We're All Packed Up

Tomorrow is the big moving day. Pretty much everything here is all packed up. The computer room is a great pile of boxes, the kitchen is a mess of packing tape and paper, and there's nothing anywhere else.

Hopefully *our* stuff goes smoothly tomorrow. The problem today is going to be that one of the new tenants is going to be moving her stuff in. This is going to be super fun. She says she doesn't have much and I hope she's right cause we have SFA for space especially once we start trying to move stuff *out* of the house.

Yeah, pretty much the problem showed up without warning yesterday. Basically our land-lord just said "yeah yeah, it's fine" to the new tenant disregarding what the Wendawg and I had told him. That and on the other side, the building manager at our new place keeps saying that "I haven't been able to get in touch with all the current tenants". And hence we don't get to actually move our stuff at all till the first unless they have magically vacated today.

Moving is fun.

There are a couple benefits to moving though. We get to a) discover that there's actually a lot of flat-out garbage in this place (and thus throw it out) and b) we get to live like minimalists for a day or two. We're living with nothing but some spare clothes, booze, and a bunch of computers. Totaly minimalists we are.

/me += failed hardware

Nothing like mixing C-syntax with IRC commands to really geek out a topic...

So much fun. Got Michael working for stuff. That was fine. Blah-blah-blah.

So then I tried to get Gentoo going today. The Gentoo LiveCD I have doesn't work fully *but* I did have a working Gnoppix LiveCD *and* the Gentoo docs have section specifically for installing Gentoo from a Knoppix (or Knoppix-based) LiveCD. How cool is that?

After some confusion, I did get to the point where I was to compile the kernel. So this involved sorting what stage I needed and formatting partitions (reiserfs for my root partition, thank you very much :P). The kernel failed to compile.

I thwacked at it and the genkernel utility but still couldn't get it to float after several tries. It's dying somewhere in the networking section. Suxx.

Round about then, my project member for school calls and he's on his way over. "Fuckit", I say, and I install Fedora Core 2. That went super snarky-fast. It was done it's part of the install by the time he got here.

That was cool. What wasn't was that when trying to restore the testbed lan, stuff started failing. I had forgotten about the bum NIC. So that was wrong.

Not only that, but it would seem that the crossover port on my hub has failed. That *really* sucks cause I normally don't believe in crossover cables. The hub was working fine through yesterday even... Maybe it's a combination of things that made it seem like a bad hub.

No matter what, it was basically a lot more difficult then it should have been. It'll be fine though. I just have to rip out this bad NIC from michael and stomp it. Fedora Core 2 installs the gig NIC fine anyhow.

Hacking Hacking Everywhere!

Woo! Hacking is fun! We've been playing with the dsniff tools today in our little testbed and got most of that stuff working great. The setup here is Cayce and Porcelina NATed through Michael.

First we had my little dlink switch hooked up. Unfortunately, it doesn't "fail open" and turn in to a hub. That didn't really matter too much because arpspoof worked great. We had Porcelina attack Cacyce to make Cayce think Porcelina was Michael (the gateway) so any traffic Cayce put out went through Porcelina anyhow :P Then, using dsniff, we could easily pull plain-text passwords from ftp and http logins. We just didn't have the software setup on the client side for popping mail, but I'm sure that would have worked as well.

We also tried mail/file-spoof to trap email messages and NFS file transfers, but didn't have any luck there. Stuck a hub in instead of the switch, but still no luck. Feh.

Then we moved up to the Man In The Middle (MITM a.k.a. "Monkey In The Middle") attack. We had Porcelina successfully hijack Cayce's SSH login. It was awesome. The username and password showed up in plain-text all like "oh, here's how to get in to this weak system" and then ex (who was running the setup) had a user login right there. He could just wander around and do whatever his persimmons allowed. It was great.

But we'll be back and more attacks will ensue.

Ne-zet-werking, Yo

Dag! Talk about fun! Last night I went crazy after being let off my reading and riting class and opened up all of dulcea's services on the router and put that in place.

Fun tip number 1: The little web page doodad on the linksys router provides *exactly* enough entries for port forwarding for me to specify all the services dulcea offers only if all adjacent services are specified in ranges. Or in pseudo-english: the new linksys box I have barely lets me run everything at once that normally runs on dulcea.

Fun tip number 2: This little router is cool. I have its DHCP server disabled and its LAN interface numbered at 192.168.1.16 (because I was too lazy to renumber dulcea). Dulcea does the DHCP and now in all fancy-pants-ness specifies the .16 as everyone's gateway *ooo* *aaa*.

Fun fact number 3: When machines get renumbered, their numbering changes. Sounds obvious, but I had to kill everyone who was connected to IRC before I realized that.

Fun fact number 4: Testing your new setup locally *does not ensure it works remotely*. So at work today, I get in and said "let's see if this works from here". Well, it doesn't. Despite remembering to update all the workstations's default gateways, I managed to forget to change Dulcea's default gateway.

Fun fact number ... uh, "a many": Changing your default gateway remotely is scary. Trust me. I was very scared when I did that. (Yes, I did have to go in to dulcea through a "super secret back door" called "leaving both the old and new interfaces online".)

So there we have it. IRC, SSH and WWW all work now on dulcea's new interface from behind the router. Woo! I just finished disabling the old interface and since I'm obviously updating my Blog/.plan remotely, I know it's all good now, yeah baby.

The Machines Are Everywhere

A quick summary for those who aren't up to date: For school, I'm hosting a small network of machines to be hacked for fun and learning.

"It's fun to use learning for evil"
- Lil' Sis

So anyhow, machines have been trickling in. I'm definately going to have some issues, like where the fuck do I put the two extra machines I have already, or the two (or possibly three) more that I have yet to bring home?

And where am I going to plug them all in? I've been fairly blase about our current setup which has three computers plus peripherals and networking devices hooked up to three power strips chained from a single outlet (or is it four power strips?). Building up a full network does make me a little antsy...

All in all, this place is going to get fucking noisy while the machines are on and if ever you look to Mount Pleasant and see smoke, just direct the fire department to my house, if you would be so kind.

You've Got Viruses!

So this morning, I had a little fun. Excessory had said that there's no way Shaw (my ISP) would hand out multiple ip addresses though I know I've been able to get at least two, possibly three, last time I tried.

Today, I said "Let's see" and hubbed everyone to the cable modem. So dulcea of course kept her ip address, then there was michael, pyhrrus, my sister's unamed iBook, and chevette. They all happily pulled ip addresses from my provider. And I know they all had connectivity because within a couple minutes of coming out from behind the NAT, chevette got hit by W32.Blaster.

Booya! Now there's a poorly maintained machine. She doesn't even have the June 2003 patch that corrects the fault that Blaster uses. That was pretty fun.

Back behind the NAT she went, patch, reboot, patch, reboot, scan for viruses (no luck, didn't actually get infected), back out from NAT, reboot, all done. Fuck, windows is great.

So yeah, its fun. Now I get to do a lot of reading, and hopefully get around to a bunch of reconnaisance.