These were compiled using version 2.1.6 of Freeradius.

Hardy amd64

• freeradius-dbg_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-dialupadmin_2.1.6-0_all.deb
• freeradius-iodbc_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-krb5_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-ldap_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-mysql_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius-postgresql_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb
• freeradius_2.1.6-0_amd64.deb

I’m getting really sleepy so I’ll add some more builds tomorrow. Coming soon, instructions on how to build your own packages.

Update: i386 builds for Hardy are also up. i386 builds for Karmic
will follow shortly.

You shouldn’t forget to make a small change to the /etc/freeradius/sql/mysql/dialup.conf(or /etc/freeradius/sql.conf) file. Somewhere around line 82 lies the following:

#######################################################################
        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
#        authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#         FROM ${authcheck_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#         ORDER BY id"
#        authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#         FROM ${authreply_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#         ORDER BY id"

        # The default queries are case insensitive. (for compatibility with
        # older versions of FreeRADIUS)
       authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
          FROM ${authcheck_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY id"
       authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
          FROM ${authreply_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY id"

This should be:

#######################################################################
        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
        authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
         FROM ${authcheck_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
         ORDER BY id"
        authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
         FROM ${authreply_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
         ORDER BY id"

        # The default queries are case insensitive. (for compatibility with
        # older versions of FreeRADIUS)
#       authorize_check_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#          FROM ${authcheck_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY id"
#       authorize_reply_query = "SELECT id, username, attribute, value, op \
#          FROM ${authreply_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY id"

And if you apply your attributes per group instead of per user, like I do, then this:

        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
#        group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
#        FROM ${usergroup_table} \
#         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#        ORDER BY priority"

       group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
          FROM ${usergroup_table} \
          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
          ORDER BY priority"

should become:

        # Use these for case sensitive usernames.
        group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
        FROM ${usergroup_table} \
         WHERE username = BINARY '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
        ORDER BY priority"

#       group_membership_query = "SELECT groupname \
#          FROM ${usergroup_table} \
#          WHERE username = '%{SQL-User-Name}' \
#          ORDER BY priority"

Reload the freeradius server and your usernames should be case sensitive. Now, go and buy yourself a beer in celebration of your valiant victory against the dark forces of computer insecurity.

That’s where Lighttpd comes in. It’s ,according to its site,

�designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems”

Anyways, what we’re interested in is the small memory footprint and the effective management of the cpu-load part.

Installation

We need to get and install lighttpd, PHP and MySQL:

Guides available from:
Instructions from Lighttpd Trac
Lighttpd installation instructions from *Nix Craft
Lighttpd+PHP+Perl+MySQL installation guide for Windows users
Lighttpd+PHP+MySQL Installation guide for Ubuntu
A few notes:

• The settings for fastcgi suggested on the Lighttpd wiki will load a large number of php-cgi process that you probably will not be using. I’ll probably suggest you set

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2"

  instead of

  "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16"

  You can make adjustments later if you feel the need.

• You need to modify the default my.cnf to make things a bit more effcient. You can follow this guide to get you started.

Does it help to use lighttpd instead of apache? Yeah, it does. I’ve been using it for the last couple of weeks and it’s been able to handle my requirements without problem. My final opinion? Well, it is not as full featured as apache but if you have a limited memory budget or are just looking for a lean mean web server, you really should take a good look at lighttpd. Now if you don’t mind, some of us have real work to do and can’t spend all day reading other people’s blogs .

Warning: This hack will not just void your warranty. It will drop-kick it to the floor, stomp it in the gonads five or six times, shoot it in the head, douse the body in petrol and set it ablaze THEN spit on the remains for good measure. And that doesn’t take into consideration what it could do to you or your equipment . You have been warned. Don’t try this unless you’re comfortable with multimeters and soldering irons.
Now, on to the good stuff. Suppose you have a Linksys WRT54G router & antenna that you want to mount somewhere, say on your roof. So, one fine Saturday morining, you grab a few tools and get to work. About 35 minutes into your little project, it hits you: How exactly do you get power for your router? The roof has no power outlets and you need to keep the antenna cable as short as possible to minimize signal losses.

You start wondering, “Maybe I should have gotten a Meraki. They come with Power Over Ethernet(POE).” Then, it hits you, “Wait! Maybe I could run some power over the ethernet cable…” So you do a little scholarly research(a la google) and find a few people who have modified their routers to support POE.
Basically, ye olde ethernete cable has 4 pairs of wires, each pair consisting of a solidily coloured cable and a white-striped cable of the same colour. The usual arrangement(TIA/EIA-568-B) for most patch cables is:

100BASE-TX makes use of wires 1,2,3 & 6 to transmit and receive data, leaving wires 4,5,7 & 8 for our use.

