Our buddy Mike Outmesguine over at the wireless weblog has just posted his Popular Science article on building a backpack based wireless access point. The backpack is solar powered and uses a JunxionBox to bridge a wireless access point to the EVDO network. The JunxionBox is a commercial solution that parallels the StompBox we covered earlier. This isn’t Mike’s first outing with the box; Feel free to check out his other adventure.
Gather round folks and watch as reader Liam beats a Microsoft MN-700 router into submission. The router normally runs a Windows CE based operating system and is considered problematic on its good days. The install is pretty involved (more so than a WRT), but when complete you can install any of the firmwares compatible with the ASUS WL500G, like openWRT. You have to open the router and attach a cable to the JTAG connector. After that you upgrade the bootloader so you can install the firmware. Not really out of reach if you’re desperate; if you own this router you probably are.
Ronja (Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access) is a free technology project. It uses LEDs to create a 10Mbps optical communication link at distances of up to 1.4km. The system was developed using open source tools and the designs are fully disclosed. Everything you need is on the site: schematics, 3D models, and diagrams. The original systems used visible light, but the current designs use infrared. The parts for building one of these units should cost around $60. It’ll probably take at least seventy man hours to put one together so you’d have to be pretty dedicated to not using commodity wi-fi equipment to go through with this.
There’s a couple great WEP cracking walkthroughs that have appeared recently. The first is included in the From the Shadows Box 3.0 episode. Humphrey Cheung, who wrote the WEP cracking article we covered earlier, explains how the process works and gives a demo of it in action. The camera work is shaky and out of focus so you should check out the Whoppix WEP Cracking Demo over at Hacking Defined. The demo is a little less verbose, but the command line commands and results are a lot clearer. I also had no idea what was so great about Unionfs till I saw this video. I hope you guys have a fun weekend with this info; I am still waiting for some antenna parts unfortunately.
[thanks jE]
I’m banking that these are probably the next things added to jackets
I was mildly interested in the serial port mods (add a gps, lcd, serial console), but this is just awesome. Now you can add as much Secure Digital flash storage as you want to your WRT54G. This requires soldering six wires plus a custom driver. The added space could come in really useful for storing logs or large dump files from kismet. You could just plug the thing into the wall and let it sniff packets all day. It could also be a small file server running bittorrent while you’re out of the house with your laptop. Most important of all: SD support means you’ll be able to share memory cards with your Playstation 3 and that’s a top priority right?
[thanks darkpadden via LinksysInfo.org]
the linksys wrt54g has been the target of many hacks taking it far beyond its original intended mode of operation; now going so far as becoming a personal telephone company. David DeLauro has set up an asterisk pbx system on top of the the openwrt firmware package. asterisk is a fully featured pbx system. in theory this set up could allow you to wire your whole house through one voip connection. you can even script the dialing sequence so that certain prefixes are handled by different carriers. the router has limited storage space, but you could probably use the voicemail features by mounting network storage. with enough ingenuity you should be able to pipe all of your communications and entertainment over ethernet.
