Jun 242016
 

I hate when an application gets updated and then you have to remember how to make settings work that already worked previously.  So I am making this post as a reminder since it seems to not be a lot of info about it online.  If you don’t want to send things you delete to trash, which then requires you to go empty trash for it to really be deleted ….. then add a “Delete Permanently” to your right-click menu items.

Pretty simple to do …. just follow these steps:

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Feb 172016
 

This is a silly script but you would be surprised how many times a day I have to do this and no matter how many times I type the command, I always get it wrong (or more than likely I forget to escape something).  Its also interesting to note that the scripts I find silly are usually the ones that are the most popular on this site….so here it is.

Basically, if you copy and paste this script into a file and run it, it will give you the exact date and time in the sed command to run to search all lines in a log file from the previous hour to now and save it to another file.

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Mar 072014
 

I love irc.  I love tor.  I love freenode via tor.  But one thing I hate is that sometimes I can’t connect and I would have to open up my torrc file and change the MapAddress cname.  So, I created a script today which randomly cycles through the names and changes it for me…..it uses a bash array to accomplish this.

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Dec 122013
 

I have been using this script for a long time (maybe 13 years) with only very slight changes.  It was probably one of the first cool ideas I had for a way to track laptops issued to employees that might possibly be stolen.  Granted, today, we use full disk encryption and other cool things that almost makes this script obsolete….but in the event something does get stolen, we can always track it.

The script only requires a crontab entry and a way to send mail (I use ssmtp btw).

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Dec 042013
 

This is somewhat related to updating amazon group resource ip’s for dynamic ip addresses except it is a different concept.  How many times have you been on the road and needed to access your home computer?  Granted, there are many third party services that allow you to do that, like dynamic dns but that is behind my control.  I wanted something I could control.  Since I use linode, they have an api and a way to script ip updates.  So thats what we will do here.

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Dec 042013
 

I often review various vulnerability scanners.  When I review them, I look at several different things:

  • were they able to find a vulnerability I previously missed?
  • are they accurate in their findings?
  • how quickly do they complete an audit compared to “insert some other vulnerability scanner here”?
  • sometimes I will also grab the tcpdumps of the audits for even further analysis
  • how accessible and easy are they to use by “skiddies”?
  • based on the tcpdumps + noise generated on the server logs, are the audit signatures of wapiti easy to detect?

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Nov 212013
 

I work from home a lot.  My ISP used to never change IP addresses dynamically the first 3 years or so I was with them.  Now they change it often (more than once a week).  This creates a slower response time when I am at home, get a page, go to log in via ssh, and find out my ip has changed since we restrict our AWS environment via group policies.  The times I have needed to do this are relatively few, but still its a problem if there is an emergency.  Leave it to me to come up with a simple solution….

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Oct 272013
 

This is a really simple fix which will block the user enumeration on a wordpress site (like the method by wpscan).

Before I get into this, I am very well aware of the IfIsEvil page on nginx wiki.  But it also says on this page, “The only 100% safe things which may be done inside if in location context are:  return and rewrite as the last statement in a location block”  With that in mind, we are going to use ONLY rewrite as the last statement in our location block.

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Aug 262013
 

If you get these errors…..

insserv: warning: script 'S85vpnagentd_init' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: warning: script 'vpnagentd_init' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: There is a loop between service rmnologin and mountnfs if started
insserv:  loop involving service mountnfs at depth 7
insserv:  loop involving service networking at depth 6
insserv: There is a loop between service rmnologin and mountnfs if started
insserv: Starting vpnagentd_init depends on rmnologin and therefore on system facility `$all' which can not be true!
insserv: Starting vpnagentd_init depends on rmnologin and therefore on system facility `$all' which can not be true!
insserv: Starting vpnagentd_init depends on rmnologin and therefore on system facility `$all' which can not be true!
insserv: Max recursions depth 99 reached
insserv:  loop involving service nfs-common at depth 4
insserv:  loop involving service pulseaudio at depth 13
insserv: exiting now without changing boot order!

The fix is….

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Jun 062013
 

This is a trick I learned a long time ago.  I used to teach it in my linux administration, digital forensics, and ethical hacking courses I taught at college.  It has been one of the most useful commands I ever learned.  So the scenario goes like this:  lets assume you have a user you suspect is doing something nefarious…maybe even a hacker has a shell on your server.  You would like to be able to see exactly what they are doing.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to connect to their shell without them knowing so you can watch what they are doing?

Here is how it is done…..

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