Tutorial [HOW-TO] Have a homemade Streetpass Relay

[Rahzadan]

Just wanted to report that I'm using a Linksys E900 flashing with DD-WRT "big" build 21061 and your v2 script is working perfectly. I have not tested the v3 script as of yet. I was initially having issues because the script's "wget" commands were not working because the W900 is actually my secondary router (bought it solely for this purpose) and I forgot to define a DNS server IP, so "wget" could not resolve an IP to download what it needed to due to this. Once I set the DNS, it worked

Edit: v3 script is working for me. I ran the installer for it which did reboot the router, however it does not work right away for some reason. Tried manually running it via telnet "/tmp/nzone 49,BASE16,GBATEMP" and nothing.. The WLAN MAC remained the same. Verified this using ifconfig $(nvram get wl0_ifname). There are 40 macs in the nzone.macs file when using 49,BASE16,GBATEMP which results in 12 minutes between MAC cycles. For some reason only when the cron job runs does it work, why is that I can't run it manually to test?

 

[retrogradesnowcone]

how often can an individual mac address be homepassed? if i connect to mac address a, then b, then back to a does it reset the waiting time?

 

[Tane]

Banning fake mac addresses? Easy! Checking the origin IP? Even easier.

The reason this exists is to BRING your 3DS wherever you go. 'Homepass' completely ruins the point. Anyway, I am just going to let it ride out. It isn't exciting as when you go out somewhere and find a streetpass waiting for you so it is becoming a bit tiresome.

Nintendo's Relay system is based on MAC's and SSIDs. Even if they banned our "fake MAC's" - they can't ban legitimate ones. Because we would all just start using legitimate MAC's from actual Nintendo Zone's (very easy to extract the MAC's from real Nintendo Zone's). We even have the MAC's from Nintendo World in New York City - they wouldn't ban themselves! (see my spreadsheet for examples) They would have to completely shut down the new StreetPass "Relay" system to currently stop us from doing this.

And banning IP's wouldn't do much. Most home users have dynamic IP's. Easy to get around that.

Now if Nintendo started banning 3DS's.... that would be devastating. But I don't see them doing that.

The reason this exists is to BRING your 3DS wherever you go. 'Homepass' completely ruins the point. Anyway, I am just going to let it ride out. It isn't exciting as when you go out somewhere and find a streetpass waiting for you so it is becoming a bit tiresome.

If HomePass is tiresome for you, then don't do it anymore! No one is forcing you. Go back to the old method. I'm sure 90-95% of 3DS owners don't know anything about "HomePass". HomePass will not have diminished the excitement or thrill of getting a StreetPass the old way. You'll have the same luck as you did before getting StreetPasses - but now more with the relay system. In fact, I'm more excited now to get StreetPasses. I'm going to a Convention the end of this week, and I'm beyond excited to bring my 3DS and get some StreetPasses

I do in fact bring my 3DS everywhere - but I never get any hits. I live in the country, corn fields on each side and just a few neighbors who would never own a DS (or even own a PC). I have to drive 40 mins to get to the city where I *might* get a StreetPass (my region is fairly economically depressed, so not many people own 3DS's around my area). I'm very busy at home with my family, so I have no time to make luxury trips for StreetPasses. HomePass makes this more than perfect for my situation.

So unless Nintendo begins banning 3DS systems for utilizing "HomePass" - don't expect it to be shutdown anytime soon.

 

[Tane]

how often can an individual mac address be homepassed? if i connect to mac address a, then b, then back to a does it reset the waiting time?

Individual MAC's can be homepassed instantly over and over again. It's the 3DS that gets the 8 hour cooldown - not the Individual MAC. If you have five 3DS systems, kept the wireless off on each. And then cycled each indivually, they would all get hits on your Homepass relay as soon as you activated the wireless. I hope that answers your question?

