http://www.computereverything.net/ff_files.7z

.7z file can be extracted with freeware utility 7-zip available on Sourceforge.  No password required.

7zip MD5 = 1D9833AF0B13FAF09F6AC389E60F0038

ffxivsetup.exe MD5 = C805C29C73B80CCB9B3711B6075A9D8D

Enjoy!!!

http://blog.opendns.com/2010/07/02/sysadmin-award-winner/

Benchmark Results

Level 1: “XK Servers”

The facts:

website: www.xkservers.web

company name: algoEX

Well this isn’t quite enough information for us to complete the mission so what happens when we scan www.xkservers.web ?

Open ports found… 6204 used for webmail.  What happens when we point our browser to www.xkservers.web:6204

We get a banner saying that our username has been reset to 01CompanyName

Now that’s what was difficult for me.  I did not realize that algoEX was in fact the company name.  Anyways its now safe to assume the username is 01algoEX.

What happens when we run this username in the Crack against the webmail URL?  BOOM we get a password. PWND! (p.s. PWND! is not the password).

Now if we login to the main website with the username 01algoEX we get the address of the victims FTP site which is: ftp.01algoex.xkservers.web.  Login to the FTP and download the algorhythm and you win level 1.

Level 2: “F8datastreams”

The facts:

website: www.f8stream.web

upload website: www.upload.f8stream.web

username: admin

This ones even easier than the first, go to the Crack and run the admin username against the upload URL.  BOOM… PWND!

login to the upload site as admin and enable FTP then Scan the server… looks like FTP’s running on its default port 21.  Put in your newly discovered password and upload your virus!

Level 3- “Delta adworks”

Facts:

Victim’s email: gary@deltaadworks.web

Website: www.deltaadworks.web

If we visit the website we dont get any useful info, so lets scan the server… And it appears port 6945 is open for Database Management.  Lets point our browser to www.deltaadworks.web:6945 and see what fact we pick up next…

username: adminuser

once again lets Crack this username against the URL (www.deltaadworks.web:6945).  There’s our password.  Lets go ahead and login to see what else we can get access to… Lookie Webmail database is down, better restart that and get connected!  I wont ruin the final steps of this game for you but you get the point.

If you’ve enjoyed this tutorial or have any questions please feel free to post feedback!

Several weeks ago I had some spare time after being called to jury duty which turned out to be canceled. Instead of twiddling my thumbs for a few hours I decided to check out netbooks. I wandered into Micro Center and looked at several brand machines including Asus, HP, Acer and MSI. When looking at specs I ideally wanted a quality brand netbook with 2 GB RAM, an SSD hard drive and Wifi card that supported promiscuous mode and packet injection. Unfortunately Micro Center did not offer ANY netbooks with 2 GB RAM or SSD hard drive, those I would have to pay extra for. I decided to keep my money on the upgrades but notcied that Asus (my first netbook brand name choice) had a machine with an 802.11 N card (1005HA-VU1X-BK). I did some quick research to see if anyone was successful with a BackTrack installation on this machine, the vertict looked good and the price was the same as NewEgg so I decided what the heck and bought it.

After leaving the store I eagerly opened the surprisingly small package, popped in the battery and proceeded to the nearest Wi-Fi Enabled coffee shop to plug in and begin tinkering. The box came preinstalled with Windows XP and booted right up no problem. All the drivers worked perfectly out of the box and system had very minimal bloatware. The machine has a 160GB hard drive split evenly into two user partitions. I trimmed down a few services, preinstalled applications and performance settings to achieve maximum performance from the rather mediocre Intel Atom processor and was cruising the net at very acceptable speeds. I installed my standard Windows security packages including: NMap, Cain, WireShark, Nessus, NetStumbler, 7zip, SRWare Iron, etc and have had very decent performance.

After a day of XP I decided it was time to start my BackTrack installation. Some easy googling pulled up two excellent articles:

http://forums.remote-exploit.org/backtrack-4-working-hardware/24386-howto-backtrack-4-pre-final-asus-eee-pc-1005ha-3 .html

http://forums.remote-exploit.org/bt3beta-working-hardware/10225-bt3-eeepc-7.html

Here’s my installation summary:

1) Download the latest BackTrack4 iso (pre-final).

2) Download UNetbootin and create a bootable usb.

3) Boot the from USB to BackTrack4 (spam the escape key while PC is powering up to get to boot menu).

4) Login as root, startx

5) Run the install.sh script on the desktop.

6) After setting up the basics you will need to configure your partitions. WARNING: (Pretty sure) the default setup will overwrite your XP installation. I clicked manual then deleted my non-xp partition, then with the free space created a 1024 MB partition for Swap and used the rest of the space as Linux ext3 system space and let the installer rip.

