local business in america is kind of a quagmire. it seems that except for a few small areas where tons of self-interested stuck-up liberals take the initiative to completely force out corporate interests from a given city, corporations run things. most storefronts you find in america are cost-cutting franchises and subsidiaries of conglomerates. it's no wonder americans easily swallow any pre-packaged product sold to them: be it music, food, television, movies, games... it's all made to order with few variations and dumbed-down for everyone's generic tastes. (heh, it's kind of funny that those are the only things americans are interested in, too)
local businesses get pushed out by these bigger corporations, mostly due to extremely competitive prices. but local business could bring a lot of variety to consumers and in effect influence the entire culture wholly through local means, if it was done on a large enough scale. the question is, in this capitalistic dog-eat-dog country, how do you introduce local business when the whole economy is based on cutting them off at the knees?
i think big companies could start by taking their already extremely effective cost-cutting measures and branching them out to more specific tastes. i think that if you work closer with all the producers of "content" that you use to produce your products you can still keep a low cost and generate a higher variety of products. integrate more, produce with more efficiency.
it would be pretty simple in principle: for any given "metro area" or whatever you determine to be an area with a specific taste that you could market a certain regional product to, create a brand. then create a line of products that are "mostly" only sold by that brand. in this way not only do you create the appearance of originality and variety, you can hopefully win over the local populace and generate a kind of grassroots following for your band.
the goal here is to *not* allow people to associate your stores regionally/locally the way people do nationally. they should not be able to say "that's the mcdonalds of east texas." part of that is keeping your brand relatively small, but also making sure your products aren't overly cookie-cutter in nature. nothing turns people away from big business faster than the lack of a mom-and-pop appearance. you need to hire good people to help sell the brand, but your products also need to have a certain element of being created or finished in the store itself.
have you ever seen a national franchise which could, for example, cook an omlette made-to-order in two minutes for a customer? i don't think i have. there must be an expense associated with shipping fresh eggs, keeping them cool, allowing for a kitchen area to prepare the ingredients, etc. but sandwich/sub franchises do almost this very thing. quiznos franchises receive pre-cooked bread and ingredients and assembles them in a matter of minutes for its customers, and produces what i consider to be a fairly high quality sandwich for the price/time. so why can't we ship pre-mixed eggs and the same ingredients, throw them in a bowl, put it in a microwave or some other omlette-cooking machine and give people something fresh(ish) and made-to-order/home made?
all you'd need to do at that point is rename the store for a given region and customize the ambiance, and switch around the recipe a bit depending on the area. your store fronts gain the reputation of being a "local", original, consistent source for (hopefully) good products, and your customers gain the knowledge that they're not just buying the same old crap from a national chain, maybe even believing they are helping the local economy. (maybe they could even go so far as to put more reward in the hands of the local store owners/managers as to actually produce more good for the given region? but now i'm really dreaming)
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Why I think Devops is stupid
http://www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/
First of all, this isn't a "movement." People have been trying for years to get quality sysadmins who are also competent programmers. I still believe that except for a few rare cases, these people do not exist. And they shouldn't: clearly, something is wrong.
If I told you I spend all of my time both becoming the best sysadmin I can be, and becoming the best programmer I can be, would you believe me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you. The fact is that when i'm a sysadmin I really don't program much at all. I spend my day at work fighting fires and performing odd jobs and when I get home the last thing I want to do is get back to the computer. And at work, if I spent most of my time researching new development trends and writing new tools in experimental languages, how much real sysadmin work am I doing? No, the truth is I wouldn't have enough time in the day to be both a full-time sysadmin and a full-time programmer. I can only do one job at a time.
"the Devops movement is characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set - people who are comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also happy to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features."
