Strav's blog

After finding out first hand just how easy it is to hack into wireless networks - yes, even networks with WEP on, I decided to take steps to make it more difficult to connect to my network. The first step was to get a router which would handle the newer WPA/WPA2 encryption types. Some time ago a friend had turned me on to the Linksys WRT54G access point - it runs linux and there are a number of firmware mods that can be applied to enhance the behavior. I bought one of these and proceeded to update the firmware and begin configuration. It was quite simple on my windows installations, however, my Debian installations are another matter. I started out installing wpa-supplicant and struggling with getting it to work with my internal mini-pci (Intel 2200bg) wireless cards. After a few hours of this, I decided that I would come back to that and instead try something a little easier - a cardbus prism based NIC. Along the way, I started to clean up other parts of my system. Since this had originally been set up with a 2.4 kernel, I had been using ifrename to rename the interfaces. Of course, it's running 2.6 with udev now so I set up the udev rules and removed ifrename. For some reason, the udev rules weren't working for the pcmcia card. I updated to the very latest version, and now they aren't working for any interfaces. I've been through the rules forward and backward to no avail. These same rules (well, different mac addresses, but otherwise identical) work perfectly on hal so I know they are good. Apparently I'm not alone in this. Here's a link to someone who is experiencing the exact same issue. Hopefully the issue will be resolved soon so I can get back to setting up a more secure network.

Well, I'm tired of investing a lot of time working on resolving some sort of sysadmin issue then either not documenting it or not being able to remember quite where it is documented. So, I finally got around to setting up blogging software so I can have someplace to store this sort of information.



Of course, even that was a challenge. When I installed b2evolution, it was erroring out with a mysql error - "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server". I finally got around this by changing the password to the old password style and starting mysql with the --old-password option.



Prior to finding the solution stated above, I first tried to upgrade to mysql version 5.0. This was a total disaster! Initially, apt-get removed the 4.1 mysql files, installed the mysql 5.0 client files then aborted the update to mysql 5.0 server because the 5.0 server can't be installed if there are any ISAM tables. Of course, the program needed to update had been removed and now apt was completely confused. dpkg to the rescue - uninstall 5.0, reinstall 4.1, update the few ISAM tables to MyISAM using the mysql_upgrade command, then finally upgrade to 5.0. Unfortunately, Squirrelmail is not yet compatible with 5.0 so I had to downgrade. I ran into yet more issues here. apt let me downgrade with no issues, however Apache stopped interpreting the PHP pages. I had to manuall remove a number of php files as well as re-register php4_module with apache-modconf. Finally everything seems to be working again!