Lenovo Smart Clock 2: unboxing and exploration

If you’ve seen YouTube unboxing videos, this is not that. There is no video here (although I think unboxing videos are great and more people should do them of more devices!) and what you’ll find described below has little to do with direct user experience.

Router Archeology: Sitecom WL-330

I like taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and see if they can perhaps gain a bit of Open Source, either by replacing existing software (as is commonly done with OpenWrt for replacing router vendor firmware, ESPHome for replacing firmware on ESP devices, etc.

What does ip netns add actually do?

While trying to add network namespace support to OpenWrt’s netifd, I ran into a severe lack of documentation about what named network namespaces in Linux actually are. It turns out that while the Linux kernel has network namespaces, naming them is really an iproute2 thing, and other tools that also try to work with named network namespaces are best off emulating the iproute2 conventions.

Exploring Oracle Cloud and the Always Free Resources

A friend recently mentioned to me that Oracle Cloud has a pretty decent ‘Always Free’ Tier, with 4 ARM64 cores sharing 24GB of RAM, one AMD VM, and 200GB of block storage to divide between them. I decided to have a look at the service, and below you will find my experiences.

Getting a root shell on an old KPN Experia Wifi (CVE-2021-38703)

The KPN Experia Wifi was sold by KPN/Telfort in The Netherlands as a WiFi amplifier/extender, for those households or businesses that need that extra WiFi oomph. On mine, running an old firmware version, I managed to gain a root shell. KPN asked that I state clearly here that the vulnerability has been fixed since, and updated devices are not affected.