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Month: October 2023

Subaru Outback Cabin Air Filter Airflow Problems

Published October 23, 2023

With autumn rolling in the HVAC blower in my Subaru Outback seemed to be acting up. Whenever I’d have the blower at a low speed for basic air circulation it just… didn’t seem to be doing much. It turns out this was caused by the cabin air filter. The heavier filter, the Breathe Easy seen on the right, was restricting flow so much that I’d only get noticeable air movement when the fan was at ~2/3 of maximum or higher.

I’d swapped this filter in over the summer, and at first I didn’t notice, because I normally run the air conditioning (cooling) on a pretty high speed or have the windows down with the blower off. With temperatures dropping I’ll often have fresh air flowing in through the vents, but with the fan at a low speed, just to keep a fresh-air feeling inside the car. On the normal low (one or two bar) setting I just… wasn’t feeling much.

My thoughts first went to problems with an HVAC damper, or perhaps a motor speed controller, but then I remembered the activated charcoal cabin filter I’d fitted and wondered if maybe it was so restricting that the blower wasn’t working right.

Yep, that was the problem. I fitted up a simple Denso paper filter for capturing pollen and everything is working fine again. I’m glad it wasn’t anything more expensive.

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Command Line 802.11 Monitor Mode on macOS Sonoma (14.0)

Published October 20, 2023

Because it supports monitor mode, a Macbook with the built-in WiFi adapter is one of the simplest ways to grab packets off the air. It’s not the most robust, but often all I need to do is grab data from a couple devices I’m near on a known channel, so fancy antennas and channel hopping and whatnot is overkill; I just need to grab packets. Using the Sniffer built into the Wireless Diagnostics captures in Monitor Mode has been fairly easy for a while, but I was stuck using the GUI.

For a while macOS has had a command line utility called airport to handle all sorts of wireless network manipulation, log gathering, and debugging. It also has a poorly documented command verb sniff, but until the release of macOS Sonoma (14.0) it was only possible to specifying the channel. Not being able to specify the width made it useless for most capturing I’d do in the real world.

Thankfully the airport command now works for channel and width, so now it’s possible to use remotely, in scripts, etc. It’s not well documented, but it works. For example, the following will capture on en0 on 5GHz channel 137 with 80MHz width:

airport en0 sniff 5g137/80

This will capture en1 on 2.4GHz channel 7 at 20MHz width:

airport en0 sniff 2g7/20

Output files end up randomly named in /tmp in pcap format with a name of /tmp/airportSniff??????.cap. They can be opened in Wireshark or your analysis tool of choice.

(I suspect that sniffing from 6GHz WiFi will follow the same pattern, but I don’t have access to a device with such a radio so I’m unable to test. It’d also be pretty nifty to see this somehow built in / better automated via Wireshark… That could be a neat project for later.)

The airport binary can be found at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport. I link this to ~/bin, with something like the following:

ln -s /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport ~/bin/airport

I keep ~/bin around for personal executable stuff, and it’s been added to my path by putting a line like this in ~/.zshrc:

export PATH=".:$PATH:$HOME/bin"

The airport binary itself has a pretty decent output from --help. It’s light on sniffing examples, but pretty good for other stuff.

Amusingly, this is pretty much the extent of the airport(8) man page; a TODO:

DESCRIPTION
airport manages 802.11 interfaces. airport more information needed here.

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Using OpenSSL to Match Certificates and Private Keys

Published October 19, 2023

I recently was troubleshooting a problem with network authentication and suspected that the issue was around certificates and private keys not matching on a client. I had a .PEM file for the certificate and a .KEY for the private key, and I wanted to see if they matched.

Thankfully OpenSSL, the Swiss Army Knife of wrangling certs, made it easy. While this isn’t anything particularly secret, it took me a few to figure it out, so I’m re-documenting it here.

To see if the private key matches the certificate, use the following two commands and compare the Modulus section:

openssl x509 -in file.pem -noout -text

openssl rsa -in file.key -noout -text

If they match, the private key matches the certificate. If they don’t, they don’t.

In my case they didn’t match, which was causing the authentication problems. So we then solved what was happening during cert issuance and everything was then good.

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