Sorry. I have a job. I don't want to have to do the developers' jobs too. I'm upgrading the Oracle cluster to RAC and being woken up at 3 AM because some bug somewhere deep in the site caused pages to load all funky, and i'm trying to figure out who committed the flaw and get them to revert it. Even if I wanted to, i'm a sysadmin; i'm not familiar with the developers' codebase, and sometimes not even the language they're writing it in. How the hell can you expect me to realistically debug it in real time? And writing tests? Really, you want me to write the developers' unit tests?
Don't get me wrong. I am fully in support of the general idea of better communication between groups and sysadmins working with developers, DBAs, QA, neteng, etc to build a better product. I think it'd be insane for any group to go about making any major changes without consulting every other group and working out any potentially negative ramifications. But this doesn't mean each group has to know how to do each other group's job. Communication is the key word here, not cross-pollination.
There are lots of technical issues that come up in the building of any product. To make it work as well as possible, there's lots of different problems which have to be accounted for. The problems cited in the above post - 'fear of change,' 'risky deployments,' 'it works on my machine,' 'siloization' - all require planning and cooperation to resolve. But this is basic stuff, to me. You don't need to be a DevOp to realize you're going to need your devs to have the same baseline system for testing their apps as your production system (sometimes more than one). The apps have to be developed in a way that allows for a smooth upgrade in the future. And you need a competent deployment and reversion system with change approval/code review and reporting.
These issues are not solved by simply having a 'DevOp', whose responsibility is not only their own systems but apparently the total management and architecting of the whole process of development of a product and delivering it working flawlessly. To properly deal with these issues you need many things. You need really strong management to keep teams working together and to help them communicate. You need some kind of manager or architect position who can keep track of how everything works and juggle the issues before they become serious problems. You need people who are really good at doing their job and get them to ask for help.
Nobody's job is simple. But creating some new position to supposedly solve all these issues by being super-human techno-gods? Even if you could get these godly Devops people in every corporation, there's no promise that they can even get past the politics inherent to each group to make everything work as harmoniously as the post describes. There is no magic bullet. No movement will make everything alright. The world is harsh and complex, and a DevOp isn't going to save it.
First of all, this isn't a "movement." People have been trying for years to get quality sysadmins who are also competent programmers. I still believe that except for a few rare cases, these people do not exist. And they shouldn't: clearly, something is wrong.
If I told you I spend all of my time both becoming the best sysadmin I can be, and becoming the best programmer I can be, would you believe me? If so, I have a bridge to sell you. The fact is that when i'm a sysadmin I really don't program much at all. I spend my day at work fighting fires and performing odd jobs and when I get home the last thing I want to do is get back to the computer. And at work, if I spent most of my time researching new development trends and writing new tools in experimental languages, how much real sysadmin work am I doing? No, the truth is I wouldn't have enough time in the day to be both a full-time sysadmin and a full-time programmer. I can only do one job at a time.
"the Devops movement is characterized by people with a multidisciplinary skill set - people who are comfortable with infrastructure and configuration, but also happy to roll up their sleeves, write tests, debug, and ship features."
Sorry. I have a job. I don't want to have to do the developers' jobs too. I'm upgrading the Oracle cluster to RAC and being woken up at 3 AM because some bug somewhere deep in the site caused pages to load all funky, and i'm trying to figure out who committed the flaw and get them to revert it. Even if I wanted to, i'm a sysadmin; i'm not familiar with the developers' codebase, and sometimes not even the language they're writing it in. How the hell can you expect me to realistically debug it in real time? And writing tests? Really, you want me to write the developers' unit tests?
Don't get me wrong. I am fully in support of the general idea of better communication between groups and sysadmins working with developers, DBAs, QA, neteng, etc to build a better product. I think it'd be insane for any group to go about making any major changes without consulting every other group and working out any potentially negative ramifications. But this doesn't mean each group has to know how to do each other group's job. Communication is the key word here, not cross-pollination.
