Piranha

This update to Piranha 3.0 is all about stability and reliability. With Piranha 3.0 100117, released exactly one month ago, a simultaneous station- and AP mode configuration has been introduced as the default. After doing extensive testing the last days, I decided to revert back to a station-only configuration starting with this Piranha 3.0 100217 snapshot release (the stability penalties caused to AAP 2.0 are just not worth it from my perspective). That said, if you nevertheless prefer the previous configuration, you can adjust your /e/c/network and /e/c/wireless as described here.

Also on the stability front, AAP 2.0 now ships with a new default value for its aap_dhcptimeout configuration variable. I raised it from 30 to 60 seconds as this turned out to higher the reliability of AAP connection attempts significantly. Together with the station-only configuration mentioned above, you should encounter a much smoother AAP 2.0 experience now.

Another aspect I addressed with this Piranha 3.0 snapshot release is related to Mac Changer and /aap/aap_mlst. Both FON heartbeat and AAP 2.0 previously relied on information from /sys/class/net/ath0/address and /sys/class/net/eth0/address respectively to deal with MAC addresses for various techniques. While the co-existence with Mac Changer in Piranha 3.0 was at least partly taken into consideration, it wasn’t deliberated in order to overcome all imaginable scenarios related to MAC Spoofing that may come to your (crazy) brains, but now it is! I now use information extracted from “dmesg” to get the real hardware addresses of your device and thus all FON heartbeat and AAP 2.0 operations are guaranteed to work 100% whatever you do with Mac Changer and/or /aap/aap_mlst and whenever you do it.

Piranha 3.0 100217 changes compared to 100214:

• OpenWrt trunk r19684
• station-only configuration
• AAP 2.0 100217
• FON heartbeat 100217

Due to the (stability/reliability) reasons I outlined, I highly recommend upgrading to this very latest Piranha 3.0 snapshot release. I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

Get your copy of Piranha 3.0 100217 here and have a lot of fun!

Starting with the next Piranha 3.0 snapshot release 100202+1, I’m going to ship GNU Screen installed by default. In combination with the recently introduced MMC card support (ext2), this should significantly enhance usability when operating your Fonera in monitor mode.

Why?

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells (…) When screen is called, it creates a single window with a shell in it (or the specified command) and then gets out of your way so that you can use the program as you normally would. Then, at any time, you can create new (full-screen) windows with other programs in them (including more shells), kill the current window, view a list of the active windows, turn output logging on and off, copy text between windows, view the scrollback history, switch between windows, etc. All windows run their programs completely independent of each other. Programs continue to run when their window is currently not visible and even when the whole screen session is detached from the users terminal.

OK, what does that mean?

Imagine you can run both airodump-ng and aireplay-ng (fake authentication and fragmentation attacks) within just one single SSH session while capturing to your SD/MMC card and you can detach (and reattach) the session at any time. The rest is up to your imagination. That said, in order to get used to GNU Screen’s usage and configuration with /etc/screenrc (this beast is highly customizable), I’d like to refer you to its official documentation.

Stay tuned!