Computer Tips -Tech Info

After several weeks of good behaviour from Evolution 2.4 since the Mandriva 2006 upgrade, I started getting a wierd error on sending messages *(Mail From response Error Unknown). Nothing within my settings for Evolution had changed since the night before when things worked… I tested with Kontact and was able to send mail, closed it, opened it, bonobo-slay’ed it… still getting the error, so… since I was on the fence as to whether or not I was going to migrate to Kontact, I went ahead with it. I’ve already covered moving the calendar and contact (addressbook) information in a previous post. So this will be on moving the messages.

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There’s been an update to the unofficial patch for the WMF (Windows MetaFile) vulnerability. The main change appears to be some options to allow for quiet installation (unattended) to help administrators in large environments try to roll the patch out in automated login scripts/etc.

It can be found here or at the incidents.org site.

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I mentioned this in my summary yesterday morning as a possible workaround until there are patches for the WMF vulnerability that’s been big news the last week. I notice that incidents.org has mentioned it too as a possibility today. VMware has released VMPLayer as a free way of running premade virtual machines.

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I’ve seen breathless headlines that say “Windows PCs face ‘huge’ virus threat; Affects every MICROSOFT OS shipped since 1990…” and really would like to try to clarify (again) what the situation is. Yes, the bug or vulnerability that’s currently being exploited exists as far back as Windows 3.0, but as far as I can tell there is not an active, current exploit that is taking advantage of this flaw in earlier versions of windows. Currently the exploit only seems to affect Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

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Yesterday, when I was testing the WMF exploit against a Windows 98 virtual machine, I sent samples through virus total and the only antivirus product to detect each of them was “TheHacker” from hacksoft. This evening I was revisiting the exploit (with the new rule for metasploit) and saved 20 samples which I also tested with virustotal. The results this evening are better. This evening 4 antivirus products detected each one.

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So, according to D-Link there is a short list of access points that the DWL-800AP+ will repeat for. They are all d-link branded access points. It seems that there have been firmware updates to improve the compatibility with more models (of d-link access points.) Some of the incompatibilities have been with WEP encryption from what I’ve read.

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Ok, so here’s the synopsis… I’ve spent the last few articles setting up a D-link DWL-800AP+ as a repeater for a linksys WAP11 (v. 1.1) As of the end of the last entry I had a bit of a problem with WEP but that seems to have been resolved now and here I am to fill you in on what went wrong. It was really a simple mistake. When I copied and pasted over from the linksys….

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So, I set a WEP key on the linksys (WAP11 v. 1.1) and it promptly disappeared… it stopped responding (over the WIRED network) to my wap11gui admin tool. I quickly realized that part of the problem is from having two network cards attached (both in the 192.168.0 range)… disconnect the usb card and reconnect. Then I use the “security” tab to enable WEP (128-bit)

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Ok, so now I had to add the new D-Link’s MAC address to the list of authorized MAC’s in the Linksys WAP11 (v. 1.1) For this, I call on wap11gui. Used to (since I use linux), I would have to suffer through a Windows boot on the laptop and balance the laptop on the edge of the bed and connect through usb to the linksys… now I can just administer it from my desk. Nice… Anyway, I log into that and Visit the “security” tab and “Authorized Mac”, and add the d-Link DWL-800AP+ to the list.

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So, now that I was “in” the DWL-800AP+ it was time to see if I could set it up as a repeater. I visited the “wireless” tab of the web based configuration and chose Repeater mode instead of AP mode and saw that I would need the Mac address of the access point that I wanted to “repeat” signal from. In this case it’s the old Linksys WAP11 v. 1.1 So, I opened up a console and (as root) did an arpping 192.168.0.250 (the ip address of my Linksys AP). Got the reply back and typed it in.

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