One of the ones I didn't like

So I mentioned in the Plan for IA240 blog post, I had some other ideas. Ones that I decided to not go with for various reasons.

One to those ideas that I rejected:

Using a tablet, with my cell phone as a tether. I tried using my cellphone in class the first night. It didn't work too well. It was rather slow Googling questions the professor was asking.

I also didn't like the idea for a hand full of reasons. I could be wrong, because I don't understand all the tech.

First the tethering. I have a rooted (running cyanogen mod) cell phone, but every time I tried, I get messages saying the network I have for service is blocking it.

I'm still creating a wireless network that someone could try attacking. Other people wanting to connect. Not saying people would, but hacking wifi isn't that hard, and if they're willing to go after a laptop, why not go easier with a wifi connection.

I've only used Shark for Root sparingly. As I understand it, it can do 3g packet captures. I'm not sure if that's only for the phone it's on, or if it can grab any 3g signal. I also haven't found much documentation on it. I also don't have the equipment to test it properly at this time. Maybe we can set something like that up to EMU's IA Club, where we can play around with it and see what it does.

Just one of the ideas, I tossed to the side. I'll talk about another one some other time.

Well Tails works...

Sitting at Eastern Michigan University on the wireless network using T.A.I.L.S. It's a little slow, but that's ok. I'm riding across TOR to an exit node in germany.

To get this to work:
I loaded the system from the Live CD.

Then using the unsafe browser, I was able to get to the capture portal. To do that, you need to go to a non-https site. I like to use www.sluggy.com. Going to www.google.com got grabbed by HTTPSeverywhere, and was dragged to encrypted.google.com. Sadly that doesn't work with EMU's capture portal.

After that, started the ice-weasel browser to make sure it worked right. Which it did. Then shutdown the unsafe browser.

So this works.

Can't wait for Friday

I found out tonight that the IASA (Information Assurance Student Association) is having their kick off meeting Friday. At 5. Time sucks, but meh.

I'm actually thinking of tossing my id in the bit-bucket for an officer position. Don't know which one yet. I'm sure that'll fly like the NX37602. There are some things I think we could do better as students. Yeah it means more work for us, but in the long run, it makes us better students. No it's not hacking each other. Although some Saturday CTF in L6 would't be too bad. If allowed.

I also got to do some reading on T.A.I.L.S. tonight. I figured I could't be the only one that was having problems with capture portals (have to log in to use wireless). Looks like I was right. And I have something to test on Friday now.

Also, new version of T.A.I.L.S came out tonight. Version 0.13.0.

Plan for IA-240 at Eastern Mi.

** This has been updated:

So one of the classes I'm taking this term is required for my degree. And I have to worry about protecting my computer in it.

The course:
IA 240. The main point of the class, that I took away from the first night, is to learn how to write Analyst reports. The over all goal is to give us the skills required to go work for a government agency. (The program has a lot of students leave and get jobs in the public sector).

The Final:
The professor will assign us something to do an analysis report on at the end of the semester. To teach us on Operational Security, we have to protect our final project from our class mates. He gives extra credit for each student we got information from.

The Problem:
The professor has already said we are required to bring laptops to class, and class mates, as in the past, will try hacking that computer to get your final project. **Update-1: This was said in a warning, not in a you will be hacking each other in this class.

Over all, knowing the above, one really wants to get your hacks in early, get a back door, and be able to come in to the classmates boxes at will. Lots of way to do that. But I'm about not being an easy target. In fact I don't want my system compromised.

Options to protect me:
- Change operating systems every class, either local install, from USB, or DVD / CD.
- Run Backtrack, and use that as the the desktop (not meant for that).
- Run TAILS
- buy dedicated machine, and use nothing on it, doing forensics on it at the end of the semester, and keep nothing on it.
- Be really evil... (run vm or a dedicated box with a sticky honeypot).

The Plan:
I don't have the money for the dedicated machines.

I thought about putting my money where my mouth is and installing Backtrack, on an old hard drive, then harden it. This would fit in with my Linux Hardening applied to BackTrack talk. However don't like the idea of swapping the hardware that often. Trying to hack my class mates would be un-ethical in my eyes anyway.

I don't have an interest in hacking my class mates. Just not being hacked.

