Edwin van Nuil

Backup

Yesterday at work we had a long discussion about backing up important data at home; things like photos and videos.
At this moment I make a copy of my photo's to an external harddisc, this is a manual action that takes place 3 times a month. I also use a timemachine (yeah Apple) backup that is synced multiple times each day.
A few coworkers of my are rsyncing their data to each other each night. In this way they have a offsite backup.
The only offsite backup I have is Flickr. Most of my pictures I post to Flickr.
Right now I'm looking for a practical way to keep current backups offsite. The moment I have a solution I will post it here.
In the mean time I also keep watching Managing Your Digital Life.

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

Yubico's Yubikey

Received my Yubikeys from Yubico last week. I was listening to the Security Now podcast and heard Steve Gibson telling about this product. I went direct to the website and ordered two. I downloaded the C library and received the AES key from Simon Josefsson. Now I'm making my own verification server. This way it's very easy to add strong authentication to our applications.

Fixing problem installing Boot Camp 2.1 on XP

On my MacBook Pro I have a small Windows XP installation using Bootcamp for the few times XP using VMWare Fushion isn't working or to slow (CoD4).
Since Service Pack 3 is out for Windows XP I wanted to upgrade but according to Apple first I had to upgrade my Boot Camp 2.0 to 2.1.
So I downloaded the standalone installer; started the installation and after a few seconds without a warning the installation stopped.
Tried to download it another time because I thought the installation image was damaged, but same results. I used the Apple update in Windows but this also gave the same results.

After some Googling I found this thread on the Apple discussion forums; seems I'm not the only one having troubles: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1498651&tstart=0.

Many suggestions, many solutions, some work, some don't. But what seems to work for one person didn't work for another; so there isn't one fix for the problem it seems.

The following fix worked for me:

run regedit
search for Boot Camp-services (others seem to use Boot Camp Services)
change the language to 1033 (decimal)  (mine was 1043)
run installer again and presto

Now installing Windows XP Service Pack 3.

Getting Nessus running on Mac OS/X Leopard

Today I wanted to install nessus on my Macbook Pro using MacPorts on Leopard. But I got the following error:

libtool: warning: cannot infer operation mode from `/usr/bin/gcc-4.0'
libtool: you must specify a MODE
Try `libtool --help' for more information.
make[1]: *** [plugutils.o] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

I'm running OS/X 10.5.2 with MacPorts 1.600. After some Googling I found the following bug report: http://trac.macports.org/ticket/14429 titled "nessus-libraries build failed (libtool error)". And in the comments there was the fix: I had to edit the Portfile and add the following line:

"configure.cc    gcc"

I made changes to the following files in the directory "/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/net/":
libnasl/Portfile
nessus-libraries/Portfile
nessus-core/Portfile


After these changes it compiled and installed fine:

polaris:bin nuil$ sudo port install nessus-core

[...]

polaris:bin nuil$ nessus --version
nessus (Nessus) 2.2.6 for Darwin

(C) 1998 - 2003 Renaud Deraison 
	SSL used for client - server communication