 

[retrogradesnowcone]

there are two very easy ways they could prevent homepass:

1) use an IP whitelist. only official nintendozone ip's could send relay signals to their servers. people having dynamic IPs at home wouldn't matter since they wouldn't be on the whitelist

2) check ARIN information for each IP-- throw away all connections that don't originate from mcdonalds, starbucks, etc.

it would be easy for them to implement. whether or not they care enough to do it is another issue; it wouldn't surprise me either way however

 

[Tane]

there are two very easy ways they could prevent homepass:

1) use an IP whitelist. only official nintendozone ip's could send relay signals to their servers. people having dynamic IPs at home wouldn't matter since they wouldn't be on the whitelist

2) check ARIN information for each IP-- throw away all connections that don't originate from mcdonalds, starbucks, etc.

it would be easy for them to implement. whether or not they care enough to do it is another issue; it wouldn't surprise me either way however

This is true. They could do those things - just not sure they will want to put all the time and effort into it. I know they are making more $$ from this. So I wonder if that will keep them from blocking it. Good insight, thanks Retro.

 

[The Mystical One]

Yeah, now that people can more easily get streetpasses to help play the new mii plaza games... more incentive for people who can homepass to get those games.

 

[[Truth]]

there are two very easy ways they could prevent homepass:

1) use an IP whitelist. only official nintendozone ip's could send relay signals to their servers. people having dynamic IPs at home wouldn't matter since they wouldn't be on the whitelist

2) check ARIN information for each IP-- throw away all connections that don't originate from mcdonalds, starbucks, etc.

it would be easy for them to implement. whether or not they care enough to do it is another issue; it wouldn't surprise me either way however

Not very easy to maintain such a whitelist.
Not every hotspot has the same setup, you don´t know if they have dynamic IPs or not etc.
They made it so easy to create a Nintendo Zone (only an open Network with the correct SSID) to make them widely available and cheap to setup.

Yeah, now that people can more easily get streetpasses to help play the new mii plaza games... more incentive for people who can homepass to get those games.

Also this.
I only spent 15 Euros for the 4 games, because of HomePass.

 

[shadowdogg]

And banning IP's wouldn't do much. Most home users have dynamic IP's. Easy to get around that.

Not if they live outside the USA. If they are outside the USA, they could ignore the 3ds data if it is meant to be a particular SSID of a particular country origin.

HomePass will not have diminished the excitement or thrill of getting a StreetPass the old way.

It will but like I said, I want to take advantage before I think they will take an approach to reduce this ability a bit more. At the minute, I am going completely overkill (of my own choice) and getting 100+ a day, so they might try and reduce that so that these relays can't do more than say 40 a day. Would be a relatively easy system to implement and be a bit more fair I think and still bring what it is meant to do, encourage you to bring your 3ds with you etc.

 

[The Mystical One]

Things I have found while trying the Win7 method:
1. Some wireless cards will not allow the virtual hotspot to use the [macshifted] MAC of the wireless card.
a. Sometimes it'd be locked into the original MAC (or the last octet would be off by one). Example: My Laptop's Intel Centrinto Advanced-N 6230
b. Sometimes it'd force the first hex digit of the first octet to be 6 or 5 (ie: 6E or 5E). Example: Whatever my mom's wireless card is... not that it mattered, since that was Windows 7 Starter.

2. You can have other active 3DS internet connections and still get the streepass off the attiwifi connection.
a. It just might take a little longer since it seems to poll each valid connection in turn to check spotpass or whatever.

3. Definitely need to turn off Windows Firewall (at least I do on the only computer I've gotten this to work on)

4. Sometimes when you start the virtual router, it won't connect to the internet; start/stop fixes this generally.

5. Sometimes when you start the virtual router, the 3DS will just continuously get sent very small (less than 1KB) data over and over and over from the virtual connection and never get anything. start/stop usually fixes this too, sometimes i need to open the 3DS and have it think "Nintendo Zone!" and close it again.

6. Seems if you get streetpass relay data from a mii you've streetpassed (that is still waiting at the gate), it ignores that Mii Plaza data, rather than doing the multiple high-5, "You've met them X times' thing that would happen with non-relay streepasses.

7. Definitely don't need a wired connection. The same wireless card can be connected to the internet and serve as the virtual hotspot at the same time.