There are lots of technical issues that come up in the building of any product. To make it work as well as possible, there's lots of different problems which have to be accounted for. The problems cited in the above post - 'fear of change,' 'risky deployments,' 'it works on my machine,' 'siloization' - all require planning and cooperation to resolve. But this is basic stuff, to me. You don't need to be a DevOp to realize you're going to need your devs to have the same baseline system for testing their apps as your production system (sometimes more than one). The apps have to be developed in a way that allows for a smooth upgrade in the future. And you need a competent deployment and reversion system with change approval/code review and reporting.
These issues are not solved by simply having a 'DevOp', whose responsibility is not only their own systems but apparently the total management and architecting of the whole process of development of a product and delivering it working flawlessly. To properly deal with these issues you need many things. You need really strong management to keep teams working together and to help them communicate. You need some kind of manager or architect position who can keep track of how everything works and juggle the issues before they become serious problems. You need people who are really good at doing their job and get them to ask for help.
Nobody's job is simple. But creating some new position to supposedly solve all these issues by being super-human techno-gods? Even if you could get these godly Devops people in every corporation, there's no promise that they can even get past the politics inherent to each group to make everything work as harmoniously as the post describes. There is no magic bullet. No movement will make everything alright. The world is harsh and complex, and a DevOp isn't going to save it.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
utf8 terminals
UTF-8 lovin' for my terminals:
my damn fonts keep having a problem with chinese and other languages if i don't use the default font and size. luckily it's barely usable, but still pretty large. more application-specific details here.
(in bash)
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
(in irssi)
/set recode_autodetect_utf8 ON
/set term_type utf-8
/set term_charset utf-8
(for your terminal)
uxterm -sb -bg black -fg green -g 100x25
(for screen)
screen -U
(for tmux)
tmux -u
my damn fonts keep having a problem with chinese and other languages if i don't use the default font and size. luckily it's barely usable, but still pretty large. more application-specific details here.
Friday, October 15, 2010
do the legwork
in the various positions in the IT industry we all have a specific job to do with various tasks. we don't always do them as well as we could. usually it boils down to someone doing the bare minimum for a variety of reasons and something ends up breaking.
there are different reasons why things might not be done as well as possible. maybe the deadline's fast approaching and you just need something to work. maybe you've not got enough budget. maybe your bosses are just jerks and even though you tell them what you need to get it done right, they ignore you and force you to produce sub-standard work.
the resulting fail will sit in the background for some time until a random occurrence triggers it. by chance something goes wrong and then everyone breaks, and you're left holding the bag. sometimes that means big hassles and wasted money. sometimes it means you get fired. so when you do have the chance, take the time and do it right.
as far as security is concerned this principle affects everything. there are lots of things you can do to secure any given system. the more you do, the less likely it is that the one attacker you were working to stop will be successful in his or her objective. this applies to everyone in the IT field: programmers, admins, NOC, QA, analysts, managers, etc etc. if you do it all right the first time you won't be left with the bag.
so for example. if you work for a large mobile internet service provider and it's your job to set up the service paywall, don't skimp on anything. make sure it's as secure and reliable as possible and don't trust anything to chance. the one person who figures out that way for everyone in the country to get free internet could bring on considerable strain (financially and otherwise) to your employers, and they won't be happy with you.
or if you run the large systems which are targeted by drive-by botnets as command and control machines or injection points, do your jobs, people. apply the latest security-tightening patches. use mandatory access control. use chroots. use separate users for each service. remove the need to log in as root wherever possible. add intrusion detection. keep up with patches! do you know how much of a hassle it is to clean up and replace systems that have been owned en masse just because you allowed a simple shitty buffer overflow to execute?
and programmers, come on. you're never held responsible for these problems. it's always the other groups which are used as the example and who look foolish because of your crappy, insecure code. the code runs on their systems, so the perception is it's their fault they got owned. but they didn't write that shitty file-uploading php script, you did. you let the bot herders in the front door and made it that much easier for them to expand their attack into the network. congratulations, homie. yes, the admins should have tightened security around php to account for unexpected holes, but you shouldn't make it easier for the attackers either.
