Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Laura's website

Just finished 1.0 of my sister Laura's website, www.laura-dreyer.com. Laura designed the whole thing in Inkscape, I carved it up with GIMP, put it into a custom Wordpress theme, and put the finishing touches with jQuery. It was really fun and I learned a lot along the way. Laura's a great designer (and sister :)

Going to pick Audrey up in a few hours from the airport... our final un-married New Year's :)

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

"trick" interviews

Apparently giving "trick" interviews is as popular as it is unprofessional.

Ethically, is there a difference between what Michael Moore does to Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine and what certain creationists have done to Richard Dawkins?

Monday, June 09, 2008

Fedora 9 impressions

I've been running Fedora 9 for a while now. Although some things in F8 felt half-baked to me (I had trouble with PulseAudio + Audacious), F9, like each Fedora release, feels more polished.

Improvements:
  • Yum is much faster - not as fast as apt, but getting there.
  • PackageKit is much more polished than the package manager GUI F8 used (Pirut and Pup).
  • Swfdec works pretty well!

Gripes:
  • Firefox 3 occasionally crashes, and many plugin authors haven't updated their plugins to version 3.
  • Gkrellm: I haven't seen an error window like this in a while :)

Saturday, June 07, 2008

summer internship


I'm interning this summer at Community Bible Church, at Pocono Lake, Pennsylvania. I drove up to the area on May 24, met the pastor that night, and met the church congregation on Sunday the 25th. They are a nice bunch of folks! I was so surprised to see the sign outside the church welcoming me.


So far I've been able to teach Sunday School on Sunday mornings, lead Bible study on Wednesday nights, and redesign the church website: poconolakechurch.org. Tomorrow I preach my first sermon there on the book of Esther.

My fiancée, Audrey, is on a plane to the Philippines for her internship this summer, where she'll be working with the missionaries there and discipling women in the church group.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

first mac experience

A friend gave me an old G3 to play around with today. It's my first Mac experience... and I promptly managed to hose Safari by installing the latest version from apple.com. Apparently OS X 10.3 doesn't support the newer versions of Safari or WebKit. After struggling around trying to downgrade back to Safari 1.3, I finally found good instructions for what I needed. Apparently I have to go back to Safari 1.2, then to 1.3 :) Also, Pacifist was necessary; simply installing 1.2 the regular way doesn't work.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Sunday, January 13, 2008

hacking the WGR614v7

Netgear often builds a telnet daemon into their routers, but sometimes it can be a little tricky getting in. I was curious to see if my WGR614v7 has any way to access a command line interface, so I fired up nmap:

$ nmap 192.168.1.12

Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2008-01-13 17:42 CST
Interesting ports on 192.168.1.12:
Not shown: 1694 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
23/tcp open telnet
80/tcp open http
8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap finished: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.355 seconds

All right! Let's try to log in...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Connection closed by foreign host.

Rats. For some reason we are kicked out as soon as we touch the daemon. A little hunting on the internet provides an explanation. Apparently the telnet daemon is disabled by default, but the Netgear staff have a Windows utility that will send a packet to the router in order to enable the telnet interface. A hacker has somehow reverse-engineered the encryption process and written it into a C program.

$ gcc -o telnetenable md5.c blowfish.c telnetenable.c

Now I use the program to construct the "unlock" packet with the IP and MAC address of my router, and the default username/password "Gearguy/Geardog":

$ ./telnetenable 192.168.1.12 00AABBCCDDEE Gearguy Geardog > modpkt.pkt

Then I send it to the router with netcat:

$ nc 192.168.1.12 23 < modpkt.pkt

Now I try to log in again...

$ telnet 192.168.1.12
Trying 192.168.1.12...
Connected to 192.168.1.12.
Escape character is '^]'.
Login: Gearguy
Password: *******
U12H06400>

And we're in! "?" gives a list of commands. I'm most interested getting the network statistics from this and putting the results into cacti... but I'll save that for another time! :)

--Edit--

Apparently seattlewireless.net, the original website that hosted the files and information, is down. I've put the C files up for grabs here:

http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/telnetenable.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/md5.c
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.h
http://ktdreyer.googlepages.com/blowfish.c

Good luck!