Random Wisdom

Yup! My favorite PC just regained Net connectivity today. I moved into the new apartment this morning and was up and running by the evening. The guy who I share the place with wasn’t around and so I would have had to wait till I got the info about the wireless network. So, instead of waiting, I just decided to see what kind of a WLAN he has … and oh my oh my … there were 5 freakin’ access points around — and 3 of them completely unsecured! As it turned out, one belonged to the dude I share the place with …

Anyway, then I decided to catch up on my TV eps (Stargate SG1/Atlantis, Threshold, Supernatural, Doctor Who) and f*** the speed sux! It’s a bloody T-Online DSL1000 Flat deal. Anyway, the IP I got was “192.168.0.5″, so I deduced that the router should be at “192.168.0.1″ or “192.168.0.254″. And sure enough there it was in the first address. Obviously, it asked me for a password that I didn’t know. So, I just tried “admin:1234″ .. and nope, no go .. Then I thought I’d just do a little net search. The router was NETGEAR (deduced from the WLAN SSID), so I just googled “netgear default password” and the 4th hit came up with “admin:password”. Turns out the guy didn’t even change that password So, I got in, fiddled around with the NAT settings and Azureus was NAT free in no time. This has got to be the prime example of an unsecured network …

Anyway, once the guy got back, I explained everything to him and changed the router password and setup a WEP-key. It seems there was a machine leeching off of this net and things improved a little once that dude got kicked out. It turns out DSL6000 costs just as much as he pays right now — but he has no use for so much bandwidth when I’m gone — so we’ll just change to DSL2000 with 384k upload for now. That should be enough for me to download the occasional SG1 / Doctor Who episode

I guess it’s usual for every institution to have a central firewall/proxy that all internal traffic must go through to reach the outside world. I am by no means paranoid about security/privacy but it got me thinking.

… And once again, SSH to the rescue! It almost feels like the possibilites of a SSH tunnel with Local port forwarding are limitless

I just picked up a public German proxy from this page:

http://www.publicproxyservers.com/index.html

And then setup a SSH connection to forward local port 8080 to proxy:port. Then for the browser I just set localhost:8080 as the proxy.

Well, the speed is a little short of astounding but it’s very much usable Now all that the central firewall/proxy should be seeing is a bunch of encrypted traffic.

It seems FC4 has dropped the WebCollage screensaver. So I had to install it myself. It’s quite easy actually: just save the file to /usr/libexec/xscreensaver/ and you’re done (almost). I think it must also be owned by root and be executable by all. It’s a pretty cool screensaver – you never know what you’ll find

Actually, the main reason I went hunting for it was to track down Driftnet. It’s a cool tool that essentially sniffs out images from the local network for you to see . Fortunately, it was available from the Dries rpm repo.