and firewall dudes: how hard is it to friggin download a malware watch list and block bad domains/IPs? you're responsible for both the servers AND desktops which are affected by worms/trojans/etc. you know how to tighten these boxes down and tighten up the network access, so do it already!
you're saving yourself work in the end. how many of us have been caught in a tight deadline when suddenly all work has to stop to deal with the intrusion and see how far it got? do you have the spare boxes and cycles to deal with that? how is it affecting your bottom line? your sleep schedule? in the end it's the executives and managers who need to be more proactive in enforcing these trends in the rest of the work force, because if they don't force people to then nobody's going to take the extra time. create a culture of polished work and everyone should benefit.
there are different reasons why things might not be done as well as possible. maybe the deadline's fast approaching and you just need something to work. maybe you've not got enough budget. maybe your bosses are just jerks and even though you tell them what you need to get it done right, they ignore you and force you to produce sub-standard work.
the resulting fail will sit in the background for some time until a random occurrence triggers it. by chance something goes wrong and then everyone breaks, and you're left holding the bag. sometimes that means big hassles and wasted money. sometimes it means you get fired. so when you do have the chance, take the time and do it right.
as far as security is concerned this principle affects everything. there are lots of things you can do to secure any given system. the more you do, the less likely it is that the one attacker you were working to stop will be successful in his or her objective. this applies to everyone in the IT field: programmers, admins, NOC, QA, analysts, managers, etc etc. if you do it all right the first time you won't be left with the bag.
so for example. if you work for a large mobile internet service provider and it's your job to set up the service paywall, don't skimp on anything. make sure it's as secure and reliable as possible and don't trust anything to chance. the one person who figures out that way for everyone in the country to get free internet could bring on considerable strain (financially and otherwise) to your employers, and they won't be happy with you.
or if you run the large systems which are targeted by drive-by botnets as command and control machines or injection points, do your jobs, people. apply the latest security-tightening patches. use mandatory access control. use chroots. use separate users for each service. remove the need to log in as root wherever possible. add intrusion detection. keep up with patches! do you know how much of a hassle it is to clean up and replace systems that have been owned en masse just because you allowed a simple shitty buffer overflow to execute?
and programmers, come on. you're never held responsible for these problems. it's always the other groups which are used as the example and who look foolish because of your crappy, insecure code. the code runs on their systems, so the perception is it's their fault they got owned. but they didn't write that shitty file-uploading php script, you did. you let the bot herders in the front door and made it that much easier for them to expand their attack into the network. congratulations, homie. yes, the admins should have tightened security around php to account for unexpected holes, but you shouldn't make it easier for the attackers either.
and firewall dudes: how hard is it to friggin download a malware watch list and block bad domains/IPs? you're responsible for both the servers AND desktops which are affected by worms/trojans/etc. you know how to tighten these boxes down and tighten up the network access, so do it already!
you're saving yourself work in the end. how many of us have been caught in a tight deadline when suddenly all work has to stop to deal with the intrusion and see how far it got? do you have the spare boxes and cycles to deal with that? how is it affecting your bottom line? your sleep schedule? in the end it's the executives and managers who need to be more proactive in enforcing these trends in the rest of the work force, because if they don't force people to then nobody's going to take the extra time. create a culture of polished work and everyone should benefit.
Friday, October 8, 2010
how NOT to design software for ease of troubleshooting
psypete@pinhead:~/svn/bin/src/etherdump$ svn up
At revision 211.
Killed by signal 15.
strace gives no indication wtf is going on and there's no debugging mode to give me more information. Of course this is subversion, so instead of a simple man page to give me some help I have to read through the 'svn book' or run commands 20 times to even know there's no debugging flags (afaict).
What is the actual problem and fix, after 15 minutes of googling? Some version bump re-introduced a bug (I didn't know I even upgraded subversion so perhaps this is some other thing making the bug pop up) that causes svn to kill itself if ssh isn't playing nice. Effectively you have to use "-q" anywhere that svn calls ssh, which was my weird tunnel subversion config change.
