Power Outages

There have been power outages here that have been taking down my lab equipment. This affected my new BSD machine. The drive became borked due to an unclean shutdown. After a few days, I got it back up again. It was a simple fix but one of the other machines kept me busy until I got to the BSD machine. The old BSD machine had an IP conflict with one of the Verizon set top boxes...I thought I'd set it to a static IP and when I checked, I had, but the damned router gave the set top box the same IP. I had to run around the house at 11PM trying to figure out which box it was (I've five of them). The last one I checked was the one I was looking for...go figure. A quick power-cycle and it got another IP. I wouldn't have figured this out if I hadn't used ARP. I kept pinging the BSD machine's IP but wasn't seeing return traffic...I telnet'd to port 22 and 80 and didn't get a response, either. So, I looked at the ARP results and saw that another machine had the IP...in fact, the set top box had two of them, but the MAC addresses were wrong on one (this was the BSD box entry...the MAC matches that machine). Very weird but hopefully it won't happen again.

I'll be looking to invest in a UPS soon. I need one that will be able to power down 3 *nix machines or at least keep them running for 5 minutes or so. Dunno if I should also ensure that there's room for the router...

Kismet for Macs - WEP/WPA/WPA2

 

Added KisMac to my Macbook.

This software is NICE!!  I've used Kismet before (on a Sharp Zaurus SL5500), but the Mac version is VERY nice!

One disturbing thing (that I should put on my security blog) is that I saw a lot of WAPs in my neighborhood still using WEP.  Three of them were Actiontec routers, which show the new rollout of FIOS from Verizon.  Mine also shows up, but mine is set to use WPA2.  There were maybe 5-6 WAPs using WPA (of maybe 10-12), but I was the ONLY one that I detected that was using WPA2.  That's not good, IMO.

I may take a drive around tomorrow to sample the neighborhood.  I'll parse that data and post it on my security blog.

Dshield; Verizon FiOS

I've finally got this running.

I spent a bit of time with it last night and found that the dshield.cnf file had some errors.

I still need to tune it, though, because the script is reporting non-malicious web traffic to Dshield...I'll need to exclude all non-attacks and non-probes.

On another note, I'm at home today since we're getting FiOS installed. This service will replace Direct TV and Comcast. I'm looking forward to a dedicated internet connection. I'll be getting the 25/15 (down/up) internet pipe (YES) and two DVRs (I hope to replace the circa-2003 Tivo soon, with something better).

Verizon hit with GPL copyright lawsuit over router software

This article is old but interesting. I've this router and I've Verizon's FIOS service. Not long after purchasing this service, I perused Actiontec's website and had seen that they utilized Linux (this is, specifically, an issue with Verizon not including the source code for BusyBox to its customers, per v2 of the GPL) as the firmware for this router. I also saw that Verizon offered firmware versions for this router on their pages. I didn't think that they'd not release their software as GPL, though. I think it was either forgotten or GPL was taken for granted (because GPL software is usually free).

Anyways, this is a good read.