Slurpr - the Mother of all Wardrive Boxes
May 29th, 2007 by Gordon Cook
A valued reader in Amsterdam commented today:
Somebody built himself something in some shed somewhere…
Source, with pictures is found at:
Slurpr - the Mother of all Wardrive Boxes
There we read:
Whenever I go to Amsterdam, every once in a while I meet up with Boris. Now our meetings are always inspiring (I guess for the both of us ^_^), full of ideas, about stuff we can do and a couple of months ago Boris came up with the following (he also blogged about this)
“At this moment I can see 8 different signals. Some are closed networks but most are open and available. I can only connect to one at a time so I tend to just pick the one with the best signal. But what if I could connect to all the networks at the same time and combine their bandwith?
Yeah, that is what I need! A big, fat access point with a large antenna and a bunch of Wi-Fi cards that automatically connect to the strongest signals it can pick up. Then it would combine all these signals into one FreeLoading Broadband Channel for me to use.”
So, in the end, I guess I was the one up for the challenge and now, two days ahead of The Next Web Conference it’s time to show the world what we’ve got!
We call it: the Slurpr. (The box already has its own domain name too!)
What is it? Well, I (re)searched a whole lot of available hardware before I decided this is what this magic box should be:
click to enlarge (picture heree)
It’s a nice black box of course, but what’s inside? The inside consists of a Routerboard 532A motherboard with 564 daughterboard.
That on it’s own gives the following specs:
CPU MIPS 32 4Kc based 266MHz (BIOS adjustable from 200 to 400MHz) embedded processor
Memory 64MB DDR onboard memory chip
Root loader RouterBOOT, 1Mbit Flash chip
Data storage 128MB onboard NAND memory chip
CompactFlash type I/II slot (also supports IBM/Hitachi Microdrive)
Ethernet ports One IDT Korina 10/100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet port supporting Auto-MDI/X, eight VIA VT6105 10/100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet ports supporting Auto-MDI/X
MiniPCI slot Six MiniPCI Type IIIA/IIIB slots
Serial ports One DB9 RS232C asynchronous serial port
Now that is already a nice piece of equipment, but doesn’t bring us any nearer to a solution of Boris’ problem here, so I added six mini-PCI cards (and a quite famous 4GB Compact Flash card ^_^) , three of which are visible in this picture:
Big Snip
Cook’s Edge: there is a lot more there at the link. I am no expert in this technology - so don’t take my word for it - check it out