Bloghorn

Once in a while, I like to have a binge-like session where I take care of some of the projects I’ve been putting off. Here’s what my workbench looked like this afetrnoon:

Doing cool stuff

So from left to right, installing madwifi drivers on my new Eee PC to get the wifi working, installing Ubuntu on my old X 30 to get it ready for new users, getting ready to recover data from a dead hard drive, and checking someone else’s install on an Eee. All told, it took about 3 hours to finish everything off, but I did everything I set out to (except recovering the data from the hard drive, which was clicking something awful despite liberal application of the refrigerator trick).

HOPE, the Hackers on Planet Earth conference, was this weekend, and it was amazing.

Cat and I started out from New Rochelle about 7:30 AM, and took a cab to the Hotel Pennsylvania. We dropped our bags off at the baggage storage place in the basement, and headed off to the conference. At registration, I mentioned I was a speaker, and the people promptly handed me a pretty blue lanyard for my badge, instead of the regular black one Cat recieved.

Badge from HOPE

We headed upstairs and hung around in the hammocks for a while, setting up the RFID badges and talking to a group of HAM radio operators that we were talking to on the conference’s simplex frequency (147.525 FM). It was pretty fun to talk to the 20 or so HAMs that attended, seeing what they were up to and checking out the stuff they were building.

For most of the conference, we were bouncing from one talk to another. Here’s a list of all the talks I attended:

• The Attendee Meta-Data Project
• Bagcam – How Did TSA and/or the Airlines Manage to Do That to Your Luggage?
• Citizen Engineer – Consumer Electronics Hacking and Open Source Hardware
• Featured Speaker – Kevin Mitnick
• Featured Speaker – Adam Savage
• Featured Speaker – Jello Biafra
• From a Black Hat to a Black Suit – How to Climb the Corporate Security Ladder Without Losing Your Soul
• A Hacker’s View of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
• Hacking the Mind, Hacking the Body: Pleasure
• The Last HOPE Closing Ceremonies
• Maintaining a Locksporting Organization and Breakthroughs in the Community
• “Off the Grid” Voice/Data Communications
• Packing and the Friendly Skies – Why Transporting Firearms May Be the Best Way to Safeguard Your Tech When You Fly
• Social Engineering
• Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) – A Brief Primer on the Arcane Art and Science of electronics Surveillance and “Bug” Detection

We also spent a fair bit of time bouncing between the lockpicking village (Cat was determined to figure out how to pick locks) and sitting around in the hammocks. There was a chatroom-like app running the whole conference where attendees could type short messages and they would appear on the bottom of the big screen on the 2nd floor. It was pretty entertaining, especially late at night.

Me speaking at HOPE

My talk went off fairly well. At first I couldn’t get the notes to display on my laptop, but I decided it was better to get started and do it off the top of my head than to worry about getting the notes in the right format. According to the RFID badges, there were at least 75 people in the room, but taking into account for the percentage with RFID enabled, I’d put the estimate closer to 100. Everyone in the audience seemed interested, and asked some really good questions. And despite not having my notes handy, on later reflection, I hit every point I wanted to make.

On Sunday, I went and took the General class upgrade exam for my amateur radio license, and to my surprise, I passed! So I am now (for the time being) KC2QCY/AG, at least until I get the license in the mail.

Cat soldering together a TV-B-Gone

Me and Cat also built our own TV-B-Gones, those adorable little contraptions that turn off TVs from across the room. Cat had fun with hers in the TGIFriday’s in Penn Station, turning off the TVs around the bar and pissing off some pretty inebriated folks. No one suspected the cute, innocent girl in the corner, though. Wonder why…

One last link, this time from the closing ceremonies. Trust me, it’s worth the click.

In short, it was one of the greatest weekends of my life, and I can’t wait to do it again in 2010 at The Next HOPE. And this time, I’m dragging more friends along. I can see it now, the Penn State posse…

A few years back, I wrote a quick little PHP program that displays the relative activity of a phpBB forum both numerically and graphically. It’s quite simple, but so effective that it’s used by the administrators of multiple forums to see what’s going on.

