Archive for November, 2016

Packet sniffing for fun and profit

wireshark-capture

I have a commercial IOT product that I want more control over. Sure, I can control it with the free Android app, but I want my home server to be able to control it, too. This means trying to understand how the app controls it over the network, and attempting to replicate that communication.

This means I have to do some packet sniffing.

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Getting started with MQTT

At this point, I have a few IOT things on my home network. The first were a couple of EcoPlugs Wifi outlets that I use to control my gutter heaters in the winter, and the next was a custom garage door controller. For the former, I’m basically controlling them by using a replay attack (I hope to make a post about this soon)…re-sending packets that I observed the EcoPlugs app sending. For the latter, I’m using a custom http interface. Since both of these contain an ESP8266, I’d like re-program them and unify them both to use the MQTT protocol.

While browsing Hackaday, I came across their Minimal MQTT series. In this post, I’ll begin by walking through that series, noting my thoughts, then conclude by getting things set up the way I want.
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Issues upgrading from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.10 (via 16.04)

Canonical recently dropped official support for Ubuntu 15.10 “Wily Werewolf”, so I decided to upgrade. I also don’t like being stuck on Long-Term-Support releases, so I did 2 upgrades in sequence: 15.10 “Wily Werewolf” to 16.04 “Xenial Xerus” to 16.10 “Yakkety Yak”. In the past, I’ve just done a clean install, but the trouble with that is having to re-do all my various customizations. This time I figured I’d just try an in-place upgrade. Of course, this meant that my customizations conflicted with packages changes. I’m still not sure which method is better.

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