As I heard a lot about NetBSD lately, especially with NetBSD5.0 being released, I thought I would give it a try.
I admit, I had a preconceived idea of what I was going to face. I thought I would have to go a couple of time through the installer, try to understand how to use the partitioner, etc. But I was wrong. Ten minutes after booting up the iso image, my first NetBSD was up and running!
Even though all this documentation is available in the NetBSD guide, here are all the steps I went through to install my machine.
My installation was done using kvm-84 on a debian (testing) machine.
Continue reading “My first shot of NetBSD (5.0)”
Hello, it’s me again!
Dans un tout autre contexte, je vous propose d’élaborer un exemple d’insécurité informatique sur les machines Windows (XP ou Vista) qui sont branchées sur Internet.
Il y a quelques jours, des chercheurs de l’université de UC Santa Barbara, ont publié un rapport résumant la méthode de prise de contrôle d’un Botnet appelé TORPIG.
Continue reading “Windows, botnets et vos données privées”
This is just a small post that may help those who are trying to install the wifi modules of a BCM4328 card on a debian OS using ndiswrapper.
The debian wiki explains very well how to install the necessary windows drivers using ndiswrapper, so I won’t go into details. Here are the main steps:
$ sudo apt-get install module-assistant wireless-tools
$ sudo m-a prepare
$ sudo m-a a-i ndiswrapper
$ sudo ndiswrapper -i /path /to/your/driver/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4328) present (alternate driver: ssb)
Continue reading “Debian, BCM4328 and ndiswrapper”
I don’t know how you feel about it, but when my hand touches the touchpad “mouse pad” while I am typing on my keyboard, and changes to windows focus or the mouse positioning, it annoys me, A LOT!
So here’s what I did to get over this issue on my debian box. It shouldn’t be very different on other distributions. (I’ll update this post in case I ever try it somewhere else)
Continue reading “Disable touchpad while typing on keyboard”
I have added a new page to my blog today. It lists commands/tips I collected over the past couple of month. I will be updating it every once in while.
Please don’t hesitate to comment suggesting/correcting commands :)
I hope this can be useful!
Cheers,
Ignace M -ghantoos-
A week ago, I encountered some space problems on my FreeBSD system during a system wide portupgrade. Fortunately, I had backed up my system just before the adventure, so my system was saved.
The procedure I followed to restore my data, was:
1- recreate my partitioning, giving 10 more Gigs to the system, using the FreeBSD installation CD
2- copy all the data on it
Since I backed up my FreeBSD system on an external ext3 hard drive, I needed to copy it back from “outside” my freebsd system. My first option was to use Fixit from the FreeBSD installation CD set, but I had problems mounting my partition because of the inode block size of my ext3 partition. Bref. I decided to mount everything from my Linux (ubuntu) system, and copy everything back from there!
I only way to do this was to recompile my kernel with the right “UFS write” flag. And it JUST WORKED!! I copied back __ALL__ my FreeBSD system on the new slices, rebooted my machine, and here I am writing this post from my old-new FreeBSD system! :)
Continue reading “Mounting UFS in read/write under Linux (debian)”
As I needed to minimize yum’s output for a project I was working on, I thought it was just about changing the debugging level. But I found out yum’s debugging level could add information, but not minimize it. So wrote a small python script that does the job.
What I wanted to do, is replace yum’s output with a very simple progress bar showing only the different stages of a yum procedure (dependencies/download/install/remove/update).
The script is quite easy to use:
Usage:
$ yum-parser.py (-u | --update)
$ yum-parser.py (-i | --install) package_list
$ yum-parser.py (-r | --remove) package_list
$ yum-parser.py (-s | --search) 'regexp'
$ yum-parser.py (-h | --help) package_list
For a reason I still ignore, when redirecting yum’s generic output to a file (e.g. yum -y install irssi 2>&1 > yumoutput), the “Downloading Packages” part doesn’t appear. To remedy this problem, I had to insert some threading to have a “patience bar” (i.e. back and forth [ = ]) while the downloads are processed.
You can find the source code here.
Continue reading “YUM output parser (yum-parser.py)”
As I was wondering how I could do to relieve my wrt54gl from the huge weight of libopenssl and nsupdate, I thought.. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could set a very restricted account on my server, and just ask my wrt54gl to ssh to it and execute locally nsupdate. So I started searching for a way to restrict user ssh accounts by listing a set a allowed commands. No luck there.
So.. python came to the rescue.
Limited Shell (lshell) is an application that lets you restrict the environment of any SSH user. It provides an easily configurable shell: just choose a list of allowed commands for every limited account. No installation is required.
You can download the current version of lshell from the following link: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=215792
If you want to contribute to this project, please do not hesitate.
Send me a patch, or just your new lshell.py so I can check it out.
You can use the interface on sourceforge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lshell/
Cheers,
Ignace M -ghantoos-
Hello again,
My first objective was to update my DNS from my home. The problem was:
1- I wanted it to be secure (at least the most secure possible)
2- my PC is behind a beautiful WRT54GL which leaves me with nothing but my LAN IP.
I had to install the stuff on my linksys running Kamikaze0.9 of OpenWRT.
After some research and some small space headaches (WRT54GL), here is what I did:
Continue reading “WRT54GL: OpenWRT Kamikaze 0.9 and dynamic DNS (nsupdate/bind)”