After working with Chris this afternoon to update the code, I just wanted to post it here so that anyone who wants it can find it. Thanks to Sell and Dobbs for the troubleshooting help they gave me with this.

RepubliStats v. 1.1.2

[EDIT] Here’s a link to a working version: http://nafticon.org/antistats/

The HOPE organizers sent me an email this afternoon finalizing my talk and giving me the date, time, and place it will be scheduled for, provided that it clears the legal department. Here’s the info:

Title: The New York City Taxi System: Privacy vs. Utility

Day/Time: Friday 2000

Location: Turing (18th floor)

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have the prime time slot on Friday night. Which means I have to get my butt into gear to clear the presentation with the legal department.

Speaking of HOPE, one thing I’m working on doing is setting up a VPN connection from my laptop, which is running Fedora 9, to Omnivore back here at home. Somehow, sending plaintext traffic over a wireless network populated by the same people giving presentations on wireless exploits doesn’t sound like a good idea. The problem is that Fedora is being very picky with its VPN settings.

I’ve tried OpenVPN, MS VPN (PPTP), and even re-flashed my WRT54G with DD-WRT to try the VPN on there, but nothing seems to work. The next step is trying to get it to work with Penn State’s ISP VPN, but even that seems like a losing battle. Hopefully I’ll find something before the 18th…

As a gift to myself, I ordered 2 new hard drives this week. One is a 500 GB replacement drive for the 200 GB one currently in my desktop. The other is a 16 GB solid state drive for my IBM X30. Interestingly, this now means that the hard drive alone cost me more than the entire remainder of the laptop did.

Anyway, I’ve only had time to swap out one of the drives, as the laptop took longer than I anticipated. I’m a big fan of selfImage, which images an entire disk at a hardware level and writes it to a file, or even another disk. I first tried smply copying the data from the old IBM hard drive to the new SSD, but it turns out that I’m 4 GB short. So I spent the next two hours trying to figure out how to shrink the Fedora filesystem (in LVM) to fit, and I finally came up with the solution.

• Back up your system. I reccomend making an image of the disk, as even if everything goes according to plan, you might want the whole sector-by-sector copy again later.
• Boot from a Fedora CD. Nothing can be done while the filesystem is in use. Select “Recovery Mode”, which is like the recovery console in Windows. Take the defaults, and make sure to NOT set the drive to read-only.
• Scan the disk using the “lvm vgscan” command to look for LVM groups. After that, use “lvm lvs” to see the names and sizes of the volumes. Note the name of the volume you want and the size.
• Now we need to prep the filesystem by doing a check on it. So run “e2fsck -f /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00” substituting your LVM name for the one used. This should take about 15 minutes. This is the linux analog of chkdsk -r for Windows, and works kinda the same way.
• Before we shrink the LVM, we need to shrink the file system. Not doing this would be like trying to shrink a tupperware container full of jello without removing any of the jello. The container would explode and there would be jello everywhere, and while that’s fine and dandy when scantily clad females are around, doing that with your data is a bad idea. So we run “resize2fs /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 15G“, with the “15G” being the final desired size of the file system.
• Now we can shrink the container. “lvm lvresize /dev/Volgroup00/LogVol00 --size 15G” should do the trick. Again, the “15G” is the desired size of the final container. Leaving some wiggle room might be a good idea if you’re using more precise numbers.
• Reboot and pray to St. IGNUtious that your system doesn’t die a horrible death.

After that, I imaged the hard drive to a file, then imaged the file onto the SSD. I haven’t had many complaints, except that the kernel now complains about not being able to read sectors that don’t exist anymore (kinda like phantom limbs for computers, no?), and it feels like my computer is in PIO mode every once in a while. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to image a 200 GB drive onto a 500 GB one using nothing but a half-full 250 GB drive and a laptop with barely 80 GB storage on it, which I get the feeling will be just as exciting.

Thanks to FedoraBook.com for finally stopping the urge to bas my head against the wall.