The tool could have spit out something like "hey, ssh is giving me shit, so i'm bailing; check out ssh" and it would have greatly decreased the time it took me to resolve the issue. Instead it just committed hara-kiri and told me a cryptic signal number. This is not how to design a tool made for user interaction.
Monday, October 4, 2010
a brief introduction to bad internet paywall security
for some reason everybody seems to leave some hole in an internet paywall you can go through to get free internet access. there are some obvious methods, and some less obvious methods. at the end of the day, though, you should be aware of all of these when you deploy one.
this one is a given. if you have a caching dns server/forwarder, ip over dns like iodine or NSTX will usually provide you with a somewhat-unstable-but-probable internet access. the fix is of course to just tell dnsmasq to point all lookups by an unauthorized client to your http server and provide an http redirect to the paywall site. apparently this is ridiculously hard for admins to comprehend.
if admins set their firewalls up right, there should be no packets originating from an unauthorized wifi client which can hit a host on the internet. apparently it's much easier to just allow any wifi client to connect to udp port 53 on a remote host without even using a real dns service to pass along the query. openvpn listening on port 53 becomes highly useful here. a creative hacker could use something like a google voice-powered SMS-controlled app to report back any SYN packets in a 10-minute window and just try all 65k ports to find an open pinhole in a firewall.
this one isn't nearly as likely to work as the last two, but when it does work it's much more stable a connection than ip over dns. examples are hans and ICMPTX. however it's usually rate limited to around 23kB/s in my experience (and it's probably much much much slower on IPv6, according to the spec only allowing something like 4 ICMP messages per second?), so if you can use a tunnel straight to a remote host without going through another protocol and its overhead, all the better.
so far i think i've only found one such proxy that successfully denies http requests to unauthorized users. people just don't seem to understand that even if your proxy doesn't have an IP address i can still use it. a very simple example is just doing
this is probably the easiest/most reliable method to get through a paywall. if someone else is already authed, just sniff the network, find their MAC and IP address, set it as your own, and start browsing. to be honest i don't ever use this method but it should work in theory. if they enforce WPA encryption it should make this method difficult to impossible, though i'm really not up to speed on all WPA attacks.
ip over dns
this one is a given. if you have a caching dns server/forwarder, ip over dns like iodine or NSTX will usually provide you with a somewhat-unstable-but-probable internet access. the fix is of course to just tell dnsmasq to point all lookups by an unauthorized client to your http server and provide an http redirect to the paywall site. apparently this is ridiculously hard for admins to comprehend.
tunneling out through firewall pinholes
if admins set their firewalls up right, there should be no packets originating from an unauthorized wifi client which can hit a host on the internet. apparently it's much easier to just allow any wifi client to connect to udp port 53 on a remote host without even using a real dns service to pass along the query. openvpn listening on port 53 becomes highly useful here. a creative hacker could use something like a google voice-powered SMS-controlled app to report back any SYN packets in a 10-minute window and just try all 65k ports to find an open pinhole in a firewall.
ip over icmp
this one isn't nearly as likely to work as the last two, but when it does work it's much more stable a connection than ip over dns. examples are hans and ICMPTX. however it's usually rate limited to around 23kB/s in my experience (and it's probably much much much slower on IPv6, according to the spec only allowing something like 4 ICMP messages per second?), so if you can use a tunnel straight to a remote host without going through another protocol and its overhead, all the better.
