Edwin van Nuil

Macbook Pro on the couch

Macbook Pro on the couch, originally uploaded by Edwin van Nuil.

In the evening I like to work sitting in the couch. This is my Macbook Pro sitting on the couch.

BackTrack 4 beta

Just downloaded the beta of BackTrack 4 and booted the live DVD on my Eee PC. Looks nice, but I couldn't get Kismet to get working. I will install it to the HD later and then tinker so more.

Download it here: http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack_download.html

CISSP / GPEN

This week I got the final confirmation of my CISSP certification.

This summer I also earned my GPEN (GIAC Certified Penetration Tester) certification after attending the 6 day SANS 560 (Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking) course given by John Strand.

I'm very happy I got both certifications because it took a lot of effort in a relative short time-span.

WPA2 Enterprise with 802.1x / EAP-TTLS

Recently I decided to upgrade my wireless network at home. My current setup is a pfsense firewall and a airport extreme accesspoint.

For my new Wireless LAN I decided to implement WPA2 Enterprise with EAP-TTLS and a radius backend.

From the wiki entry of EAP-TTLS:

"EAP-TTLS offers very good security. The client does not need be authenticated via a CA-signed PKI certificate to the server, but only the server to the client. This greatly simplifies the setup procedure as a certificate does not need to be installed on every client."

First I describe the installation of the freeRADIUS server and the configuration of the Airport Extreme. Next the client configuration on OS/X Leopard and finally the installation of a EAP client for windows that supports TTLS on Windows XP/Vista.

Using VMWare Server 2.0 Remote Console Add-on on OS/X

VMWare released the 2.0 server edition last month; so I installed it this week on my test server. This server is a Ubuntu 8.04.1 machine. I already had a VMWare server 1.x running and the upgrade went well.

Using Firefox 3.0.1 to admin the server also works very nice and in the same way as our ESX server. If I click on the Console tab under Firefox on Ubuntu it installs a Firefox add-on the first time. After that I have a standalone Remote Console.

But when I connect to the VMWare server from my Mac using Firefox I can use all the functions except the Remote Console Add-on. Firefox tries to install it but fails because the package isn't compatible with OS/X.

In the VMWare forums I read that there are rumors that VMWare is developing a native OS/X client, but in the mean time this is how I connect to the VMWare server from my Macbook Pro:

ssh -X -f -q $SERVERIP /home/nuil/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/extensions/VMwareVMRC@vmware.com/plugins/vmware-vmrc -h "127.0.0.1:443"

where $SERVERIP is the IP address of the VMWare server and the xxxxxxxx is the profile id of your local Firefox on the Ubuntu server. On my configuration I use port 443, but on a default installation it is port 8333.

For this to work you must have X11 installed on your Mac.

Paros Web Proxy on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Paros is a proxy program you can use to evaluate the security of web applications. It's free of charge and runs completely in Java. Through Paros's proxy nature, all HTTP and HTTPS data between server and client, including cookies and form fields, can be intercepted and modified.

In this first article I describe how to install Paros in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, in a future article I give a description of installing it in OS/X and a brief description of the workings.

Bandwidth Throttling on OS/X

The following code is a easy way to do Traffic shaping or Bandwidth throttling on OS/X. These are functions of the build-in firewall ipfw in OS/X. With this rule you create a 24 KByte/s pipe:

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 24KByte/s

then attach the pipe to a rule, ie all http (80) traffic:

sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

After you are done delete the pipe to gain normal speed:

sudo ipfw delete 1

Installing Mod Security 2 on Ubuntu 8.04 server

I wanted to install Mod Security 2 on my Ubuntu Jeos 8.04 server, but there isn't a package anymore.
Some googling later I came across this article: How to install Mod Security 2.
I didn't modify the Makefile; just run

./configure

in the apache2 directory and it works.
If this is the first thing you compile on Ubuntu server you also have to install the build tools with the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

A way to find the current DHCP server on OS/X

I was network debugging and was looking for the ip address of the DHCP server and then found this handy command:

ipconfig getpacket en0

This only works on OS/X.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and JDK / Netbeans 6.1

When trying to install Netbeans 6.1 on my Ubuntu workstation the installation window would freeze. After some searching I first tried this:

export LIBXCB_ALLOW_SLOPPY_LOCK=true

But that didn't solve my problem; then I decided to turn off the Visual Effects (System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects => none) and it installed just fine.

Also note that you're using the right java version, the official from sun:

nuil@Solaris:~$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_06"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode)

otherwise install the sun version:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun