Blogs

A sneak preview of my next "Perfect Ubuntu Desktop" video.

* Ubuntu 10.04
* Wallpapoz rotating random wallpaper every 1 min
* CoverGlooBus album art desktop widget
* Unclutter hides the mouse pointer after 30 seconds
* Hide Desktop icons
* Gnome-panel auto-hide hack to 0px
* System Load Indicator applet
* Gnome-do
* Avant-window-navigator dock

Having everything hidden (Gnome-panel, AWN, Icons, Mouse Pointer) it creates a nice picture frame while your computer is idle, thats constantly changing.

I was recently gifted a badass "M-Audio Mobilepre" USB Pre-amp by a buddy of mine so i could learn to play the bass in the comfort of my own home. All was fine and well when we used it in Windows to record with Audacity, but when i attempted to use it on Ubuntu Linux, i couldn't hear anything i was plugging into the Pre-amp sound card. I found some threads regarding the older versions of this card and how to use madfuload to load the appropriate firmware to support the cards. Thing is, my version is 200F and should be "plug-n-pray".

After much searching, i figured out that it was due to Pulseaudio yet again.

In this article, i will show you how to remove Pulseaudio, and replace it with ALSA packages. After which, you will be able to get the mono inputs on the M-Audio Mobilepre USB card to come out the stereo output on the back of the card.

Synchronet Bulletin Board System Software

... is a free software package that can turn your personal computer into your own custom online service supporting multiple simultaneous users with hierarchical message and file areas, multi-user chat, and the ever-popular BBS door games.

Synchronet development began as a personal hobby in 1990 for single-tasking MS-DOS compatible computers and Hayes compatible modems. The program was sold commercially from 1992-1996 after which time it was released (with source code) for both the 16-bit DOS and 32-bit OS/2 platforms to the public domain and development by the author was ceased.

In November of 1999, the author found a renewed interest in further developing Synchronet, specifically for the Internet community, embracing and integrating standard Internet protocols such as Telnet, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IRC, NNTP, and HTTP. Synchronet has since been substantially redesigned as an Internet-only BBS package for Win32 and Unix-x86 platforms and is an Open Source project under continuous development.

Synchronet Version 3.1x for Win32 and Unix (Intel-x86 architecture) can be previewed on Vertrauen (Home of Synchronet BBS Software).

In this article, i walk you through installing the Synchronet BBS Software on a Ubuntu Server.

Aircrack-ng

Aircrack-ng is a set of tools for auditing wireless networks. These tools can recover 802.11 WEP and WPA-PSK keys once enough data packets have been captured. It implements the standard FMS attack along with some optimizations like KoreK attacks, as well as the all-new PTW attack, thus making the attack much faster compared to other WEP cracking tools.

Last year i walked you through installing the Aircrack-ng suite on Ubuntu Linux.

We will be installing and using just part of the Aircrack-ng suite, airmon-ng. This will allow us to put our wireless card into "Monitor" mode.

Wicrawl

Wicrawl is a simple wi-fi (802.11x) Access Point auditor with a simple and flexible plugin architecture. The plugins allow us to find out useful information about an AP so we don’t have to manually check each access point. Plugins are implemented for existing common tools, and new plugins can be written in any language. Wicrawl is able to use multiple cards, and eventually will be able to use multiple computers.

The goal is to automate the tedious task of scanning wi-fi access points for interesting information. This can be a useful tool for penetration testers looking to “crawl” through massive numbers of APs looking for interesting data. Plugins will be everything from DHCP and nmap to aircrack or hooks to move a motorized directional antenna around.

The guys over at Midnight Research Labs stopped development back in 2007. Being a bit out-dated, it wouldn't compile on the latest Ubuntu without a couple tweeks. I replaced the entire source code in the Aircrack-ng plugin folder with the latest SVN (as of this post). I also had to add a header file to the discovery folder to help it compile.

I went ahead and tared up my folder with all of these edits so you can easily compile it on the latest Ubuntu Linux (9.10 as of this post).

In this video tuorial, i walk you through installing Aircrack-ng as well as Wicrawl.

Video tutorial of my last article on Installing AirPWN.

Read on for the text version.

System notification emails

Continuing in part off of my last Ubuntu Server article, "The Perfect Server", I decided that i wanted the server to send me emails updating its status with me. If the HD space gets low, the RAM is all used up, services go down, or even i lose internet at my house while im out and about, i get a nice email from my server notifying me of the problem (at least when my inet comes back online).

What better way to top this off than with use of a gmail account that i already owned and used?

In this article, i will walk you through installing the following along side your postfix installation:

Self signed SSL certfication (don't want anyone being nosey!)

Apticron - A nice set of scripts that will execute 'apt-get udpate' and email you the results

Webmin - One of the best web based management consoles for head-less servers. Has a great system notification setup, along with many many many other goodies.

SSL Strip

This tool provides a demonstration of the HTTPS stripping attacks that was presented at Black Hat DC 2009. It will transparently hijack HTTP traffic on a network, watch for HTTPS links and redirects, then map those links into either look-alike HTTP links or homograph-similar HTTPS links. It also supports modes for supplying a favicon which looks like a lock icon, selective logging, and session denial.

In this article i will walk you through installing SSLstrip along with ettercap and perform a MITM attack.

Senao EnGenius EOC-5610

I finally broke down and bought myself my very own all-in-one outdoor wireless access point. I decided to pick up the Senao EnGenius EOC-5610 because it obviously supports the ever so powerful DD-WRT firmware. This thing is really tricked out. Not only does it utilize the Atheros AR2313 wireless chipset (yay for aircrack-ng), it also has a built in 8db internal omni-directional antenna and 8mb of storage if you ever wanted to capture some yummy wireless packets.

In this article, i walk you through installing DD-WRT Professional on a Senao EnGenius EOC-5610 wireless access point / client bridge.

Hey Twhirl, where's linux?

Are you aware that linux users can easily install Adobe AIR, which in turn can install your pretty twitter client? Seriously?

In this article, i will walk you through the painlessly easy process of installing the Adobe AIR platform as well as your choice a twitter client.

What is the perfect linux server?

The perfect linux server to me is something that can maintain all of my downloads, whatever it may be (Torrent, newsgroups, soulseek, ect) that can be controlled and accessed from VPN, LAN or Internet via HTTP... and have it all running when it boots up! (That was the hardest part actually)

In this video tutorial, i walk you through installing:

- Webmin (HTTP Adminstration of your server)

- Torrentflux (HTTP Front-end for Torrent downloads)

- SABnzbd Plus (HTTP Front-end for Newsgroup downloads)

- irssi (Text based IRC Chat client)

- Museek (Soulseek music download daemon)

- Eggdrop IRC Bot (*does the robot*)

- Hamachi VPN (Free and easy VPN solution that even my grandma can understand)