It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

In a previous blog entry, I discussed strategies for snooping out wi-fi hogs. Unfortunately, when I went out to cast my net, the only fish pulled in was myself. It turns out the approach I described doesn't work on my laptop, an Inspiron 600m with Intel 2200BG wireless network controller (ipw2200 driver).

In a shared network technology such as wireless Ethernet, the network controller typically picks out just the packets addressed to it, ignoring everybody else's traffic. Some controllers can be placed into promiscuous mode. In this mode the controller accepts all packets, so a program can monitor all the traffic on the network.

The ipw2200 driver doesn't provide a simple promiscuous mode, so the solutions I described don't work.

I've found two workarounds.

First, I can switch the wireless Ethernet controller from "Managed" to "Monitor" mode with a command such as:

iwconfig eth1 mode Monitor

Then, I can launch a program such as Wireshark to monitor the traffic.

The bad news is that my lungs felt like they were ripped out and replaced with sandpaper. The good news is that I've now got gigabit Ethernet wiring in the house.

The installation kicked up so much insulation dust that I ended up getting sick. Even still, I think it will be worth it.

The house used to be wireless. I wanted to go wired for several reasons.

Wired is more reliable. That's important because I want to move critical functions onto my file server, such as backups. And, of course, the digital music collection.

Wired is also more secure. I now literally have an air gap between my trusted and untrusted resources.

Finally, wired is higher performance. That's important for backups and streaming media, two functions I want to support.

I'm in the process of consolidating all the media files onto the server and setup the satellite systems to run off of that.

A year from now, your television is going to break.

Over-the-air broadcast television is changing from the current NTSC analog broadcast standard to a new digital transmission mechanism. There are several significant reasons why this is a good idea. Broadcast television will become HD quality, with improved video and audio. Television stations will be able to transmit additional information, even multiple channels, in their allotted space. Also, this will release a large piece of valuable radio frequency spectrum, which will be used to raise money for the Federal government and open up the airwaves to exciting new services.

This is my penultimate entry for Holidailies 2007. The goal was a month of daily blogging and I'm on track to achieve that (for the first time in my many years of Holidailies participation).

I've learned a couple things from this exercise.

The first thing I learned is that I'm not as interesting as I thought I was. But, then again, who is?

Although I've had a handful of posts over the past month where I think I've had something pretty valuable to say (such as the Socialized Football and Time Warner Rate Increase posts), the blather ratio was higher than I'd have hoped.

Part of the problem is that I'd intended to write on things that came out of interesting December projects, but I didn't have many of those. I didn't take much time off from work, and I spent that little free time on family stuff not projects.