overly permissive transparent squid proxy
so far i think i've only found one such proxy that successfully denies http requests to unauthorized users. people just don't seem to understand that even if your proxy doesn't have an IP address i can still use it. a very simple example is just doing
`echo -en "GET http://www.google.com/ HTTP/1.1\nHost: www.google.com\n\n" | nc www.google.com 80`. if this succeeds, their proxy is allowing anyone to just go right through to the internets without authing. to use this in practice download ProxyTunnel and use Dag's SSH-over-HTTP method to open an ssh tunnel with SOCKS5 proxy, or hell, a ppp-over-ssh tunnel to get Hulu to work. you should try both port 80 and 443 with this method as sometimes they'll only allow one outbound through the proxy. also take note that though the default transparent proxy might be too restrictive, you should scan the default route and the rest of the network with nmap for more open proxy ports like 3128, 8080, etc (hint: AT&T's open proxy port is non-standard). for the most part some variation on this ssh config line will get you what you want:
ProxyCommand proxytunnel -p www.google.com:80 -r remotehost:public_http_port -d remotehost:internal_ssh_port -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Win32)\n"
MAC address/IP address cloning
this is probably the easiest/most reliable method to get through a paywall. if someone else is already authed, just sniff the network, find their MAC and IP address, set it as your own, and start browsing. to be honest i don't ever use this method but it should work in theory. if they enforce WPA encryption it should make this method difficult to impossible, though i'm really not up to speed on all WPA attacks.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
virgin mobile broadband2go in linux
Recently I wanted to get internet in my home for cheap. My friend recommended Virgin Mobile's mobile broadband since it is now only $40 a month, pre-paid (no contract) and unlimited 3g data. This is by far the best deal you can get for mobile internet access in this country. Every other service is both more expensive and has a tiny data cap, and usually requires a contract.
It's no wonder every wal-mart I visited in a 20 mile radius was sold out of the Mifi, a battery-powered wifi hotspot and 3g modem. At $150 it's not cheap at all, but the supposed ease of set-up and ability to share internet with up to 4 wifi devices makes the convenience worth the price. Since I couldn't find one I opted for the Novatell Wireless MC760 usb 3g modem. At $80 it's much more affordable, but much more annoying to get working.
Only windows and mac are supported by the mc760. Normally this just means finding some half-working Linux driver and getting no support, which is pretty standard in the Linux world. In this case it's much much worse: you have to use windows or mac drivers and software to perform some magical rituals in the firmware before it'll even connect to the service. So there's really no way to use it without at least setting it up in windows or mac.
I of course didn't want to go along with this, mostly because it would be annoying to pirate a copy of windows just to get some crappy modem working. I tried for a couple days to get something to budge without a real windows install. I even eventually installed a VM of windows xp to try to set it up the "normal way" in a VM inside linux, but that still didn't work. I did end up using a windows machine to activate it finally. I'm still not sure I couldn't do it all from Linux, though.
So this is what I found out about the device. You plug it in and it does this wonderful thing where it pretends to be a USB CDROM and auto-runs a windows driver installer. The only way to turn this off in Linux is to use usb_modeswitch to detect the USB device and perform some magic to switch it to a ttyUSB0 modem/serial device. As usual, Slackware did this for me automatically without me knowing it, so I actually didn't even have to set that up.
The next thing I found out was how to configure the device as a modem. After hours and hours of googling and testing I found the secret ppp configuration that allows the modem to be controlled in Linux:
/etc/ppp/peers/virgin
/etc/ppp/peers/chat-virgin-3
/etc/ppp/pap-secrets
All you really need to dial up the modem is "ATZ\nATDT*99\n" or similar. Some people use 777, but 99 works for me. The PAP username and password is "Internet". Now, using just these settings with a completely pristine modem you can actually connect to Sprint PCS' network. You get a 10.0.0.0/8 address and two Sprint PCS dns servers (68.28.146.92, 68.28.154.92) and one P-t-P gateway: 68.28.145.69 (though that may just be one of several gateways). The very trivial auditing I did showed DNS worked but ICMP, TCP and UDP were almost nonexistent. Their firewalls seem to be non-shitty, however, a DNS tunnel would probably still work.
