Howto Setup Multi threaded John the Ripper

This article has an updated version -> Here

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!