After ’successfully’ upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 (64bit) on my laptop KDE4 failed to start with error: Kstartupconfig4 does not exist or fails. The error code is 127.
Gnome still worked but KDE and KDE apps failed to load. Trying to run dolphin in terminal produced libssl.so.8 & libcrypto.so.8 shared library missing errors.
The resolution is put in the symbolic links that are missing
cd /usr/lib64 (64bit) and /usr/lib (32bit)
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.8
and reboot
Today at work a client he needed to access a cisco router but no-one new the password but we had the config files saved which included the MD5 hashes of the enable and enable secret passwords. So I set about cracking the hashes, which was done successfully btw, following on from that I then remembered a John the Ripper MPI patch which I had seen some time ago I ended getting it going at home and the results are good!
Directions for installation are as follows (on Fedora 11)
yum install mpich2 mpich2-devel
wget http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper/john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
cd john-1.7.2-bp17/src
make linux-x86-64 (for 64bit version duh!)
cd ../run
touch ~/.mpd.conf && echo "MPD_SECRETWORD=secret" > ~/.mpd.conf && chmod 600 ~/.mpd.conf
mpd &
mpiexec.py -n 4 -path ./ -wdir ./ ./john --test
Initial Benchmarking looks good. Below is 1 core vs 4 cores
Traditional DES [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
1591K c/s real, 1594K c/s virtual / 6131K c/s real, 6380K c/s virtual
BSDI DES (x725) [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
Many salts: 53222 c/s real, 53329 c/s virtual / Many salts: 207665 c/s real, 215407 c/s virtual
FreeBSD MD5 [32/64 X2]
Raw: 9718 c/s real, 9816 c/s virtual / Raw: 37720 c/s real, 39581 c/s virtual
mysql [mysql]
Raw: 2571K c/s real, 2571K c/s virtual / Raw: 9397K c/s real, 10254K c/s virtual
About a 100% increase per core! Life is good!
Seems I’m in fix it mode tonight - amazing what you get done when you don’t have women distracting you!
Anyway it seems that my fail2ban has been broken for quite a while, the resolution of this was me running:
fail2ban-client -x start and that worked ok
So I modified /usr/sbin/rcfail2ban and added the line:
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;
Here it is in context:
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting Fail2Ban "
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;
/sbin/startproc $FAIL2BAN_BIN start &>/dev/null
rc_status -v
Well you get the drift. Happy Banning! 
Recently I came across a new file format called RSDF, these appear to be txt files which have a bunch of links in them, so called link containers. I wanted to access the URLS in these files, but I didnt really want to entrust my computer to just “any” application. Read the rest of this entry »
Hooray! I did it!
I have managed to boot my bootable usb pendrive (BackTrack 3) under QEMU within Windows XP.
For those of you who want the magic one liner here you are:
qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -std-vga -hda \\\\.\\PhysicalDrive2 -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -kernel ../../boot/vmlinuz -initrd ../../boot/initrd.gz -append "root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=../../boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 vga=0x317"
- This gives you TextMode with 512 MB Ram and Mouse Support!!
- You will need to change PhysicalDrive2 to what ever drive number your USB key is. (Hint look under the DiskManagment snap-in)
- You require administrative rights also
- My Qemu directory lives under USBDriveLetter\BT3\QEMU FYI
- QEMU Version Win32 PreCompiled 0.9.1
Hopefully this saves you a few hours
It seems there is a bug in Ubunutu (a possibly other distro’s) that certain keys don’t work as they should.
For example Page up and Page down in the guest were producing something similar to a right click.
The fix for me was quite simple: echo "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" >> ~/.vmware/config
More helpful tips are here
I have been pulling my hair out trying to resolve a backup issue with a client’s backup on Veritas BackupExec 9.1. What happened was that backup was failing on 1 message because the antivirus couldn’t scan it, and locked the backup from reading it.
BackupExecs error was:
0xa0008488 - Access is denied
Backup - \\SERVER\Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes
Access denied to file FirstName LastName [user]FW: Your Tracking # 835503826372.
Now this particular message was found in the Inbox, I then deleted it and emptied the Deleted Items.
Backup still failed! But this time the message was it the root_store IE. The top level of the Mailbox and I couldn’t see it with OWA Client etc. I had to pass it on to another engineer who started looking at it, who then gave me the right tact to search.
I deleted the message by using a Microsoft tool called MDB Viewer, this is a low level tool for Mailboxes, It’s on the exchange CD-ROM CD-ROM_Drive\Server\Support\Utils\I386\Mdbvu32.exe
I then basically (Remember I don’t do Step by Steps, I do summarys) Choose the Server, Choose the Mailbox (username), then clicked OpenMessageStore on the MDB menu,
Click Open Root Folder on the MDB menu
From there I saw the message in Messages in Folder Column, I selected it, Choose the operation IpFld->DeleteMessage() and called the function!
Woo Hoo Backup now works!
Merry Christmas to me and you! 
So I was back the stupid clients that had the crappy mdaemon / IMAP setup. This time upgrading there MS Office version to 2003 in an effort to stop the IMAP pst file hitting the 2GB limit. Anyway after pulling my hair out to get it to use the 2003 UNICODE PST type store I came across this post: link
“This issue occurs if the DWORD value for the NewPSTFormat registry entry is set to 2. This condition requires Outlook to use the Unicode-based personal folders (.pst) file format. This file format is incompatible with IMAP. ” Fuck! Looks like stupid internet standards win again!
You know the worst part - The client is a lawyer and he explicitly asked me in a email if this will fix the problem, to which I replied “Yes it will”
Now I just need to find that damn message…….
Part of works server migration has meant that we are working on a new Terminal Server. I liked the old one better because:
- It had a run command
- I could view the system drives
- I could type H: in the address bar and it worked!
- It had command prompt access!
- No firefox installed (Hardened IE installed! OMG WTF!)
And the list goes on….. What I find mose stupid is a work for an IT company and they lock the shit down which make us less productive!!
Read the rest of this entry »
Had a client whose print queue would jam up and they couldn’t restart the printer spooler until you manually cleared the spooled documents. So I stole this piece of code and put it in a batch file. Works wonders!
@echo off
net stop "print spooler"
del /q "%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*"
net start "print spooler"
Update: The reason the spooler was dying was because when he printed a PDF document he would close Acrobat before the document finished and in turned killed the Print Spooler. Because we charge by the hour, he didn’t want it to be investigated any further, which is fine by me!