What's REALLY fucked up is virgin won't give you the URL to sign up or activate your card. You need to install the software and click on it to take you to a public URL they could have told you before. (Thanks a lot for wasting a ton of my time, virgin mobile) So you go to this URL and sign up with the device - NOT using the device, mind you. You need the internet (and a computer with administrator rights) to do that. Oh, and their website sucks - I had to call tech support for them to tell me to clear my cache and restart my browser about 4 times in between parts of the sign-up process because their shitty webapp couldn't understand the concept of expiring or reloading a cookie or session id. If you can just try to set the whole thing up with their customer service at 1-888-322-1122.
You register your address and credit card with the device's ESN and get a login/pin code for their website. Then you log in and pick a plan and fill it up with money. The login and an additional code for activating the card (the MSID) are both new phone numbers local to your zip code. With the software installed on a computer and an account set up, you can begin to activate the device. You connect once and the software redirects you to a very simple, easily guessable URL based on the phone numbers above. This then tells you new numbers (which IIRC were the phone numbers above) to insert in fields in the connection software to complete the activation process. When you go to plug them in you notice the default values are zeros along with the last 4 of the ESN. I saw some links during my googling which makes me think some specific AT commands would allow you to register the device without using Windows or Mac. Somebody please sniff the usb connection and verify this for me.
Does this activation process require your PIN code? No. Does this require anything but two phone numbers related to an account with money in it? No. Would it be possible to spoof more than one device on their network with the same settings at the same time? Perhaps, but I bet they have a way to find dupes. (Keep in mind, this MC760 also contains a GPS receiver which i'm still trying to figure out how to tap into)
Anyway. After finally disconnecting and connecting again, the internets is go. Unplug from the crappy windoze/mac you've been forced to use to activate this thing, plug it into your linux box, wait a minute and then run `pppd call virgin'. You should be connected, given a public IP and the internet should just do it's thing. The funny thing? All the settings once you're connected are the same as when we connected before the activation. Only the IP address is changed. HMMMMM. I wonder if we could just spoof an IP address and use the internets without activating? Again, this thing has GPS built in so don't think you wouldn't be tracked down.
The speeds i'm getting vary from 6Kbps to 1.2Mbps down and 1Kbps to 30Kbps up. This is not completely out of the range of current 4G connections, as embarrassing as that is for 4G users. So far in about half a day the connection has cut out twice for several minutes at a time and the card is extremely hot. I would recommend the Mifi if you have the cash.
edit when the usb card gets hot, it gets HOT. this makes performance suffer. example:
It's no wonder every wal-mart I visited in a 20 mile radius was sold out of the Mifi, a battery-powered wifi hotspot and 3g modem. At $150 it's not cheap at all, but the supposed ease of set-up and ability to share internet with up to 4 wifi devices makes the convenience worth the price. Since I couldn't find one I opted for the Novatell Wireless MC760 usb 3g modem. At $80 it's much more affordable, but much more annoying to get working.
Only windows and mac are supported by the mc760. Normally this just means finding some half-working Linux driver and getting no support, which is pretty standard in the Linux world. In this case it's much much worse: you have to use windows or mac drivers and software to perform some magical rituals in the firmware before it'll even connect to the service. So there's really no way to use it without at least setting it up in windows or mac.
I of course didn't want to go along with this, mostly because it would be annoying to pirate a copy of windows just to get some crappy modem working. I tried for a couple days to get something to budge without a real windows install. I even eventually installed a VM of windows xp to try to set it up the "normal way" in a VM inside linux, but that still didn't work. I did end up using a windows machine to activate it finally. I'm still not sure I couldn't do it all from Linux, though.
So this is what I found out about the device. You plug it in and it does this wonderful thing where it pretends to be a USB CDROM and auto-runs a windows driver installer. The only way to turn this off in Linux is to use usb_modeswitch to detect the USB device and perform some magic to switch it to a ttyUSB0 modem/serial device. As usual, Slackware did this for me automatically without me knowing it, so I actually didn't even have to set that up.