Update: I forgot to mention. Once you do this hack, you have to remember that if you power the router up in the normal manner, power will still be supplied from the power terminals to pin 5 and pin 8 on the WAN port. Keep this in mind if you’re connecting the router to other equipment to avoid …unexpected results. I use a customized cable that has wires 4, 5 ,7 & 8 cut and terminated in the middle of the cable just to be safe

First we need to do is solder a couple of wires, one from pin 5 to the positive terminal on the router’s board and the other from pin 8 to the negative terminal. This will transfer the power coming in over the cable to the power jack on the board where the router can make use of it.
[singlepic=2,320,240,,center]

This is the only modification that needs to be done on the router itself. However, don’t pack everything up until you’ve tested to make sure its working.
Next up will be our injector. Now, there are many ways to feed power into the cable. You can buy a power over ethernet injector, splice the power cable directly in the network cable or build your own injector. I’d recommend buying a power over ethernet injector; it’s a more reliable option and you don’t have to mutilate the poor cables.

But then, if you’re reading this guide, you probably don’t have an injector available or are thinking,”Building my own POE injector is just so much cooler!!” In that case, you’ll need a keystone jack, a spare ethernet cable, and a power brick for the router (It’s usually better to get a spare of equivalent rating as the original since these instructions will make it …unwieldy for normal use)

[singlepic=9,320,240,,center]

What you do trim off one end of your ethernet cable and connect wires 1,2,3 and 6 to the jack. These are your data lines.

Then you take the plug off your power brick and connect the +ve to pin 5 on the jack and the -ve to pin 8. Trim off any unnessary lengths and you have your own power injector.

Once that’s done, feel free to call all your friends and gloat over how clever you are.

Router:

Power Injector:

I have a Meraki mini I’ve been playing around with. I’m running OpenWRT Kamikaze 7.06 on it and I love it. It’s very flexible piece of hardware and comes with an 8mb flash and 32mb of RAM, which is more than enough for the stuff I run on it. The only annoying thing is the lack of a web interface. It’s not that I have problems with using the terminal; it’s just that, it becomes annoying to switch on my desktop just to attend to a minor detail. Or I’m downstairs in a friend’s room and just need to check if my internet connection is alive. A web interface would allow me do all that from a browser as long as I was connected to the network.
Thankfuly there’s the Webif frontend by X-WRT . From what I’ve seen so far, it’s quite good though it’s still beta. It does everything I want it to do so I can’t complain.

Installing
You first need to install the haserl package, which webif depends on.Telnet or SSH into your router and enter the following:

ipkg update

This updates your package list

ipkg install haserl

Installs haserl which allows you to embed shell scripts in html.

ipkg install http://downloads.x-wrt.org/xwrt/kamikaze/7.06/atheros-2.6/webif_latest.ipk

Download and install webif from the x-wrt.org site since webif is not yet in the kamikaze repository

Note: the webif install will reboot your router!!

Once the router is back up, open up a browser of your choice and enter your router’s ip address. Voila

• Forget about ever getting internet access ( not really much of a choice).
• Suscribe to the commercial hotspot.
• Find a way to improve my signal level

Now the first option is like asking me not to breathe. The second is not such a bad option, I make it a point not to pay for internet access if I can get it for free (umm…. legally of course. >:) ). So I guess it’s time to get out my toolkit and start voiding warranties. Now the best way to improve your wireless signal is to get a better antenna. I didn’t have much in the way of resources so I decided to opt of a ‘cantenna’, which basically is a waveguide antenna (if you need details, you won’t find them here. Ever heard of google?). Anyways, what I needed was a tin can, a bit of thick copper wire, an N-connector and a pigtail. Now anyone who lives in Ghana knows those last two items are virually impossible to find. So I had to improvise. I had these cables for an indoor antenna I got from a friend. One end has a magnetic base with a female SMA connector and the other end has a male SMA connector. There was also an SMA to RP-TNC connector included as well.

So I’ll it a try and see what happens. Updates coming soon.

My Linksys WRT54G version 5 suddenly stopped working over the weekend. On powering the router, all lights powered on and stayed that way. I had previously been running DD-WRT Micro.I tried holding the reset button for 30 seconds, powering the router, holding for another 30 seconds and then usnig TFTP tool to flash the router but that did not work. My situation was desperate and I was ready for desperate measures. So I used this guide : http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/redhat/wrt54g_revival.html So I had to open up the router and short out pins 15-16 on the chip. The problem though was that in the pictures I saw, there were differences in the location of some of the components. So I’m posting a picture of what my board looks like just in case anyone has something similar to mine:

I won’t go into the details of the process since they are already documented elsewhere. All I’ll add is, funnily enough, after shorting out the pins, my router started working properly without me needed to reflash the firmware. Might work differently for you though.