So, I've already got Full Disk Encryption, I'm going run with The Amnesic Incognito Live System (TAILS). I'll take an energy hit, the main hard drive won't be touched.

The only thing I have to worry about is saving my work from class (not that I type much in class, I'm more about pen and paper). But if there is something I need to save, I have things for that. I'm using Google's two factor authentication. I also could look into doing File System over SSH. Not sure if I'll have to go that far.



*Update-1: the professor was not giving permission. he was giving a warning.

wasted day

So, I got some new toys recently. Like Thursday. One was an MP3 adapter for the car. It's kind of nice. But would be nicer if it could go just a little lower in the frequencies. I found that 87.9 seems to be a good channel to use, but the new device only goes down to 88.1. Which has a station on it.

Boo for living in one of the largest radio markets.

The other toy was a BRU-353 GPS dongle for my computer. Which I want to use with my Alfa wireless card, and laptop or netbook to go war driving. I spent most of the day trying to get the the GPS to work. It hasn't yet. I don't know if the problem is faulty hardware, or if it was because I was in my house testing. Although I had it suction cupped (comes with it) to my front room window. So hard to tell.

Although in the process I ended up breaking my laptop. I use it the most, prefer the keyboard and shape. Sure it's not a widescreen monitor but that is fine. The keyboard on the Eee PC netbook is just a little too small, and the trackpad way to sensitive.

So I broke the laptop. By installing and removing programs trying to get the GPS to work. Some how, the system got messed up and figured it didn't need some 300 odd packages related to Gnome / Desktop environment. It dropped it's network management software too.

I was happy between /var/log/dpkg.log, some awk and sed, and a little help from my netbook and usb drive I was able to recover the networking. Which led me to being able to recover the rest of the software. :)

I really thought I was going to have to go through the hell of re-installing.

And I just got done installing backtack linux 4r2 on the netbook. Triple boot, but ubuntu isn't booting so I'll have to solve that. Think it'll just be a case of fixing grub.

Life is good. My head only hurts a little. :)

Although I still need to get the GPS dongle working, and get a magnetic mount antenna for the car to war drive with.

new to me tools

I like finding "new" tools. That doesn't mean that the tools themselves are new, just new to me.

In Information Security, I play mostly on the defensive side. Firewalls, nmap scans of my boxes (the ones I'm responsible for), centralized logs, and google advanced searching.

That doesn't mean I don't want to learn some attacker skills. I'm always trying to learn more, to add more value. Even if the majority of my job now, doesn't involve much security (other than the occasional firewall rule).

Therefore I'm reading books on hacking. The one I'm reading now is Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network. In the STAR section's first chapter I came across 2 tools that seem to be useful. They're plugins for Firefox.

Passive Cache Search: Lets you search the Google cache of a webpage. Usually searching the cached page still pulls down pictures and other multi-media from the site. But Passive Cache is supposed to have a way to do it as text only from the Google cache

Advanced Dork: Tool to help create advanced Google searches. This one should be fun. It's the one I've been playing with the most out of the two.

interesting

So a year ago, the company I work for moved. One of the thing that needed to be done was readdressing our Citrix XenServers. I was busy working on Layer2/3 switch problems, so someone else did the address change. Unfortunately one of them didn't work right after. The address was changed (by following Citrix's documentation). However networking and XAPI would fail to start. Networking had to be started by hand. (By the way, you have to bring up both the physical and xenbr interfaces for it to work).

This week I'm looking at erroneous traffic on the network. One of the things I noticed was the bad XenServer trying connect via port 443 to an old ip address.

Looking at it, /etc/xensource/pool.conf had the old address in it. So I commented it out. Then rebooted. Brought the network up by hand, and decided to try and figure out what the deal was.

Googling around, I found information to try using the xe commands to make network configuration changes. Problem is, you need xapi running for xe to work. restarting XAPI doesn't give the world's greatest error message in /var/log/messages. Exit status 2. Watching from the CLI, the error was xapi failed to start.

Someone else on the Citrix Forum said that they recreated the files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. So I copied those files from a working box, and changed what I needed too.

Still not going.

Hunting around, I found /opt/xensource/xapi, which I think is what "service xapi restart / xe-toolstack-restart" are trying to run. I tried to start that. Got the following error: xenserver exception Failure("cannot parse pool_role from pool config file")

Google was next to useless trying to find information on that. So I fired up find on the box and tried to find anything with the filename pool (based off what little information Google did give me).

