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I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

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Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#61

Post by mypalmike »

vander_elst wrote: post #30
thyrox wrote: post #18

How does one learn about this stuff? I learned about basic networking in college (the TCP layers) etc but people doing such stuff sounds like Greek to me. If I want to learn more about what the author is doing, is there a resource like a udemy course or YouTube channel you guys can recommend?

I'd suggest a book. I was pretty happy with "Computer Networking: A Top-down Approach" by Jim Kurose. I find it more appealing that it starts with the upper layers (http), because I was more familiar with them.

Nice to see the name Jim Kurose here. Many years ago, I learned networking and C programming in his computer networks course at UMass. Such a great teacher and a real breakthrough class for me in understanding not just networks, but low level systems programming, computer architecture, and other things tangentially related to networks, I'm not surprised to hear his book is good.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#64

Post by nixgeek »

spr-alex wrote: post #53
woodruffw wrote: post #36

This is adjacent to the classic free WiFi hack on airplanes, which is to boot another client off of their DHCP lease by spoofing their MAC. It’s unfortunate that, below HTTPS and a light smattering of WiFi encryption, there’s essentially no authenticity controls on LAN management protocols.

I work on SPR, http://github.com/spr-networks/super , we make it easy to use distinct WiFi 3/ WPA2 passwords to authenticate devices on the network for policy based access

Great project, a lot of APs themselves support VLAN segregation using RADIUS, has SPR ever considered the scenario where it might be ideal if it were just the router and it controls APs (and even switches) that way?

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#65

Post by chimeracoder »

hnbear wrote: post #42
laserbeam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, that should be the mindset of IT experts in general. Any reset/reset should fix everything and bring the system to a known functional state before doing any work. Obviously you don't want to have to restart to fix issues, but having that as a fallback (especially for issues you didn't predict during development) is great UX.

Isn’t this the fundamental point of the push for impotency in configuration management tools? You just need the state set to “good”, regardless of which bits need to change and current state. Hit the button and it makes it “good”.

> Isn’t this the fundamental point of the push for impotency in configuration management tools?

FYI, The word you're looking for is idempotence (EYE-dem-poh-tense).

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#66

Post by godzillabrennus »

nixgeek wrote: post #64
spr-alex wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on SPR, http://github.com/spr-networks/super , we make it easy to use distinct WiFi 3/ WPA2 passwords to authenticate devices on the network for policy based access

Great project, a lot of APs themselves support VLAN segregation using RADIUS, has SPR ever considered the scenario where it might be ideal if it were just the router and it controls APs (and even switches) that way?

Client isolation at the access point level does this.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#67

Post by woodruffw »

ruune wrote: post #62
ape4 wrote: post #50

Why don't laptops randomize their MACs?

Probably because no desktop OS I know of randomizes MAC addresses by default. How many people are gonna enable that manually? At least android (and I think iOS) default to random addresses

I believe recent versions of macOS also perform MAC randomization by default.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#69

Post by godzillabrennus »

andrecarini wrote: post #51
thyrox wrote: post #18

How does one learn about this stuff? I learned about basic networking in college (the TCP layers) etc but people doing such stuff sounds like Greek to me. If I want to learn more about what the author is doing, is there a resource like a udemy course or YouTube channel you guys can recommend?

Get yourself a router that supports OpenWRT, install that on it and figure out what every configuration option does. Bonus points: setup WPA Enterprise on it and a DNS resolver.

Running an old PC or at least a VM that does OpnSense is even more versatile.

Re: I told the flight attendant "the WiFi isn't working"

#70

Post by sandworm101 »

placatedmayhem wrote: post #47
woodruffw wrote: post #36

This is adjacent to the classic free WiFi hack on airplanes, which is to boot another client off of their DHCP lease by spoofing their MAC. It’s unfortunate that, below HTTPS and a light smattering of WiFi encryption, there’s essentially no authenticity controls on LAN management protocols.

Every time I have to interact with a "captive portal", I'm annoyed at the hack implemented through DNS hijacking, rather than implementing and extending 802.1X and/or another layer-2 authentication scheme. The idea seems to have been tossed aside entirely. Instead, every device has to have a web browser. There's not even a way to do surrogate registration for devices that don't have browsers, with Apple TV and Ninten…

I have a work laptop (government) that hates captive portals. It has a security system that won't let it connect using the local DNS. So it doesn't get captured. Those of us with such laptops all have tricks for getting to a hotel's wifi login page using IP addresses. But we have to do it fast, before the security software fully wakes up and blocks the hack.

We used to just login on our phones, then tether the work laptop to the phone over USB. The security people caught up to that a couple years ago and disabled USB tethering. So now I alter my laptop's MAC to be the same as that from the work laptop. That tricks about 90% of hotel wifi into allowing the work laptop to connect without need of a splash page. But for the other 10%...

(Not a joke, I do this) I sometimes login to the hotel wifi on my personal phone, tether that phone to my personal laptop, then setup that laptop as a router. The work computer can then connect to the wifi from the personal laptop, which tethers into the phone, which is on the hotel wifi. All of this just avoid another ridiculous wifi login page.

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