7) After the install completed I rebooted and removed my USB device. Here’s where things got a little tricky for me. Ubuntu by default does not enable the root account. I wasted much time running BackTrack as a user trying to sudo everything. This proved to be a waste of time for me so I finally did a “sudo passwd root” and rebooted logging in as root everytime there after.

Enabling and testing certain features

A) Wifi: /etc/init.d/wicd start This worked off the bat enabling my Atheros wifi card (ath9k driver). I could then use Wicd Network Manager (gui) to input my WPA2 settings and connect automatically (authenticates very quickly!).

B) LAN: /etc/init.d/networking start This did NOT work out of the box for me and took quite a bit of finesse to get going. I had to download a modified driver for my card (will post link later).

C) aireplay-ng: First few times I tried running this from KDE it crashed my system, stdout said Injection Sucessful but seconds later my whole system would lock up. After some googling I installed and fiddled with linux wirelss compat drivers and still got the same results. I uninstalled the drivers and tried again from the command line before starting any networking services and sure enough it worked. THEN it started to work magically under KDE.

9) Final Grade: A (9/10)

I give this machine a 9 out of 10 for quality, performance and overall satisfaction. My only major issue is that the Touchpad and Keyboard will stop responding randomly on occasion (under both OS’s). I will be giving Asus a call to try to resolve this one but my suspicion tells me that this may be a hardware issue. The other question that lingers in my mind is Hard Disk security. In the bios you are able to set a Hard Drive lock password which for obvious reasons is a very useful tool. What i’d like to know is just how secure is this, Who if anyone can easily unlock this drive and for what purpose? If anyone has any wisdom to share please make a post! Also please feel free to post any questions you may have as this BackTrack installation was a bit tricky.

Good luck!

I went straight for the network setup entering my FQDN, netbios name, domain username and password.  The NAS successfully joined Active Directory so I created a folder on it called Private with the intention of giving each user a 5 GB slice for storage and .pst files.  The folder was created successfully so I created a subfolder with my username then went to assign NTFS permissions, but Guess what? ..Access Denied!

Okay I thought, I’ve never used one of these before, might as well give Seagate Tech Support a call.   1-800-SEAGATE and only about 5 minutes of hold time I had a rep on the phone.  He had me look at the Groups link of the Access tab to see if I could add Active Directory users from the web interface.   Unfortunately no users were showing up in the list box.  He then had me delete the box’s AD entry and unjoin/rejoin the domain.  Once again I was able to successfully join the Active Directory domain but unable to get a user list.  Seagate could not offer any additional support at that point so I’m left blindly to fiddle with permissions?  The data sheet advertizes Active Directory support but I don’t think their techs are trained very well on supporting this functionality.

All in all it seems like a nice unit, very sturdy, easy to manage, nice features such as encryption and media server but without the Active Directory functionality is it useless in this environment…

Oh well!

At this point I think it’s time to give a Western Digital 4TB ShareSpace a shot.   Review to come!

This has been an excellent solution for our environment to export PDF files from our applications that don’t support it natively.  Staff members are now able to print quotes and invoices as PDF and send via email directly to their customers.

HURRAY FOR PDFCreator!!!

Vendor newletters, webinar invites, forwarded spam, ERP and CRM upgrade gabber… Ooh yay, another Labelview problem and potential solutions from their support vendor.  Guess what?  Our legacy environment is NO LONGER SUPPORTED by Teklynx…  understantably so since the About window shows a copyright date of 2000 but that still doesn’t solve my problem.  It seems we have  a mystery here.  The .lbl files for this version don’t want to open properly on this particular client machine which is somewhat baffling because the machine is virtually identical to the one it works fine on.  It’s almost positively due to the “Field length” settings not carrying over to the faulty computer.  I’ve copied all the registry settings and application settings and even started to disassemble pieces of the application to figure out whether this is A) a driver issue  B) a database issue  or C) a configuration or preference issue.  It shouldn’t be this hard!

After hacking away at this for a bit I’m left with few options because it’s sucked so much time away already… Do I A) say forget about it and put a working Windows 98 machine back in place.  B) Tell the department: “Sorry, you have to recreate these labels from scratch. ” C) Have the company upgrade to a current and supported version  or D)  Pour gasoline on myself and light a match?

I was left but a moment to ponder these options when a Customer Care supervisor came to my office so we could rerecord and program the CCR and Automated Attendant settings in our Nortel system.  This took about 2 hours and we still got some work to finish up on it.  Around that time I got a call from a local doctor’s office which I support saying they wish to accept our proposal and commit to a 3 month service contract – Great!  Shortly after, I got a call from another client asking to setup a network printer, and then a call from an OpenBravo ERP partner.