The next thing I found out was how to configure the device as a modem. After hours and hours of googling and testing I found the secret ppp configuration that allows the modem to be controlled in Linux:
/etc/ppp/peers/virgin
460800
user Internet
password Internet
debug
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -f /etc/ppp/peers/chat-virgin-3'
crtscts
noipdefault
lock
modem
/dev/ttyUSB0
usepeerdns
defaultroute
connect-delay 5000
novj
/etc/ppp/peers/chat-virgin-3
TIMEOUT 10
ECHO ON
ABORT '\nBUSY\r'
ABORT '\nERROR\r'
ABORT '\nNO ANSWER\r'
ABORT '\nNO CARRIER\r'
ABORT '\nNO DIALTONE\r'
ABORT '\nRINGING\r\n\r\nRINGING\r'
"" "ATZ"
OK "AT&F"
TIMEOUT 60
SAY "CALLING ..."
OK "ATD*99***1#"
CONNECT c
/etc/ppp/pap-secrets
Internet * Internet *
All you really need to dial up the modem is "ATZ\nATDT*99\n" or similar. Some people use 777, but 99 works for me. The PAP username and password is "Internet". Now, using just these settings with a completely pristine modem you can actually connect to Sprint PCS' network. You get a 10.0.0.0/8 address and two Sprint PCS dns servers (68.28.146.92, 68.28.154.92) and one P-t-P gateway: 68.28.145.69 (though that may just be one of several gateways). The very trivial auditing I did showed DNS worked but ICMP, TCP and UDP were almost nonexistent. Their firewalls seem to be non-shitty, however, a DNS tunnel would probably still work.
What's REALLY fucked up is virgin won't give you the URL to sign up or activate your card. You need to install the software and click on it to take you to a public URL they could have told you before. (Thanks a lot for wasting a ton of my time, virgin mobile) So you go to this URL and sign up with the device - NOT using the device, mind you. You need the internet (and a computer with administrator rights) to do that. Oh, and their website sucks - I had to call tech support for them to tell me to clear my cache and restart my browser about 4 times in between parts of the sign-up process because their shitty webapp couldn't understand the concept of expiring or reloading a cookie or session id. If you can just try to set the whole thing up with their customer service at 1-888-322-1122.
You register your address and credit card with the device's ESN and get a login/pin code for their website. Then you log in and pick a plan and fill it up with money. The login and an additional code for activating the card (the MSID) are both new phone numbers local to your zip code. With the software installed on a computer and an account set up, you can begin to activate the device. You connect once and the software redirects you to a very simple, easily guessable URL based on the phone numbers above. This then tells you new numbers (which IIRC were the phone numbers above) to insert in fields in the connection software to complete the activation process. When you go to plug them in you notice the default values are zeros along with the last 4 of the ESN. I saw some links during my googling which makes me think some specific AT commands would allow you to register the device without using Windows or Mac. Somebody please sniff the usb connection and verify this for me.
Does this activation process require your PIN code? No. Does this require anything but two phone numbers related to an account with money in it? No. Would it be possible to spoof more than one device on their network with the same settings at the same time? Perhaps, but I bet they have a way to find dupes. (Keep in mind, this MC760 also contains a GPS receiver which i'm still trying to figure out how to tap into)
Anyway. After finally disconnecting and connecting again, the internets is go. Unplug from the crappy windoze/mac you've been forced to use to activate this thing, plug it into your linux box, wait a minute and then run `pppd call virgin'. You should be connected, given a public IP and the internet should just do it's thing. The funny thing? All the settings once you're connected are the same as when we connected before the activation. Only the IP address is changed. HMMMMM. I wonder if we could just spoof an IP address and use the internets without activating? Again, this thing has GPS built in so don't think you wouldn't be tracked down.
The speeds i'm getting vary from 6Kbps to 1.2Mbps down and 1Kbps to 30Kbps up. This is not completely out of the range of current 4G connections, as embarrassing as that is for 4G users. So far in about half a day the connection has cut out twice for several minutes at a time and the card is extremely hot. I would recommend the Mifi if you have the cash.
edit when the usb card gets hot, it gets HOT. this makes performance suffer. example:
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