December 2017

S M T W T F S
     12
34 5 6789
1011 12 13141516
1718 19 20212223
2425 2627282930
31      

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
jarandhel: (Default)
Sunday, February 12th, 2006 12:43 am
Playing around a bit with linux livecds on shub-niggurath to get a feel for different distros and increase my familiarity with Linux. (We're actually starting to hit areas in class where knowledge of non-windows/dos operating systems is coming in handy, since we're covering forensics at the moment.) Kinda having fun with it, but also causing me some confusion. For starters, one of the livecds said it detected firewire on my system. My system has no firewire. I'm not sure what to make of that... could it be my motherboard has built-in firewire support but no ports for it? I've heard of certain devices, such as the cvs disposable digital video camera, like that. The main board in them has support for usb built in, but not wired to a port. You just need to solder one on. But an actual computer motherboard like that? I dunno. Any ideas?

So far, I'm a really big fan of ubuntu. Not so much a fan of kubuntu, but I haven't given the latest update a try yet. Somehow it just felt clunkier than ubuntu the last time I used it. I will be giving it another chance, though, along with many many others. I just tried INSERT, which I understand is based off of Knoppix if memory serves. That's the one that's telling me I've got firewire. Tried Arudius a moment ago as well, but my monitor may not be compatible with it, or perhaps my video card. I'm tabling it for now until I can try it out with different hardware. mPentoo was next, but it seems to be freezing on coldplugging pnp devices. Going to try removing the usb wifi adapter from shub-niggurath and see if that makes any difference. Failing that, I will move onto the NEWBIE cd. And we'll see where things go after that. Yes, those familiar with these products will note a bit of an emphasis on cds with forensic and/or pen testing capabilities; as I said, I'm reaching a point in my cns class where such knowledge is coming in handy. I understand it won't be long before we move to redhat there. I'm looking forward to it.
jarandhel: (Default)
Sunday, January 29th, 2006 05:53 pm
Been spending most of the weekend applying for jobs online. Hoping to get something stable soon. Taking a few minutes for a sanity break right now, filling out form after form is mind-numbing and I'm quickly reaching my limit. Unless I hear from someone tonight, I'll probably be back out tomorrow job hunting door-to-door at local companies and such, up until I need to head to class in the evening. I wish there was a better way to go about this.

I've halfway been bouncing around the idea of making up a cd compilation of hacking/security tools and selling it to my classmates for 20 dollars. There's a lot of stuff out there under the GNU, and you're allowed to resell it. And frankly most of my classmates wouldn't know the good tools if they tripped over them, so I would be providing them the service of screening the tools first and maybe writing up some basic instructions about what the tool is and what one uses it for. I could probably make about 200 dollars or so doing that. My hesitation mainly comes from the fact that there's at least one wannabe hacker in the class who I really don't trust to use such tools ethically. But again, if I limit the cd to the tools that are already publicly available, I think that would satisfy my ethical concerns since I wouldn't actually be giving him anything he could not get on his own rather easily. I'm not sure yet, though, still thinking.

Speaking of my school (which has now changed its name to Banner College since being bought from the Chubb Insurance Group), they're moving to a new building just down the street from the old one, and they're apparently getting rid of some old stuff presently. I got a bunch of computer books from them that are somewhat outdated but I think could still be useful to some degree. The Waite Group's New C Primer Plus (Second Edition) is one of the best ones in there, I think, since the programming language I'm working with now (Objective C) on the Mac is a strict superset of C. I also got such classics as:

Publishing from the Desktop by John Seybold and Fritz Dressler
The Waite Group Advanced C Primer ++ by Stephen Prata
Security in the Enterprise by The Chubb Institute/NIIT
Microsoft Windows Server Operating Systems by The Chubb Institute/NIIT
SAMS Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 days by David Chapman with Jeff Heaton
Guide to Disaster Recovery by Michael Erbschloe
Computers by Larry and Nancy Long
Peter Norton's Computing Fundamentals (Third Edition)
and (last but certainly not least)
Introduction to the IBM System, by the Computer Science Center of the University of Maryland, Handout #1 CSC IBM Series, Updated July 1993.

Nice little pile of loot there, don'tcha think? Though I have to say, getting it all home through the Metro was a BITCH.
jarandhel: (Default)
Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 10:25 am
Just trying to figure something out. I use Mac OSX for my primary operating system. It operates on a Unix base. At any time I like, I can drop into terminal and work from a unix command line. It even supports the X11 windowing system for unix programs. (Gimp and OpenOffice run wonderfully on this, though the keymappings are a bit odd when compared to normal OSX)

Here's my question, then: would there be any conceivable benefit to me in creating a Linux boot disk or live cd with a distribution of linux compiled for the powerpc cpu? I have only a loose understanding of Linux and Unix, but as I presently understand things Linux is essentially an open-source version of Unix, correct? Would this actually provide me with any advantages, or would it just be an awkward way of doing the same things I can already do from the unix terminal available on my system already?