Ethernet Over Power

I’ve recently been playing around more with infosec related stuff, after it dawned on me the other day I haven’t hacked anything except webapps in years. I decided to set up a small lab, ideally out in the garage where it’d be away from anywhere we’d like to keep tidy, with a couple of Windows hosts in it, since I haven’t had a go at hacking a Windows box in nearly two decades.

But how to access the internet from out there? The wifi really only works to abou the front of the garage, and forget it working inside of it when the door is shut. Damn it.

In at Aldi and I remembered that they used to sell a cheap ethernet-over-power starter kit, but alas they don’t any more. Harvey Norman had one, but at a hundred bucks it was above my pain threshold - pretty sure I could have the electrician run data cable inside the length of the house for me for that. But Kmart had one, and it was below my pain threshold so I decided to take a gamble on it.

Got it setup and paired, and plugged one into the shed. Nothing. Bummer, but not entirely unexpected. Tried in the spare bedroom (what I could make an office, if I so desired), nothing. Tried it in the living roomwith two power points mere meters from each other (and at absolute worst-case-scenario, no more than 10 meters of wiring apart and certainly on the same circuit), and they connected but the performance was miserable. 2mbps when it worked, and it repeatedly dropped out, so an iperf3 test came in at a total throughput of ~400kbps.

It’s a TP-Link - which I swore I wouldn’t buy again as everything TP-Link I’ve ever bought has been garbage - specifically an AV200 starter kit. I’m not sure whether the product was defective, or something in our house (apparently smart meters can mess with them) but I didn’t really care, so I took it back and got a refund. I’m done keeping electronics stuff that doesn’t do what it says on the box right away - the last few times I’ve held onto it thinking I’ll get time to look into it and then I end up holding on to a piece of shit past the refund window. Not this time.

I still haven’t worked out how to get internet to the lab, so at the moment the Windows 2008 server is sitting behind the bin (arguably where it belongs). I suspect that Sabriena won’t be too happy with that being a permanent arrangement, so I’ll see if I can arrange to have ethernet run to the office or something.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

Author:

fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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