The /etc/xensource/pool.conf came back up. So I went back into the file I changed last night, took out the comment character(#) and figured for grins to change the line to read slave:.

Restarted xapi and it worked.

Rebooted and the box came up right, everything working.

Long way of saying: if you're running Citrix XenServer in a pool, have to re-address and things brake, check the pool.conf file.

Interesting what happens when you're trying to fix one problem and in the process end up solving another.

it's a start

So... I've mentioned the WIFU class a few times now (see the wifu tag below). I've gotten the first wireless card I needed. I still need at least 1 more. I don't have to have another of the same type, but why not? I've got an old desktop I'm going to hook it up on. I haven't started the class yet, but I have started playing around.

Anyway I've tested the usb wireless card in Backtrack4 from the live DVD, in my normal Sidux install on this box (my laptop), and now in the BackTrack4 virtual machine (VM) running on top of my Sidux install.

Tonight, I followed along with the Aircrack-ng tutorials while using the VM with the USB Wifi adapter. I was mostly interested in trying packet injection with the card from the Virtual.

Getting the packet injection to work took some set up. First you have to get the card in monitoring mode, and the test injection had a link to that tutorial. However I don't think it worked every time I tried it from the VM. Sometimes the packet injection would work, sometimes it would fail. I usually had to do airmon-ng stop on both the mon0 and wlan0, then start it again on wlan0 before the injection would work. Annoying but not enough to make me give up.

I was rather excited about getting injection to work, even if it was a bit dodgy. However, I'm not the kind that is willing to leave well enough alone. Since I don't have everything set up yet for the wireless lab I'm building, I decided to jumped ahead to the WPA/WPA2 cracking. (Note I have yet to crack WEP).

I got airodump-ng running on the network I wanted (my U-Verse 2WIRE access point), and could even see the only client (the Sidux install on the laptop, using the built in 3945 wireless chip). However I didn't see any authentication packets in airodump-ng. No biggy, the tutorial tells you how to fix that if you're not patient or only have 1 client.

I was able to deauthenticate the host operating system (Sidux), and even watched was WPA_Gui would reconnect. However airodump-ng never seen the authentication handshake. I tried looking at what was going on with wireshark,and could see the deauth packets going out. But no auth packets. The VM wasn't using the network either.

I'm going to have to get more hardware, I'm ordering the second card this weekend. There are some other things I'd like too... Netbook, desktop, multiple monitors, but that will take longer to get.

I was a little surprised at how easy it was to deauth a wpa/wpa2 connection, and wondering how many people around me are messing with other people by sending deauth packets. I mean after all, I live near one University that has an Information Assurance Program, and the other University I live near is well know for having a great Computer Science / Computer Engineering program. :-)

more on the Cert

So I mentioned in a little shocked. I got picked for a free cert course.

After some emails around on who was going to take what, I'm taking WiFu. I actually offered to take it, kind of. I still would have preferred Penetration Testing with Backtrack. But I have a better chance of getting a cert with WiFu and I think that is a little more important.

So for the last week or so (little longer probably), I've been looking at getting things together to do the course.

I'm going to get 2 Alfa AWUS036H and 1 BU-353 USB GPS Unit. The GPS isn't needed but will be fun to play with. And I'll finally be able to do Wardriving / Warwalking and map the data out, instead of just saying hmmm... But that's for another post.

I picked up a cheap old Gateway Celeron, 256 meg, 15 gig hard drive. I'm going to toss straight Debian on it, and attach one of the USB Network Devices to it.
I'm going to dig out my old Linksys wireless router, flash it with Linksys firmware (I can put dd-wrt back on it later), and hook the other Wifi device to my laptop running BackTrack. (If don't pick up another cheap PC first).

I'll update the blog as I go along.

well it's decided

So for the last few weeks I've been thinking about rebuilding my laptop with Debian. I wanted to do a reinstall to make some chages.

While trying to upgrade the system today, I broke it. I'm at least backing up some important data by using this walk through to mount my encrypted hard drive.

After the back up is done I'll probably end up taking the thing to work, or waiting until tomorrow do the install.

