21 Dec 2011
It was rather unexpected to have to pay extra for Internet access at a hotel, especially The Westin, being all expensive and whatnot.
In the end I payed out, well the company who was paying for me payed out ($15 for 24 hrs?!?!), but had I set up a few things
before getting there, there would have been no need to pay.
I stayed at
The Westin Bellevue, and
would assume that many other
Starwood Hotels and Resorts locations must employ similar captive portal filtering. At
this particular Westin location there were three wireless networks: WestinLobby, WestinMeetingRooms, WestingGuestRooms. They
all employed the same captive portal filtering based on hostnames.
Attempting to ICMP ECHO (ping)
vraidsys.com would fail, but pinging
starwoodhotels.com.vraidsys.com worked.
Similarly an HTTP GET request to
mail.zerbe.biz would fail, but
starwoodhotels.com.zerbe.biz worked. If only
I had an SSH host for tunneling with a "valid" hostname, then there would have been no need to pay for this extortion.
19 Dec 2011
I was streaming mp3's from my FreeNAS 7 fileserver over CIFS the other day to a
MusicZones
zone controller and every two minutes or so there would be a break in the audio, but not when I was pulling Internet radio directly to the
zone. Mind you this was over 802.11g, and there was no EM interference. Interestingly, my wired zone controllers which are on standard
100Mbps Ethernet over CAT5 do not experience these audio breaks.
Turns out lowering the "Send Buffer Size" and the "Receive Buffer Size" from the default 64240, to 8192 did the trick. Inspired by
looking at
old FreeNAS and Openfiler smb.conf files.
21 Nov 2011
Been playing around with the
APN
settings on my Qualcomm Android dev phone. I wanted to make sure I had the right
MCC
and
MNC, since I knew I had the correct network id.
I threw together a J2ME app,
MotorolaCellInfo.jar,
that detects these values from my SIM card when I use it in my Motorola phone. This uses functionality that is only guaranteed
to work on Motorola devices. For more, please see the source I used:
Getiing Location Information (IMEI,MCC,MNC,LAC,CELLID) without GPS.
If you are the hacker type, check out the NetBeans project+source [
zip].