…is available here. And I feel old looking at it.
Category Archives: Computing
Botnets and Ham Radio
This is a very funny post from Jeff, KE9V.
Dmetry and Olaf walked into a dimly lit tavern and selected a booth far in the back where they could not be easily overhead. Dmetry was a hulking 300 lbs man who had muscled his way into the lower echelons of leadership in the Russian mafia but he was most interested in disappearing a very wealthy man as soon as possible.
It goes on..
“This application includes a Trojan horse; it will offload itself from the primary application upon installation, and play hide and seek with any anti-virus measures that may have been installed” Olaf said as a perverted grin spread across his face. “Then when we are ready, we will have at our disposal 100,000 networked computers that will do our bidding whenever the signal is given”.
Dmetry wasn’t easily convinced. “But why, why should these people be willing to install this botnet?”
Olaf replied, “They have no idea what they are doing. Urmil has written an application for radio amateurs, maybe you’ve heard of these radio ‘hams’, no? They love to play with their computers and their radios but they know little about the technology behind it all. This new application will be software that permits their computers to communicate via HF radio, they are crazy for free software and shiny new baubles to play with.”
“We will tell them that this software is for a new mode of communication and it will spread like wildfire in their community. They will never be the wiser…”
So funny, but it isn’t all that big a leap to see it actually happening. Very funny, thanks Jeff.
(Of course I use fldigi, build it from source, and keep an eye on what stuff is actually leaving my machine as much as possible.)
IPv6 and aprs.fi
Recently, Hessu, OH7LZB, began the process of migrating his service to IPv6. While he isn’t finished (AAAA still to be added) ipv6.aprs.fi is up and running and usable today.
First tweet from space.
Spotted on the Southgate Amateur Radio club’s website.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a special software upgrade last week –
personal access to the Internet and the World Wide Web via the ultimate wireless connection.
Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer, KC5WKI, made first use of the new system on Friday when he posted the first unassisted update to his Twitter account, @Astro_TJ, from the space station.
Amateur Satellite – Thesis
I spotted this on the Southgate Amateur Radio Clubs news feed this morning. Looking forward to learning something by reading it. Pretty cool project though, it has to be said.
A thesis based on the work done for the SO-67 Amateur Satellite is now available here.
Titled “Reusable Software Defined Radio Platform for Micro-satellites” it was written by John Foster Van Wyk of Stellenbosch University and describes the design and implementation of a software platform for the software defined radio (SDR) that formed part of the Sumbandila (SO-67) Amateur Radio satellite.
The Amateur Radio payload on SO-67 operates in conjunction with the Software Defined Receiver project sharing the VHF receiver and UHF transmitter used by the SDR project.
The nominal frequencies for SO-67 are Uplink 145.875 MHz and Downlink 435.345 MHz +/- Doppler shift
Sumbandila (SO-67) Mission Blog
Southern African Amateur Radio Satellite Association (SA AMSAT) and SO-67 schedule
Electricity Usage.
I’d been meaning for ages to purchase something to measure power consumption in the house. Earlier this week, a work colleague reminded me about it, so I went and purchased one. My Current Cost Envi arrived just before 8am this morning (thanks Mr. Postman) so I hurriedly plugged it all in before going to work.
This evening after dinner I found the data cable and plugged it all in.
[3383512.421973] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
[3383512.580255] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
[3383513.033716] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial
[3383513.034024] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for generic
[3383513.034271] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbserial_generic
[3383513.034276] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core
[3383513.146668] drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for pl2303
[3383513.146703] pl2303 1-2:1.0: pl2303 converter detected
[3383513.146930] usb 1-2: pl2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[3383513.146942] usbcore: registered new interface driver pl2303
[3383513.146946] drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver
Excellent, the device was recognised to begin with. I found this web page by Paul Mutton, describing how to generate graphs from it with RRDtool. Some minor modifications, courtsey of “Q” and we have a result.
To quote from Paul’s page:
Then you can sit back and be amazed at how much electricity you waste when you leave a computer on to monitor how much electricity you are using 🙁
ARRL and TAPR DCC
I’m not long back from the DCC, and I thought I would comment on it while the memory is still fresh. I had never been before, so I was wondering what I had let myself in for. Well I have to say I had a blast. From my accidental meeting of Larry WR1B on the shuttle to the hotel, to having lunch with the TAPR folks just before I caught my flight home, the atmosphere at the event was all about the sharing of knowledge. Like all good events, most of the really good discussion goes on in the corridors between presentations. Over breakfast, lunch, or indeed in the demo room.
Coolest presentation for me was the HPSDR, Modular Software Defined Radio, and the sheer enthusiasm of the guys was infectious (I want one!).
The picture below shows the set-up (belonging to N8ZM I think) for the tutorial on Sunday morning. The intention was to monitor the transmitted waveform from the transmit side on the spectrum analyser (large box to the right of picture) and also to receive and decode transmitted signals from Larry WR1B’s recently constructed NEU-PSK (small flat black box). All great fun.