 

[syrusdark]

After a long and gruesome quest, I finally managed to change the MAC address of my Galaxy Note, by using terminal commands... and it still doesn't work. For some reason, the 3DS can't connect with the phone when the MAC address is changed. It does find the wireless signal, and the Nintendo Zone app reacts accordingly, but when I try connecting with the internet through it I get a 003-1103 error, and no Streetpass data is received. Anyone has any idea of what the problem might be?

 

[weiff]

Alright, I read several pages of this thread... and then tried the search... no answer found. I have one of the Nintendo official wifi adapter, is there any reason I cannot/way to use it to accomplish this process? I am not really in the mood to do a bunch of resetting to my wireless modem. I had that adapter working as a fake network a few years ago with some modified software. So any info on how to do it?

 

[BerserkLeon]

Alright, I read several pages of this thread... and then tried the search... no answer found. I have one of the Nintendo official wifi adapter, is there any reason I cannot/way to use it to accomplish this process? I am not really in the mood to do a bunch of resetting to my wireless modem. I had that adapter working as a fake network a few years ago with some modified software. So any info on how to do it?

first post.
Win XP.

 

[weiff]

first post.
Win XP.

OK, thanks. Was not sure the device was even capable. Will try it when I get home.

 

[duke_srg]

how often can an individual mac address be homepassed? if i connect to mac address a, then b, then back to a does it reset the waiting time?

You can run it manually, but it will only force MAC to change once every 12 minutes in your case.

 

[FryJay]

I've been trying to use my Raspberry Pi for this and I'm running into issues. I'm using a TL-WN725N v2 for my wireless dongle and I can't seem to change the MAC address. When I attempt to do so manually with ifconfig like so:

sudo lfconfig wlan0 down
sudo ifconfig wlan0 hw ether
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

The MAC address remains unchanged and I receive no error. Also, when I run the command:

ip link ls wlan0

After the ifconfig down command, it still shows the state as up.

When I use macchanger, I receive the following:


ERROR: Can’t read permanent MAC: Operation not supported
Permanent MAC: 00:00:00:00:00:00 (Xerox Corporation)
Current MAC: 64:66:b3:09:24:6a (unknown)
New MAC: 4e:53:50:4f:4f:46 (unknown)

The MAC remains unchanged after the command.

I'm not a Linux guru (but I'm learning) so if anyone has any clues to me as to what is causing the issue I'd love the help!

Thanks!

 

[Tizzy]

Well, I've tested this with both the Windows 8 instructions and spoofing the MAC via router (Using a Medialink router whose firmware allows for MAC spoofing). It doesn't seem to work fully. However, it's strange since I CAN access Nintendo Zone and see the content there, but it won't give me a streetpass hit no matter how long I leave it on. I've tried with 3 of the MACs to no avail - I access NintendoZone in all of them but no StreetPass hits.

Does anyone know why this is happening?

 

[Sordid_]

I personally have DIR-615 E4 with 21061, and all posted scripts are working. Try restarting cron daemon like this

stopservice cron
startservice cron

You can't check MAC changed in Web GUI, just try

ifconfig ath0

You can also check if MAC lists is downloaded successfully:

cat /tmp/nzone.macs

stopservice cron -> startservice cron didn't help unfortunately. If I type cat /tmp/nzone.macs I get a list of macs but if I type ifconfig ath0 it doesn't do anything, just goes on to the next line.

Edit: The DIR-615 E4 that you have has an Atheros chipset while my DIR-615 D2 has a Ralink chipset. Maybe that's the issue?

 

[Katarsys]

I can't make it work, if anyone is interested in homepass with me, my Mac address is 00:21:29:7A:58:10 (0021297A5810) I have MH3U, MK7, SSF4, Theatrythm FF, Kid Icarus Uprising, Pokemon Rumble Blast and PES 12.

 

[LovesLaus]

I got all the settings up and working but i am not getting any spotpass.

the 3ds seeing the connection and able to connect to it. i have internet service on the 3ds as i am able to go on the web. the nintendo zone logo blinks blue.
but i still get on spot pass and i am not sure why that is.