Well, shucks. What do you know? Kismet is now working, logging the exact locations via GPS, and everything seems good. I might go for a test war drive tomorrow after work. There’s still a bunch of manual stuff that needs to be done to get everything started. Maybe I’ll blow away the normal startup scripts and make it do just what I want it to do. We’ll see… Anyway, it’s bed time. Goodnight…
Look what a nice antenna gets you? Just FYI, when I drove this same route before with just the NIC I got 4 APs. This time I was using a Maxrad BMMG24005ML195NF.
I can’t wait to get a GPS.
Great… It seems that the latest Orinoco Client Manager does a “soft upgrade” of the firmware to the latest version. No wonder I haven’t been able to upgrade it myself. I think I might finally be downloading an old version so I can get the bloody firmware BACK to 6.06. Yay! That means no putting the Orinoco card in my XP box, though. Oh well. If anything, I just hope that this process is repeatable. It sucks having to deal with all of this. I just want it working.
Now if I had of left well enough alone and just slapped the card in a linux box to begin with, these problems wouldn’t be here… Oh well.
MORNING UPDATE:
Every version of the client manager seems to do this, but only to the latest version the client manager supports. So, who knows what version… The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that the problems I’m having are related to something that I somehow hosed in my LFS install. I knew I should have backed it up before I started playing with PCMCIA. The reason I think this is because the NIC *DOES* work fine under Windows, and if I insert another PCMCIA wireless NIC (the Belkin) the box will core dump/hang this way too. I just wonder what it is… Oh well. I’m probably going to blow it away tonight and slap a Slackware install on it. Upgrade the kernel and PCMCIA and see if it still dies. I just hope not.
Well, I finally got the wireless stuff working under Linux. I was browsing the web and pinging to my heart’s content.
But, I can’t make kismet work properly. With the lowest firmware version it doesn’t grab anything. With the highest, kismet crashes the PCMCIA driver looking like something’s failing and the card isn’t able to handle data that fast. Anything in between I can’t get to flash for some reason. So, I thought I’d try the absolute latest PCMCIA card services. Installed those, didn’t help. Installed the original version that I was using (3.2.1), rebooted, now the box core dumps every time it goes to load the PCMCIA stuff. But only with the kernel that I made. I think I need to somehow get in there and rip out all the PCMCIA stuff and start over. It wasn’t hard to make it work, I can do it again. However, I want it to just work.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to get the card flashed to a known-working firmware level with a Windows 2000 notebook at work. I hope. I don’t want to have to install 2K to fix things here. Gah, all I want is kismet to work so I can keep going on the rest of this project.
I’m waiting for e2fsprogs-1.25 to compile. See, it’s one of the many parts of Linux From Scratch that need to be compiled. I’m making a LFS installation to be customized and used for war driving. I think I’m going to have the standard suite of tools (kismet, airsnort, WEPcrack, ethereal, etc) installed along with Rox and Sawfish. I think that some nice light-weight front end software will work well, but I still like a GUI of some sort so I can have a bunch of windows open all at the same time on one display.
I’m also thinking that having everything running as root, automatically logging in might not be a bad idea. I know it’d normally be a security problem, but if the machine is completely inaccessable remotely, that might work. We’ll see… I’d like to keep it completely graphical, just to look nice. Maybe a graphical boot screen, but that would require X to use the fbdev server. I *think* the box I’m making this for has fbdev support, so we’ll see. Getting it working is more important than looking pretty. But pretty is still very important.
Anyway, we’ll see how it goes…
Okay, besides the fact that it’s not a full release, can anyone think of a reason not to use FreeBSD 5.0-DP1 on my home file server? I like the idea of ACL support in Samba, especially with it being a PDC and me logging into it. Then again, since it’s only me, there isn’t that big of a concern over rights.
Any ideas?
I finally got around to ordering the parts for my new computer. Here’s what it’ll have:
Asus P4T533 Motherboard (i850E chipset)
512MB PC1066 32-bit RAM in the form of 2x256MB RIMMs
Intel P4A 2.26GHz CPU w/Retail HSF
I’ll be putting it all inside of the same Doggie Case that I’ve been using for a few months. It’ll also use all the existing parts, including the Riva TNT2, SCSI CD-ROM and CD-RW, Sony floppy, and fibre channel array. I did pick up a Soyo BayOne to get some front mounted USB ports and CompactFlash reader.
The parts were ordered from Runtime Computer in Canton (MB and RAM bundle for $420), Directron (Soyo BayOne for $29.99), and Googlegear (CPU for $234).
Okay, after spending the last half hour doing A/B tests of 160kbps, 192kpbs, 256kpbs, and 350kbps .ogg files, I don’t think my ears are good enough to hear that much of a difference. I think I’m going to go with 256kbps, but I’ll give everything a listen at home through speakers and headphones and then decide. Maybe my ears suck, or maybe it’s the noisy sound card in this machine. We’ll see.
Okay, Monkey’s Audio:
27 File(s) 458,098,103 bytes
Ogg Vorbis 256kBps:
27 File(s) 144,111,480 bytes
Defiantely an advantage on file size. I think there’s an advantage on sound, too. The .ape files (Monkey’s Audio lossless) sounded brighter. Hard to tell. Time to get a spectrum analyzer…
While I was at lunch I decided to use Exact Audio Copy to rip beefcake’s drei down to some .ogg files using Ogg Vorbis 1.0. So far I’m pretty impressed. I went with the standard 256kBps VBR for a first try. At first listen on my notebook here at work it sounds like a 320kBps MP3 but with better high frequency sounds. It also pulled the whole disc down into ~150MB. Not bad…
Lately I’ve been desiring to rip a number of my most listened to CDs into some sort of compressed format. That way it’ll be easier to listen to around the house. I’ve now got a notebook and some Aiwa USB speakers in the kitchen. My I-Opener and a USB->TOSLINK adapter would work well down by the television. Obviously the PCs could act as their own players.
Sounds good so far, eh? Now comes the hard part… Deciding on a format. Monkey’s Audio is a nice lossless codec, but it’s Winamp support is a bit dodgy. Works, but not well. MP3 is just sounding tired. You can always tell an MP3, at almost any bitrate. Ogg is sounding good, has great support from software players, but I can’t find some good recommendations as far as settings go. I think that 256kBps VBR is going to work good. Going to 350kBps VBR will add an estimated 25%, and I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Perhaps I need to do some listening tests, then some decoding (to wave) and run the files through a spectrum analyzer vs. the original wave.
Anyone have enough experience with Ogg or various other codecs that they can make a recommendation? Hopefully I can find a codec that will be good for a few years to come. I know that lossless would be best, but it will also be about 300MB per disc then.