Kind of sucks. But at least I'm not going to be losing data (like my Keypass password file so I can log into thing).

Ugh... I made a mistake.

I made a mistake.

I've got a lot of work related books to read, and the list is getting longer all the time. Over the weekend I picked up a book on speed reading. 2 actually, at the local library. 1 is a 10 day program, the other I'm not sure about.

Anyway... The NEW 3rd edition of Hacking for Dummies (something recommended at the Ethical Hacker Forums) is coming out soon. The other week, I asked if I should get 2nd ed for 15.00 via Amazon, or wait until December. They said if I could get it now, and read it now, I'd learn more by practicing now, than waiting for the new edition in December. Since I have so much to read, I figured I'd wait. Focus on things that need to get done at work. (Things like setting the networking graphs up (got the ones I needed done), setting up the server monitoring tools (large book), fixing the broken servers (waiting on parts) ).

For some reason between last week, and this week I started looking at the online 2nd edition of HfD on Safari. They won't let me download the whole book, I'm assuming because the new one is coming out. But other than speed reading, that's all I read today (book wise). I finished the preface, the introduction and the first 2 chapters (printed the chapters off for a car pool that did not happen). I've been using some of the tricks I'm picking up in the speed reading book.

Although my reading speed is still between 265 and 300 wpm, with a comp between 70 to 90 % right now.

I'm enjoying Hacking for Dummies, I can't wait to read chapter 3... but I really really should finish Firewalls and Internet Security. I'm about 2/3 of the way done with it so far. The furthest I ever made it. I'm still torn between buying 2nd or 3rd edition of HfD too. I have a feeling I'll end up buying both.

Lastly I should really, really, really be studying for a certification exam (and trying to find a way to pay for it (CCNA, LPI, wouldn't mind Sec+ but I have the books for the other ones)), or writing the essay that's due tomorrow for my 1st gup test in Tang Soo Do.

Lots to do at work too... I'd say I need a time management book, but I've already read Time Management for the System Administrator 2x, and how I'm finding time to do everything I need. I've got a block of time (ie lunch tomorrow) for the essay questions (note they're designed for kids).

Of course, the biggest question at this point is where do I want my career to go?

How I spent my Saturday Night...

I'm a geek. I know it. Being broke doesn't help matters much.

For fun tonight I played with the Network Forensics Puzzle that was on ISC.SANS.ORG earlier this week.

I'm no expert, some stuff was beyond my skills tonight before I started. In fact I only started playing, not doing the contest, because someone in a forum posted what tool to use to extract the data. Here is a quick walk through of what I did, without giving to much away I hope.

Downloaded the pcap file and checked the md5sum
They matched so I moved on.

I knew how to load a pcap file into 2 different programs, so I ran it in both, filtering on just the ip address I needed (the user's ip address).

I then looked through the data, using what I knew of layout to get the username of who the spy was talking too.

Then I found the first comment. Using the same method (reading), I found the name of the file being transferred.

Then I extracted the data that was transferred from the stream. If I knew the magic number, the only part I wasn't able to find, it might have been easier. I used tcpxtract for that bit of magic.

At fist I was thinking what was extracted was more like rar files you can find online. Where you unrar the first file, and the rest are used to build the first. While I was eating I realized that might not be the case, and there may have been 37 different files that were actually transferred. It was a case of having just learned to use tcpxtract.

Once I realized that, I found the files that would open with Ark, and which ones didn't. The ones that didn't I ignored. I then tried to extract the others. Only 2 extracted. Again the others I ignored. One was a manifest file, the other the file I wanted. I looked up the document in the file and got the recipe.

Then after bashing my head around some, I figured out, based on comments others had made and how the file is really stored, to change the un-extracted file's name to the right name, and tried opening it with Open Office. it worked. Grabbed the md5sum off that.

Out of the 6.5 requests in the challenge, I did 5 of them. I never found the magic number. :( and I didn't bother to try to script it (computer program) to do the work for me. Because I never found the magic number, and I don't think my programing skills are sharp enough. Although, I didn't think my computer forensics skills were sharp enough at the beginning either.

Another Open Letter to AT&T

Dear AT&T:

On occasion to support my position at work I have to use my home system. One of the things I do is run Nmap (network mapper) on work's Net-Block. I use it to find out what ports are open, and make sure that only the ones that should be are open. I usually do this via an SSH connection from work.

