything up to the @ of your sip address 'black'. And under the 'SIP Proxy' put in 'ekiga.net' or whatever is after the @ in your sip address.

If you don't have a google voice account just go ahead and stop here. You can now receive normal phone calls through sip with ekiga. Go ahead and give it a test. Just call the ipkall number from any phone that has long distance service.

For adding the number to your google voice account, it's fairly simple. Just add the number and have google call to verify the number. When your phone rings, slide up to answer and then slide the number pad up to punch in the verification code. I've noticed a good bit of lag sending the touch tones back to google. Keep this in mind in case you get into a hurry and google doesn't seem to be accepting the code. Now you can receive calls from google voice over sip without having a gizmo5 account.

As an added little bonus, there is an app in the market called 'GVoice Callback' which allows you to make normal calls with your phone and tells google voice to 'ringback' your ipkall number. So with this work around you can also make as well as receive calls with ekiga. This is the method in which I receive and make ALL my calls now that I'm located in Canada.

NOTE: Ekiga really likes STUN servers. So I'd advise using one if your going to be jumping from network to network making sip calls.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Chicken 'n' dumplings

This really needs no introduction. It's a recipe that's been running around in my family for quite a while. Something that we love to eat as the fall and winter approaches. So, take an afternoon off and make something good over the weekend for your family.



Chicken & Dumplings

1 - large Chicken
2 Quarts Chicken stock
1 - Can of cream of Chicken Soup
6 tbsp of butter.
salt/pepper to taste.


Dumplings
2 hard boilded eggs
1/3 cup of shortening
2/3 cup of milk
1 1/2- 2 cups all purpose flour

place flour in large bowl, add shortening and milk. Stir until moistened add more flour if needed to make a soft dough.


Directions: Boil chicken until tender. Remove from bone and cut into small pieces. Save the liquid for stock. If necessary add enough water to stock to make 2 quarts. Add soup,
butter, salt and pepper into boiling chicken stock. Boil 2-3 mins stiring gently. Fold in chicken and eggs. Simmer for 20-30 mins.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Split for burning large backups to a DVD.

The other day I was getting my backups ready to restore my Archlinux install onto a larger hard drive. I don't delete any packages that pacman downloads. I just move them out of the /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ to /var/cache/pacman/old/. This is just to make sure that no matter what happens I can rollback to any package that I've used. Which I do quite a bit when switching from radeonhd drivers to the ATI drivers. I have to switch out xorg and boot to an older kernel.

Anyway, /var/cache/pacman ended up being about 16GB from over 1.5 years of pulling down packages. I wanted an easy way to copy the whole directory to a couple dvds for easily copying to the new disk. I was asking notklaatu on irc if he had any ideas and he told me that I could use tar, split, and cat to do all this. I could tar the folder and compress it. Then, run split to divide the large file into smaller files that would fill up the entire dvd. Burn the files to the dvds and then use cat to rebuild the original compressed tar. So here are the commands that I used to tar, split, burn to dvd, and rebuild the archive

$ tar cf ~/pacman.tar /var/cache/pacman
$ split  -b 2240m ~/pacman.tar split.pacman.tar.
$ growisofs -Z /dev/sr0 -udf split.pacman.tar.a*
$ cat ~/split.pacman.tar.* > ~/pacman.tar

This is all that it took for me to backup 16GB to 4 dvds, I also decided to back up my digital photos and some of my other digital media with this method. It saved me a lot of time in k3b making data dvd's. burning 8 files was a whole lot easier than burning 9000 or whatever what in that package folder. Hope this helps out someone.