My Samsung is Very Big

After a, well, little spot of Envy, I got a nice new and big LCD. It's a Samsung 193P which, if you check online, is a 19" LCD. And it's beautiful. And big. Did I mention it's fucking sexy? Aw yeah!!! As an added bonus, I just set the display in "portrait" orientation and turned the display so it now reads like a page. It's just fabulous. Complete content on a single 19" screen that is 1280 pixels high and still 1024 wide. That and it's got DV-frickin-I.

It's very nice.

You May as Well Have the PIN for My Bank Account

Between the "hacking" course I'm doing school and reading Cryptonomicon (for the first time, believe it or not), I've really started to notice how little I know about information security. Cryptography in any of its modern incarnations and applications. Today I found a copy of the O'Reilly book on SSH (the one with the snail on it) and man, I really only have a tiny inkling of what's going on.

We fuck it all. There's certificates to track down, some to share and some to hide, passwords and passphrases, clients and servers, confidentiality and integrity and authentication, and hashing and semmetric and asymetric encryption...

But I'll give it a stab. I think I have a fair idea of the most general ideas and a lot of places where I see security should be used and improved throughout all the systems I've been poking around on. So over the next little while, I'm probably going to be confused as shit. That should be fun. Go along well with the circus at work, the nuts at school (though the semester is wrapping up, thank kittens).

AAAAArrrrrrghg!!! I'm going to get a drink now.

Werd! We're Online!

Stuff is all a pain in the ass. In other news, I did get a nice little pine desk for my room so I finaly have a place to sit and hack away at my computer. Definately an improvement. I still have lots of stuff floating around. Mainly books. After pushing stuff in my room around, I have some space against one wall for a book shelf. I won't be able to get one quite yet since that's where the test-bed computers are going to live until the haxxor course is done, but once that course is done, then I'll be able to get a book shelf and finally put away all the last of my stuff. Wooo!!


I'm gonna go eat my "Broadway Deluxe Fried Rice" now...

And Moved

A little bumpy, but certainly not the worst moving day(s) evar. Anyhow, now I have to hack my network back together. Dropping the Linksys router back in place didn't just work. Hella-weak. Czak did the old mfr reset on that puppy and could get online at least.

Now I just have to restore the network setup. So far it hasn't been bad. Getting the router online was definately the important first step. I hacked away at that config last night and got a bunch of it up.

Got the router renumbered,

Verified that chevette could still get online,

Booted dulcea, she couldn't get online,

Disabled dhcp on the router (dulcea was numbered statically),

Now dulcea gets online,

Verified chevette could dhcp from dulcea and get online still,

Re-opened the essential services (smtp, dns),

Updated zone info on Nikita and transfered it to dulcea,

Haven't verified SMTP works, but I know DNS at my work hasn't updated yet so it won't work from here,

Opened more services (ssh, pop, spop, etc) and checked a few of them.

So far so good. Dulcea is a bit noisy for me to sleep with, but I think that's just the PSU. I'm going to try to replace the PSU tonight with one of the other ones I have handy and if that works, great, and if not, I'll leave dulcea off again overnight and buy a "silent" PSU tomorrow.

Now for the fun part. I'm supposed to be on this "eXtreme" service from Shaw which is 5Mbps down and lord knows what up. I tested off dslreports.com and scored over 2Mbps down by just under 1Mbps up. Not bad. I wouldn't complain about that 'cept I have other grievances.

I only get one real ip address. This is no good for my war-games course. This is flat-out bad. Wendawg thinks we're supposed to get two. I know on our old modem that I pulled as many as I could connect to the modem at a time (5). Either way, I have to reset the modem when swapping devices. I really only get one IP address. This I will have to sort out with Shaw even if they make me pay for a second IP for two months until the war-games course is over.

And I'm a little tired and cranky so screw it all straight to hell.

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.