Aug. 27, 2008
I recently changed mobile phones from my LG KS20 to a Nokia E71. All in all I am very pleased with the change to Nokia and I must say that I am truly impressed with this model. Well, except for PC suite not working with Virtualbox ofcourse 
I don't know whos to blame but the software does not want to connect to my phone over USB. It finds the phone and installs all the right drivers but once PC Suite tries to connect I get "PC Suite does not regcognise the connected phone. The connection between the PC and phone failed, error code 0x80044403. Switch of your phone, switch it on, and try again."
I am running the latest PC Suite 7.0.8.2 on Windows XP in Virtualbox 1.6.4. My current workaround is to connect to the phone over bluetooth from the same Virtual XP installation using a USB Bluetooth dongle. I must say that this part is a bit of a pain in the ..... Well, I guess you can't have it all.
The issue has been reported at both Virtualbox and Nokia forums so hopefully there will be a fix soon.
Posted by Patrik in Virtualization | 2 Comments
Aug. 27, 2008
OK so I've been able to get things running quite smoothly now. I cracked my Linksys WUSB54GC card open and soldered a pigtail connector to it according to the following photo http://www.josepino.com/other_projects/antenna/usb-antenna.jpg. I also added txPowerTuning=36 as option to the rt73 driver which I believe did make things somewhat better.
What remains in order to get a good solid environment running is a better wifi card with a lot better transmit power, which I've ordered from the UK today. Hopefully it will be here by monday so me and my friend can do some more tests over a beer or two.
Posted by Patrik in Security | 2 Comments
Aug. 22, 2008
I have had some better luck with airbase-ng the last few days, most likely due to a combination of factors.
For starters I (once more) ripped apart my USB adapter and de-soldered my external antenna cable and found a better spot for it. The new re-fitted antenna works a lot better now and actually picks up quite a few new networks (and clients of course).
Another change I made was to switch the wireless drivers to the ones available from the git kernel sources which for the moment seem to work better than the previous ones.
I still believe in the airbase-ng concept of a user-mode AP which works with many different chipsets and not that dependent of driver patches. However, in order to switch away from the madwifi-patches it has to work atleast as good as they do and with a USB wifi-interface.
Once I get things running I'll post my setup here. If someone already has done so, please drop me a line with your setup including hardware
Posted by Patrik in Security | No Comments
Aug. 20, 2008
I recently purchased a new Asus eee 900 as I dropped my previous lovely pink 700 in the floor breaking the screen 
Due to its small size I thought it could be suitable for carrying around while performing wireless assesments. This led me to setting it up as both a scanning/monitoring device using the built-in wireless interface and a fake access point. Kismet basically ran out of the box while the fake access point took some more work.
As a friend told me about the airbase-ng project I though I would give it a shot...