Office 2003 and Activesync and You

I was at a client's place today and she had Outlook 2003. I set her up with POP3 and tried to do a send/receive and it said "send/receive finished," but nothing happened. The test message I tried to send was still in the outbox, and the inbox was empty.

This problem also made it impossible for her to run Activesync with her Windows Mobile PDA. Whenever I tried to set it up, a message box would come up and tell me to install Outlook, run it once, and then run the synchronization wizard again.

Well, lo and behold, this was a known issue with Outlook 2003. A simple upgrade to Office 2003 SP3 fixed the problem.

Only took me 3 hours to figure it out!

Aircrack Injection (Part 1)

First of all, if you don't know, Aircrack is a program that's used to crack encryption keys of wireless networks. My laptop has a Broadcom 4306 chipset, which has been hacked to death by Linux developers.

Starting with kernel 2.6.24, a different driver is used for Broadcom chipsets (the older one was based on Intel drivers, the new one I believe is based on MadWifi). The drivers in the new kernel support injection out of the box, but the older ones do not. I previously spent a lot of time patching the older drivers to support injection, and it worked well, until I upgraded to the new kernel.

At first, injection only worked if I moved my laptop very close to the wireless AP. That problem appears to have been corrected in the new 2.6.27 kernel.

For a long time, I thought injection didn't work at all in the new kernel because I was doing it wrong: I was trying to authenticate with my access point at home, which uses no encryption. Apparently, the AP you authenticate with using Aircrack has to use WEP. Then today I tried authenticating on my neighbor's WEP-protected AP (just to test it, of course :) and it worked!

However, before doing that, I worked hard on making a live Ubuntu Gutsy CD that includes Aircrack, Kismet, and the patched drivers. So for anyone that wants it, you can download it here!

WiLife

I was recently generously given two WiLife surveillance cameras. One of them has a power adapter that doesn't work, so only one camera is useful to me.

Unfortunately, it appears I can only access the camera using Logitech's proprietary software. Opening the powerline networking adapter in Wireshark shows TCP activity on a bunch of random ports, but I can't gleam any useful information.

If you've had success with third party software and this product, I'd like to hear about it.