As a result of this, Gabe decided he was out to get the DCC, our computing department, which is portrayed as the Evil Department of Computing Syndicate in the following short I helped film:

As you can see, I have a couple minor roles (playing cards and the exciting finale scene). Good times. Around that time we also constructed a 802.11b antenna from a dish Gabe bought from FAB-Corp, a bunch of packing tape, and my musical horse, Alpo:

He then dropped out and started his own business, called OvernightPC (I still have one of the CDs they passed out at a LAN party). They would come to your dorm room or home or business and fix your machines. The business did alright for a while, but eventually failed. Gabe moved to Portland, OR.

I went to OSCON in the summer of 2006, and stayed with Gabe. He had started running a web proxy service under various different names, like VTunnel. Wanting to expand his business (he was already pulling 6 figures in advertising revenue at that time), he flew a kid from England to Oregon to work on a new idea: Pay VPN service for anonymity. I’m not sure how this ended up working out.

I left after the conference, and the next thing I heard about him was that he moved to Florida and was loving it. Now, he’s at the center of the entire Sarah Palin Email Account Scandal. His service was apparently used to do the email password hacking deed. I’ll have to give him a call and see what he thinks about all this.

Update

I talked to Gabe on the phone today, and he told me he had done a video interview with Fox. It sounds like he’s doing well.

Video mirrored here:

This rocks – now I have to try it on some For-Pay wireless…

Do not try this if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting into.

So, last month sometime, BrainSlayer got DD-WRT working on version 8 of the WRT54G. Now this was great news to me when I read it since I’ve been wanting to get rid of the crappy LinkSys management from the beginning. Some of the procedure worked, and some of it didn’t for me.

Do not try this if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting into.

Here’s what I ended up doing:

• Go here and look at the state of things.
• Read flashing.txt. It helped me immensely.
• Download the DD-WRT firmware and the version 8 VXWorks killer and put them in a safe place
• I use Ubuntu, so at this point I installed tftp:

sudo apt-get install tftp

• Go to the flashing dialog and flash the VXWorks killer firmware you got.
• Once the router reboots, get a beer while it warms up. This should take 1 to 2 minutes.
• Unplug the router and plug it back in.
• Wait while it boots (20 seconds).
• Set your ip and default gateway:

# Replace <interface> with whichever network interface you're using.
sudo ifconfig <interface> 192.168.1.100
sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1

• Ping the router. Hopefully this works…

hank@rofl:~$ ping 192.168.1.1
PING 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 192.168.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.792 ms

• Send the new firmware over. Make sure to set your mode to octet! You should see a bunch of blinky lights on the router for a few seconds, then tftp should output the number of bytes transferred.

hank@rofl:~$ tftp 192.168.1.1
tftp> mode octet
tftp> put dd-wrt.v24_micro_wrt54gv8.bin

• Get another beer. While you do that, your firmware is being reflashed and DD-WRT is booting up. You should see the power light go on, then off, then on again, then blink, then stay on.
• You should be able to get DHCP now. Try it:

sudo dhclient <interface>

• If that worked, head over to http://192.168.1.1 to the admin console.
• Change the settings to your liking. The default account is root/admin
• Change the maximum connections to 4096 and the TCP and UDP timeouts to 90 each in the main Administration page.

This should yield you an awesome setup. I’m very happy with mine.

References

Hack Attack: Turn your $60 router into a $600 router

Files

Oh, and just in case DD-WRT’s site goes down in the middle of the procedure (like it did to me), here are the files:

Firmware
VXWorks Killer