Each time, coming home. I've had problems using my home PC. Trying to access anything on the internet, anything that wasn't an active session when AT&T / 2WIRE did their magic, brings up a page an error page. Other things, like my mail monitoring tool don't have that problem and when I opened my web email, it worked. However going to other sites from there brings back up the error page, and sets off ABE (application boundaries enforcer).

The error page says it's detected "a router behind a router". Which isn't the case. To "FIX / Resolve" the issue, places my home system INTO A NON-PROTECTED DMZ is not an acceptable solution. While I don't have a lot of ports open, I'd still prefer if people didn't have easy access to them. Here is section saying that everything is open.

"Allow all applications (DMZplus mode) – Set the selected computer in DMZplus mode. All inbound traffic, except traffic which has been specifically assigned to another computer using the “Allow individual applications” feature, will automatically be directed to this computer. The DMZplus-enabled computer is less secure because all unassigned firewall ports are opened for that computer."

STOP PUTTING MY EQUIPMENT AT RISK TO BLACK HATS AT&T. FIX YOUR SYSTEM.

centos install

So I'm rebuilding my RedHat 4es based DNS boxes at work with CentOS 5.3. Partly because I don't have RH support anymore, partly to get the latest security fixes, and lastly because I've been wanting to rebuild them for a while.

CentOS had been giving me problems with installing since Saturday Night (note these are production systems and I had to create 2 new ones to cover the load, which went with no problem last week). Now I'm sure I could have stayed and got it working in an hour or so Saturday night, but 1) I was sick. 2) I didn't have any blank discs and the DVD I was using was scratched up pretty bad.

The load on this one server, kept getting to the point where it would try to install the drivers for the usb-storage. I'm assuming that means the CD-rom drive. And I'll explain why.

Looking around wasn't much use, I was looking for something along the lines of the knoppix cheat sheet. Something that told me all my boot options. But even googling the problem I was having wasn't much use. Until I used linux.google.com.

Someone else had a similar problem with their box, and turning off USB worked for them. However when I did that, my blade no longer saw my cd-rom drive. (The cd-rom drive is connected via ILO, and I've never had this problem before). Re-enable, and tell it to start without the storage driver worked. (linux nousbstorage). However, I was then left with having to do a net based install.

I had to do those for my virtual boxes last week, so no great problem there.

Once again I wonder why I'm doing CentOS installs, but meh. Personally I'd rather do Debian or Gentoo, but this is what the business told me to run.

Fun with grep

I got a copy of the Grep Pocket Reference back in early July via PDF format (from O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf). I read through it but didn't really learn that much.

Last week the hard copy version arrived (2 weeks after I ordered it from Amazon). I've been reading it the last week. The parts I'm going through right now talks about Regular Expressions (regex). I've read about regex more times than I can count, in classes, in shell scripting books, on the web. This time it made sense.

My firewall log parsing for ip addresses has really improved. For example. I'd usually do "grep '< my ip address >' /external/logs/firewall1". The problem my address at work is .18, but it would pull .181 - .189 also. The first thing I did was back slash the . (dots) in the ip address. It cleaned up some stuff from the logs but not much. It's nicer to know that's not looking for any character and only matching what I want it too.

Which was a problem I was having when I wrote failed a few years ago.

Yesterday I read about word boundaries. I tested it this morning with my work IP address, and no longer am I getting the .181 - .189 addresses. Which is fun. It'll make looking for some things easier in the logs at work.

-------

Just for fun, here is what the finished version of Failed looked like (modified slightly):

#! /bin/sh
# checks for /var/log/auth.log for login failures.
# version 0.2
# < my email address removed >

# prints failed invalid users
echo "Failed Invalid User Attempts"
sudo grep "Failed" /var/log/auth.log | grep -i 'invalid' | grep -v '< work login id removed >' | awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$13,$11}' | sort -u

echo ' '
#prints failed vailid users, except for me.
echo "Failed Valid User Attempts"
sudo grep "Failed" /var/log/auth.log | grep -vi 'invalid' | grep -v '< work login id removed >' | grep -v '< home login id removed >' | awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$11,$9}' | sort -u
echo ' '

------

I sudo the 2 lines, because I need to be root to access that log file. I didn't want to setuid the script to run, nor did I want to be root when I ran it. It also requires me to type my password to run it, since sudo only remembers my password for 5 minutes.