I may not make it next year, or indeed the year after, but I will make it back.
iPhone and LHS
Recently I’ve started using the iPod functionality on my iPhone. I don’t know why I never figured it out before, but it plays the audio out throught my Car’s stereo over the bluetooth connection. I’ve been using this newly-found functionality to catch up on Linux in the HAM Shack, which I also only discovered recently.
I have to say, I do like the format Russ and Richard have adopted, and though I’ve been in the hobby for a good few years, and using Linux even longer, I’m both enjoying it and learning from it. If your a HAM, and looking for an alternative to Windows head on over to the website and check it out.
Cheers Guys.
Netopia Cayman PSU Fault?
There was I, browsing away, minding my own business on Friday evening, when all of sudden my Netopia Cayman lost sync. I tried rebooting it a few times but no joy. On reboot, it would respond to a few pings and then stop. I rang Eircom Saturday morning and after going through all the questions, eventually, they said they would have a replacement router out to me by Tuesday at the latest.
I asked a friend of mine if he had a spare router, which he did, but he suggested that I first try replacing the PSU, as he had a router display similiar symptoms previously and it turned out to be the PSU.
Turns out, that the PSU is where the fault lies. I plugged the router into the shack power supply and all is well again (As an aside, I now know that it uses 0.3Amps at 14.0Volts).
paclink-unix
I posted before about using the Airmail through Wine on Linux to access the Winlink system. It’s fine, it works, but it is a lot of overhead. Recently, in a response to a question, Dana, KA1WPM posted to one of the Winlink email lists that I’m on about the existence of paclink-unix. Paclink-unix was started by Nick Castellano, N2QZ.
Now I had seen this mentioned before, but for whatever reason I never took the time to look at it. This time I took a closer look.
After downloading the source and having a quick browse, a few small modifications had to be made.
In mime2wl.c I changed Nick’s call-sign to my own. The same had to be done in mail.wl2k.c
in wl2k.c I changed
asprintf(&command, "%s -ba %s", SENDMAIL, emailaddress)
to
asprintf(&command, "%s -bm %s", SENDMAIL, emailaddress)
I’m not sure what -ba means to the original sendmail, but -bm for postfix, which I’m using, seemed to be what I was looking for, after consulting the manpage.
Next the configuration. After (very) briefly consulting the postfix docs. I came up with the following:
/etc/postfix/main.cf
....
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
...
/etc/postfix/master.cf
…
wl2k unix – n n – – pipe
flags=RXhu user=j0n argv=/usr/local/libexec/mail.wl2k
….
I mostly copied the maildrop line already in the configuration file. removing the ‘D’ in the flags and adding an ‘X’. I’ve not yet tested whether I need the ‘D’ or not.
X indicates ” Indicate that the external command performs final delivery. This flag affects the status reported in “success” DSN (delivery status notification) messages, and changes it from “relayed” into “delivered”.”
/etc/postfix/transport
...
winlink.org wl2k:localhost
...
So anything destined @winlink.org now gets sent through the local transport.
That’s pretty much it for the moment.
If I need to send to any other domains through winlink I could add the following “catch-all” to the transports file.
* wl2k:localhost
And everything would go through it.
Testing it then I sent myself an email at winlink.org, and tried to collect it using the supplied tools.
j0n@ns1:~/src/paclink-unix-0.3$ sudo wl2kax25 EI7IG "EI8IG-10 v EI2WRC-4" 1200 60 ei7ig@localhost
Connected.
---
<
<
<
<[WL2K-2.0.0.18-B2FIHM$]
wl2kax25: sid [WL2K-2.0.0.18-B2FIHM$] inboundsidcodes -B2FIHM$
>; EI8IG-10 V EI2WRC-4 DE EI7IG QTC 0
>[PaclinkUNIX-1.0-B2FIHM$]
>FF
wl2kax25: proposal code C type E mid 6L9CAL8YBRST usize 274 csize 236 next (nil) path (null) ubuf (nil) cbuf (nil)
79
wl2kax25: sentcksum=79 proposalcksum=79
wl2kax25: 1 proposal received
>FS Y
wl2kax25: title: Testing Postfix
wl2kax25: offset: 0
wl2kax25: STX
wl2kax25: len 236
wl2kax25: EOT
wl2kax25: extracting…
wl2kax25: calling sendmail for delivery
wl2kax25: delivery completed
wl2kax25: Finished!
>FF
j0n@ns1:~/src/paclink-unix-0.3$
wl2kax25 is like fetchmail. It connects out over a linux ax25 port (i.e. Radio) to a winlink node and retrieves it to be delivered to an email account of your choosing. In the above example, the winlink node is approximately 35km away, but not accessible directly. Consequently I used the EI2WRC-4 digital repeater (digipeater) to relay my packets.
For a ‘pre-alpha’ piece of software, it is working nicely for me, and it is good to have a Linux “Native” winlink client. Many thanks to Nick and Dana for their efforts.