Bohack

I finally found my recipe for Christmas Chili and cooked about 2 gallons of it for Christmas week. The Christmas Chili is perfect because it beats ham on Christmas day and if done right; its Red and Green for the Christmas theme. The recipe cooks about 5 quarts of Chili. It is best to season to taste with the Habanero hot sauce on your own portion, not everyone likes to melt down on Christmas day.

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The original Xbox was released in November of 2001 by Microsoft and it created a new age of console gamers. Since the Xbox 360 came out the original Xbox has been thrown in the corner. However after 7 years this console still has a very important function for video junkies and ROM junkies. The Xbox Media Center is the ultimate use for the old Xbox console platform. The units can be purchased from GameStop for less than $50 dollars and for less than an hour of work plus a modchip, you too can have the ultimate media center. No other multimedia product can come close to the Xbox Media Center or XBMC.

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Any day you can walk up to my workstation at work and find a command prompt open. Whether it is a Windows CMD prompt or a Linux Shell; I actually prefer it over the Windows GUI and over a KDE or Gnome on Linux. I can generally get more done in a few keystrokes then mouse clicks, especially when you need to start a task and have a log of the outcome.

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It has become culture to prepend the http:// prefix in front of a URL. In fact if you type the URL in most web browsers and hit ctrl-enter, the browser will prepend the http:// in front of the URL. The HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) works on port 80 TCP and is defined in RFC 2616. Since HTTP language is clear text over port 80 TCP that means that forms authentication will travel over clear text and can be intercepted. So it is recommended that HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) be used to encrypt the session with SSL. HTTPS or SSL works over port 443 TCP and requires a private certificate be installed from a browser trusted Certificate Authority (out of the scope of this article).

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During the day I always have a command window open on my desktop. It helps get simple tasks done; like reseting a password for a user or opening an ssh session with a remote box. I have a multitude of Windows command or cmd scripts that help me through out the day. Often I may want to change or tweak a script and then the hunt is on… Which directory was it created in? I know that it is in the path; because I can just execute it without typing it’s full path, but where is it?

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I think we have all rebooted a server and then asked ourselves “Did it actually reboot?”. So we hunt through the logs for the event and then move on or reboot it again. During patch day for the servers this can be a real nag, knowing when something is back online so you can finish patching it; is key to getting the job done. So I wrote this little batch script a while ago to help keep track.

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The next LAN party that you setup, you’ve wanna mix up a batch of this LAN Party Bean Soup. It serves about 14 to 16 people and yields about 3 quarts. At LAN parties you always want something that fills everyone up and this is the perfect combination; it’s cheap, everyone like beans and who doesn’t like ham? All you need is some disposable dishes or  thieved coffee cups and plastic spoons. Remember cheap and filling is the key at a LAN party. Anything you can thieve before hand makes it that much cheaper to throw the LAN party!

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A while ago bothered by the heat and noise in my office, I decided to replace the Cisco 2600 router with a Linksys business class firewall/router. The RVS4000 was the perfect choice it has a stateful firewall, Intrusion Prevention System, Gigabit Speed and it was free. So I installed the brand new firewall and soon found out that I couldn’t FTP, it seems this was a common issue with the RVS4000. The Pakistani technician at Linksys said that, I shouldn’t need to FTP since the device doesn’t have a FTP server built in. After I had enough of Linksys’s crappy products and their shitty Paki support, I had an epiphany! I have a computer always running in the office to serve out movies and music for the house, why not make it a router as well? Read the rest of this entry »

My first Linux install was actually a BSD install of OpenBSD and I was quite impressed that nothing was installed except for the operating system. I am now minimalist and when installing operating systems this principal works to my advantage. The ideology is: you only install what is needed and nothing more, thus reducing the surface of attack and lowering wasted process time. So I have put a guide together that was inspired by the Linux how to for “The Perfect Setup – Debian Etch”. This guide was created with screenshots from VMware. Read the rest of this entry »

Mass software installation is generally done with imaging of machines. The process is simple: a reference image is created and then software is installed onto it. Along the way we test the software, QC check the software installation against our environment, then regression test the software against accounts that will be used by our users. Finally ‘sysprep the image’ and then push out a gigantic image to the all the PC’s in the field and cross our fingers.

Some software just does not want to be imaged, so we find ourselves reverse engineering the software to make it work; licensing is usually to blame. This can sometime take weeks because it breaks other functionality. Many times we simply don’t have the time to image a PC and go through the entire process or it may be something that’s just not worth the time. Bohack’s rule of thumb is: less than 40 PC’s in the same location just sit down and manually install!

However that doesn’t mean we need to give up on automation. So I wrote what I call the ‘Automated Installation Framework’. It’s a simple VBScript with common subroutines and often just saves time behind the keyboard. It uses a VB command called sendkeys and saves us from clicking next, next, next…

To use it I recommend using a ‘Vanilla’ install of your current environment; so use the image in place you will be installing to. Virtualization undo disks help speed this process up, because you will find that you will be installing over and over again for the perfect rollout. Next start practice installing the program, as you write the keystrokes down required moving the install through its steps. Keep track of the time it takes and estimate the time for the slowest computer you have. Next create a domain account that is a local administrator or domain admin for the machines you need to install to. Create a simple profile for the user and drop the finished VBScript into the profile’s startup section (base of the profile\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). Now all you need to do is login as that user and as the profile loads and the startup section runs, your install will begin. Cross your fingers and watch the install!

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