To make this work on Redhat based systems, change auth.log to secure.log

I'm jumping on the band wagon...

...I'm just late that's all.

So I'm thinking about passwords lately. With Black Hat and Defcon this week, the report that some big name Infosec people had their accounts broke into, a friend's tweet on getting 400 followers, and me having to change my FB password today, I thought I'd share how I come up with passwords.

Now for fun the other night, driving back from Tang Soo Do on a long and lonesome highway east of Omaha... I came up with about 15 or so passwords based off a tv show I liked. They were between 8 to 10 characters each.

So there are a few ways I do it. There are 2 examples in each.

Method One:
I'll take a phrase, the longer the better, and modify it.
The quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog (a well known pangram , ie uses all the characters in the English language) or I'm here to chew bubble gum and kick arse and I'm all out of bubble gum (mainly because I'm fond of quotes).
I'll take the phrase, and use camel case (mixed case), with numbers, special characters (anything over the number keys), and letters. I'll then mix them up like below:

Th3Qu!ckBrownF0xJump3s_Over_the_L2zy_red_dog

I'm_h3r3_2ch3w_BubbleGum&kick@rse.&I'm@ll0ut_ofBubbleGum

I can mix them other ways too. For example, I swapped brown and red, just to make it a little different.

Method Two:
I'll take a song lyric or a line from a movie, tv show, or whatever and I'll modify it by using just the first letter of each word, and the some of the other steps above. Examples I'll uses are Seger's Turn the Page, and a line from Cool Hand Luke.

"On an long and lonesome highway east of Omaha" becomes:

0@L&lh3oO!

"What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it"

Wwgh!F2c.SmUjcr=SugWwhHlw,W!twhWi_whg!! (to be honest, I'd modify it a little more, and weighing in around 30 characters, I'd use that for a pass phrase for my encrypted hard drive).

There are some other rules I use, if you notice, I have 2 characters side by side, 1 will be cap, 1 will not be. I tend to use the 2 interchangeably at home and at work, so we have phrase on some boxes, and the vegitable soup on others.

Lastly Method 3, which I only use on rare occasions is:
pwgen (password generator) from the linux command line. I'll add options like at least 1 special character, 1 upper case, 1 number and set it to be 10 to 12 characters long.

and finally...
I tend to use password safes, with things divided in them. Keepass and Password Safe.

I have had a few users complain when I give them a 10 to 12 character password based on something they said in the conversation. 1 about being long, and 2 about being so random, but when I tell them I use 24 to 26 character passwords regularly they tend to think it's not that bad and they seem to remember what they got fairly well.

There are other ways to make passwords too, and if you google them, I suggest googling site:lifehacker.com

Have fun, be safe online and for extra credit, figure out why I think this is a bad password. BwDn$b! (there are 2 reasons I don't like it).

Pidgin, Yahoo, and Debian Testing

So like lots of people, I've been having problems with Pidgin and Yahoo, after the upgrade. I followed several "work arounds". However every couple days it stopped working again.

If you followed the blog at all, you know I run Debian Testing right now. Currently, testing doesn't have the latest version of Pidgin that fixes the issue.

Instead of waiting, or changing my source lists, I went to the Debian Package pages and found the files I needed to get it to work.

If someone else wants to use DPKG to install just the files they need, here are the ones I needed:

libpurple0_2.5.7-1_i386.deb
libzephyr4_3.0~beta.2483-2_i386.deb
pidgin-data_2.5.7-1_all.deb
pidgin_2.5.7-1_i386.deb

Libpurple0 and pidgin-data were needed for pidgin. Libzephyr4 was needed for libpurple to install.

More laptop woes

Quick history of the laptop.

It's a Thinkpad T60. I bought it when Compusa was having their "going out of business" sale. When my desktop died, I switched over to the laptop as my main system. That was about 2 years ago. Some people have admitted surprise in not having a new desktop system to replace the old one, but truth is, I just can't afford it.

Things I've done to the laptop:
Replaced the maleware that is Windows, that came with it, with Linux
Upgraded the memory to 4gig
Replaced the CPU to have a chip that had VT technology
Replaced the hard drive, with a larger faster drive.

