Tomato Firmware: Increased Transmit Power Does More Harm Than Good?

I had turned the routers up to 80 mW and the problem was still occurring. Upon some research I found that as the Transmit power levels of the routers increased, so did the radio noise produced by the routers. I decided to turn the routers back down, to a level lower than when I first began to administer the network. After this change, users noticed an immediate improvement in the quality of their wireless connections. Everything was (and still is) running stable. The users are no longer losing Internet connection and are maintaining proper network speeds.

via Tomato Firmware: Increased Transmit Power Does More Harm Than Good? | Techerator.

I’m seeing the same thing with the Tomato firmware.  The firmware is nicer than Linksys but I thought increasing the power of this router would increase the range but I suppose it’s more complicated than that.

Packetstan: NBNS Spoofing on your way to World Domination

Since the look up is just a hostname, windows adds the local DNS suffix to the query and asks its DNS server(s). The suffix picked up my the Windows box usually comes from the DHCP server. As you can see, the DNS server replied that it had no idea on how to lookup that name. Next, you’ll see the NBNS Request. The beautiful thing is, the NBNS Request is a broadcast, so anyone can reply easily and redirect traffic.

via Packetstan: NBNS Spoofing on your way to World Domination.

NetBIOS/NBNS

NBNS serves much the same purpose as DNS does: translate human-readable names to IP addresses e.g. www.wireshark.org to 65.208.228.223. As NetBIOS can run on top of several different network protocols e.g. IP, IPX, …, other implementations of the NetBIOS services have their own mechanisms for translating NetBIOS names to addresses. NBNS’s services are more limited, in that NetBIOS names exist in a flat name space, rather than DNS’s hierarchical one multiple flat name spaces can exist, by using NetBIOS scopes, but those are rarely used, and NBNS can only supply IPv4 addresses; NBNS doesn’t support IPv6.

via NetBIOS/NBNS – The Wireshark Wiki.

The TCP Datagram

push flag (1 bits)

The push flag tells the receiving end of the tcp connection to “push” all buffered data to the receiving application. It basically says “done for now”.

via The TCP Datagram.

This would be the PSH flag that I needed to look up and found this site which makes for a good reference.

Transparent web proxy – DD-WRT Wiki

Running a transparent proxy server on your network can be used for more advanced content filtering of web pages for environments such as a school or library (where in some locales, filtering is required by law) or as a way to protect children in the household.

This guide will help you enable a transparent proxy server on your network by having your WRT54G router forward all traffic to the proxy server automatically.

via Transparent web proxy – DD-WRT Wiki.

Example of a full nat solution with QoS

Here I’m describing a common set up where we have lots of users in a private network connected to the Internet trough a Linux router with a public ip address that is doing network address translation (NAT). I use this QoS setup to give access to the Internet to 198 users in a university dorm, in which I live and I’m netadmin of. The users here do heavy use of peer to peer programs, so proper traffic control is a must. I hope this serves as a practical example for all interested lartc readers.

Via Example of a full nat solution with QoS.

Linux: The hole trick to bypass firewall restriction

Linux: The hole trick to bypass firewall restriction.

As long as remote is behaving itself, it will send back a “port unreachable” response via ICMP – however this is of no consequence. On the second attempt
remote# echo "hello" | nc -p 53 -u local-fw 14141
The netcat listener on console local/1 then coughs up a “hello” – the UDP packet from outside has passed through the firewall and arrived at the computer behind it.

Daytime Protocol

Daytime Protocol – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Daytime Protocol is a service in the Internet Protocol Suite, defined in 1983 in RFC 867. It is intended for testing and measurement purposes in computer networks.

A host may connect to a server that supports the Daytime Protocol on either Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port 13. The server returns an ASCII character string of the current date and time in an unspecified format.

Apparently some HTC devices use this protocol.