As a proud owner of Sprint’s new Palm Treo 800w, I regularly subscribe to the treo|central forum for my phone. Now, there is a common sentiment expressed in PDA/Smartphone forums – not just the one I read. “Is there a one-[touch/button/tap/click] approach I can do to [some function]?” This potential function could be toggling the GPS, killing the current application, terminating all open programs, toggling PowerVision/EVDO/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA, soft resetting, etc. If you’re lucky, someone knows of a for-pay program that contains the requested function hidden in an obscure menu. But usually, the bulletin board thread ends with … silence (crickets chirping).

But don’t concede yet! Once in a blue moon, if there is a high enough demand, somebody benevolently writes a program and releases it to the forum community. But why wait for that person? “Ask not what the hacker community can do for you. Ask what you can do for the hacker community!” Why not be that benevolent person? If there is not a way, make a way. Program it yourself!

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So then, you’ve got the “Fastest Package” for the Verizon FiOS ultra high-speed fiber optic. A whooping 50 Mbps download speed and a 20 Mbps upload speed! That means 802.11b WiFi routers won’t even be able to handle those speeds! Nevertheless, that possible 11 Mbps bottleneck should not be your only concern. If you’re going to be utilizing a number of network intensive applications (*coughGnuettllaEmuleBittorrent*) you’ll need to make some other adjustments to your hardware and software network setup. This is one of many things you can do to optimize the network. However, it is the first thing I try to remember when setting up any node or router on my home network.

Possible Names

This setting has many names. You can look for “Maximum Ports,” “Maximum Number of Connections,” “Max Active Links,” “Max Half-open/Duplex Concurrent Connections,” etc. Like the names imply, this setting controls how many connections can be established between nodes. Why is this important? It allows the client computer to contact many more server hosts at the same time. Off the top of my head, this would be beneficial to multi-segment download managers programs like DownThemAll!, Internet browsers (especially with multiple tabs), and (lower voice) P2P file sharing programs.

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A couple of months ago, I published my previous Wi-Fi penetration article about “Aircrack/Aireplay-ng Under Packet Injection Monitor Mode in Windows using a Virtual Machine of Backtrack Linux.” Really, there was still no complete sever from Linux with this scheme … until now. I didn’t realize that there was an easier way to use aircrack-ng in Windows and at the same time completely break free of Linux. Hours after I released that article, a reader left a comment telling me that somebody already wrote a less complicated method, “How to Packet injection Aireplay-ng & Windows XP” at airdump.net.

Summary

Ultimately, the premises of this hack works like this. With a slightly modified DOS/Windows-ported compilation of the most cutting-edge (actually beta) Aircrack-ng suite and a monitor mode compatible WiFi driver, it is possible to essentially inject packets in Windows with no middleman of a virtual machine (as mentioned in my previous Backtrack article). The original article at airdump.net actually provides the recompiled Aircrack-ng suite and the stripped CommView WiFi driver in a nifty little package.

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