This week, the battery light started blinking orange. the battery itself said that it was nearly fully charged. I've had issues with the lights on the system before like the wireless indicator light not flashing while using wireless. The lack of a flashing light there had to do with the Linux Kernel.

Anyway, looking up the flashing battery light via Google, it looks like an issue with the battery's safety fuse being blown. It also sounds like a common problem. Lenovo replaced the batteries last year, but I didn't know about the problem, nor did I have problems with my battery. They're no longer offering the battery replacement program. Not sure if my battery qualified anyway.

So looks like I have to buy a new battery now. :-(

I've been busy, computer stuff.

So one of the things I wanted to do when I created this blog, was make it more professional than my live journal account. That failed. But I do tend to try and cover an array of things here, besides just working out. Which is what lead to those other two posts earlier. The ones about U-verse and Knoppix 6. I took longer entries that I saw people going to via google (in my site tracker report) and made 2 condensed versions so they wouldn't have to hunt through longer posts for them.

Two weeks ago, my laptop at home suffered bad things when I tried to upgrade my installed version of Sidux to the latest version via apt-get dist-upgrade. It resulted in me having no GUI to use. All the data was still on the drive, and as long as I didn't want to do anything that required a Grapical environment, I was ok. Sadly that made surfing the web and watching videos hard.

To fix it, I bought a new hard drive. 320gig for about $70.00 USD + shipping. After installing it, I tried the latest CD ISO of Sidux, only to have it do the same thing up the software upgrade. No GUI. Next I tried Gentoo, after 2 failed installs I said screw it. Then I tried something else, I don't remember, and didn't care for it either, so I tried Gentoo again. 2 more installs later, I finally had a working system. As long as I didn't want to use a GUI. Trying to install the GUI would cause the system to shut down. It'd be in mid compile, and the next thing I know, it's turned off.

So I went back to Debian, haven't ran straight Debian for a while. Set up and encrypted hard drive, which is nice, and Debian so far is the only one I've seen that give the option on install. Of course it took about 5 hours to erase and encrypt the drive. I got a working system, with a GUI, but didn't like that some of the software was old. Debian Lenny had verison .8 something of VLC, and Open Office 2.4. Which trying to upgrade to 3.0 was what caused the problem to start with on the laptop.

I told the system to update itself to the Unstable branch, I tend to run something based off Unstable or Testing anyway, and it removed my GUI and wouldn't give it back. I got the Debian Testing Nightly build install, and it installed fine. I told it to install KDE, my preferred GUI. It did. KDE 4. Which was ok, because I wanted to try KDE 4 out.

I don't like KDE 4. It's too Vista like for my tastes. I don't see why they have to chase what Microsoft is putting out for the GUI. I can't turn off Plasma (or if I can, I haven't found out how yet) so I can install non-Plasma themes from the theme site. I don't like the desktop widget. I like to store some files on my desktop. It's the way I am. They're files I refer to regularly, things like what episode is next in a series I'm watching, a list of commands, etc. I don't like the bars at the top of the windows, I'd like to change those. And lastly, I don't care for the slowness. Even scrolling / page up / page down in Ice Weasel (Debian's Firefox fork) is slow. It shouldn't be and wasn't under Gnome.

I'm thinking of installing XFCE and LDXE on the thing and see how those deal. I also have to find a way to get my old data off the old hard drive. I've gotten most of the tweaking done though.

Knoppix 6 and SSH

I've noticed a few trends in my visitor lists. One is people looking for information about Knoppix version 6 and ssh.

As I've said before I like my Gnu/Linux a little harder. I installed Knoppix 6 on a laptop at work and ssh was not included. No server, no client.

It is included on the Live CD, and can be ran from the live cd. However when I did the install, it was not there. To get it, I had to do the following:

root@Microknoppix:~# apt-cache search ssh
root@Microknoppix:~# apt-get install openssh-client

The above commands are tested from the live cd. On an installed system your milage may vary.


*EDIT - 2010/04/22

I've revisited this. Running Knoppix on VirtualBox.

Knoppix 6.2, LXDE. Click the desktop menu button, and under preferences Start SSH.

Aptitude had the ssh server listed when I searched for ssh, with the sourcelist that was installed from the LiveCD