As we look to upgrade ERP systems there are many well known commercial products we are evaluating.  In addition I have committed to exploring some open source alternatives and narrowed my list down to the following four products worth evaluating for this particular environment:

OpenBravo

postBooks

Adempiere

WebERP

We’re looking for an ERP that has excellent sales, accounting, inventory and production tracking as well as a POS.  Other important features we seek are well designed security, user-friendlyness, handheld wireless barcode readers or pdas integrated with POS.  For a full review on the above products check the product reviews section (reviews coming soon!).

Other fun stuff included a call from MessageLabs trying to get me to evaluate their product as an alternative to Postini.  Now I do know our Postini services are due to expire soon and also pretty sure their prices have gone up 4x from what we paid last year – go Google!  But MessageLabs is still more expensive and I wasn’t really impressed by the 3rd party anti-virus products they use for filtering.  I am however very impressed with the statistics i’ve seen so will be getting a trial soon (expect a full report!).

Upon getting to work, one of my more pressing matters included reprogramming phone extensions and handset configurations on our Nortel phone system to make way for the wholesale division who’ve just returned from the winter season layoffs.  They needed to be able to forward their desk phones to their cell phones so they can recieve calls while working in the commercial yard.  Also it was reported that some phones in the retail building were not picking up their proper call groups.  After wasting a good 20 minutes I found out that the actual problem was that the function buttons on the phone were not programmed properly.  Phone crysis solved!

Next was the ODBC issue with Labelview…  During the winter season I plucked the 2 remaining Windows 98 boxes from production because I was too lazy to configure a Nod32 Configuration file for them and quite frankly sick of seeing them on my network.  Unfortunately one of these two 98 boxes had a legacy printer application connected to a legacy printer.  Well you can see where this is going…

The replacement machine is not much newer but runs Windows 2000 which at least conforms to my Domain Security Policy and gets Automatic Updates from my WSUS server.  Anyway… After deploying this machine I had no had time to setup and configure the Labelview application, so sure enough last friday I was asked to get it running for them, and then got sick over the weekend.   After returning yesterday I got the application installed but could not get the labels to open and kept getting an ODBC error.  I saw that the latest MDAC was installed but did not see any ODBC in the Control panel.  After tearing thru the Registry i noticed odbccp.cpl was set to hidden (Security Policy ?) so I ran the control and noticed no drivers were installed –  Meh!  So i downloaded and installed the drivers from Microsoft and was still getting issues.  After further examining the application I was able to gather the credentials needed for it to properly login to the database and violla the labels started working again.   No documentation on this program from any former IT Admin and nothing but panic from the one employee who holds the disk.  WHAT A PAIN IN THE ARSE!  

Finally got that relic of an application figured out… now to document it… oh, that’s what this is ?  

What else… Oh yea, the “Musical printers” (Had to swap out 5 printers!)

… So the other pressing call I got this week was in regards to a printer (printerA) in the home services department that was “smearing the toner”.  Today I was able to take a look at it and confirm in fact it was printing very “sloppily”.  So I put in a call to our printer service company only to find out this particular printer is not under contract.  (Just my luck)  So as a quick fix I took the printer (printerB) from the president’s office and ran it down to replace the broken one  (it’s his company… i’m sure he’ll understand!).  Guess what, once I get there, their printer was printing fine!  So what do I do?  The minute I walk away its gonna start printing crappy again but they are printing 100 pages a minute to it so its not a great time to take it down anyway…  I guess i’ll leave the president’s printer down here for now (its pretty heavy anyway).  Also snagged an oldschool HP JetDirect (external) card that happened to be sitting down there, powered on, but not connected to anything. 

Both of these printers are higher end HP LaserJets.  Now let’s talk about the other 3 printers

printerC:  IBM InfoPrint series

This printer we got a great deal on and has NIC built in so I figured would make a great replacement for the accounting printer (printerE) which had no NIC and was attached to a PC that is never used except left on to print to via network sharing.  Unfortunately when printing to it from certian legacy applications you’d have to manually set the PCL type to Raster from GL/2.  …Yeah, i dont know what that means either but hey it made the printer happy but didn’t make the accounting team very happy.  Needless to say I promised them I’d find a solution…

printerD : HP LaserJet 2100 (spare HR printer)

During a chat with the HR manager she mentioned that I could take the printer in her office if I could provide a replacement, and since she doesnt print from this particular legacy app I figured she could use the IBM printer (printerC).

printerE :  HP LaserJet 2100 (original accounting printer)

Inevitably I swapped

printerA : printerB

printerC : printerE

printerD : printerA

printerE : printerD

Other than that there was the common “I forgot my password”… “can you reset my password” … “im not on the right email groups” … “my mouse was doing something funky” … etc…