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RFC 5782: DNS Blacklists and Whitelists

The Internet Research Task Force has released a Request for Comments for the Usage of Black and Whitelists

The rise of spam and other anti-social behavior on the Internet has led to the creation of shared blacklists and whitelists of IP addresses or domains.
The DNS has become the de-facto standard method of distributing these blacklists and whitelists.  This memo documents the structure and usage of DNS-based blacklists and whitelists, and the protocol used to query them.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5782.txt

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Karmic and BCM43 drivers

Just booted up the new Ubuntu Karmic release in live mode prior to the installation. I always do this to check if there are any incompatibilities with hardware on a new release. This has happened a few times in the past due to driver and kernel module changes.

I checked the live mode to make sure the initial plug and play installed all the drivers needed for the basic operations. The hardware drivers assistant detected the BC4312 wireless card and offered either the free or the proprietary drivers.

If you have worked with Ubuntu in the past, you may have noticed that the free drivers for the BC43 chipsets are very buggy and often lack WPA connectivity so you will have to stick with the proprietary drivers to begin with and replace them later on.

So I rebooted and installed Karmic Koala on my HP550.

After the installation process the hardware driver assitant listed neither the free driver nor the proprietary one which can get you stuck if you are depending on a wireless connection.

In order to get the drivers running, you will have to install the b43-fwcutter package via

apt-get install b43-fwcutter

After the installation, the hardware driver should be listed (if this is not the case, simply reboot the machine).

Select the Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA wireless driver and reboot the machine and you are good to go.

There still needs to be some more improvement handling hardware drivers in Ubuntu to make it more accessible for beginners, but overall the plug & play regarding hardware has become very decent – in my experience even better than Windows 7 if you are not using the newest hardware.

Btw. 9.10 has gone official 😉

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Android mobile client for Nagios

Nagroid is a mobile client that speaks to nagios via http/https licensed under GPLv2.

The client will let you configure category aware notification sounds for either Warning Alarms, Critical Alarms or Down/Unreachable alarms and allows you to filter handled problems.

This app goes along very well with ConnectBot (GPLv3) if  https/https access via SSH tunnel is required.

Pretty neat, but I guess the xmpp notifiaction is more practical to me when it comes to Nagios.

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Hacking at Random 2009 program online

The program for the upcoming outdoor hacking event in the Netherlands is online with some very promising topics:

Stay tuned for my upcoming outdoor hacker event survival guide 😉

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Netbooks & Serial Network device configuration

I recently bought some Cisco equiptment (a Catalyst 2924-XL-EN and a 2611 router ) to play around with in my spare time. In order to get the equiptment running for a test lab using telnet configuration, I had to connect via the serial console which can be a hassle due to the lack of serial rs232 ports on modern computer devices.

I bought a Serial USB adapter eager to find out if this will actually work (had some compatibility issues with other devices in the past)

So i got a cheap USB adapter from my local computer store (link on Amazon – this one definitely works with Cisco Catalyst Switches, I will test it on a 2600 router as soon as it gets delivered to me ) and plugged it into my Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu 8.10. After dmesg confirmed the device (in my case ttyUSB0) I needed to get a serial based terminal emulator for console configuration.

Minicom is the good old Linux serial terminal emulator, so a simple

sudo apt-get install minicom

will provide you with the required app on Ubuntu/Debian. If you are running Vista, I recommend tutty since HyperTerminal is no longer included.

The next step will be to set up the device parameters for minicom by running

minicom -s

Set your serial device to the equivalent (should be ttyUSBx) and set the following connection values:

  • Baud Rate: 9600
  • Data Bits: 8
  • Stop Bits: 1
  • Flow Control: none

Now save your config file (the default config is dfl) and launch the program. The values for any Windows software are the same.

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Citrix Makes XenServer available for free

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1686939

Obviously, this step is taken in order to battle VMware and its free ESXi server.

Compared by the XenServer vs. ESXi feature set, Citrix offers enterprise level technology such as Live Migration (Xen Motion compared to VMotion for ESX) and many others features for free. Also, Xen is teaming up with Microsoft on Hyper-V in deploying Virtualization Management software.

But VMware is also teaming up with Cisco (Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Unified IO Nexus Hardware ), Emulex (Fibre Channel over Ethernet Host Bus Adapters, CNA ) and EMC²

Last week I attended a presentation event by VMware and its peers (Cisco, Emulex, EMC²) and we can expect quite a few cool features & technology to come.

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Managing Bookmarks on multiple machines

Ok, so you’ve got like 2 workstations, a notebook perhaps some netbooks and you have a load of bookmarks you want to have on all machines…. perhaps including your machine @ work….

There is a pretty nifty online bookmark manager plugin from StartAid which will allow you to manage your bookmarks online, publish them to other users and export to XML or HTML.

Get the Extension here

Here are some of the key features taken directly from the addon site:

– Similar feel to built in bookmark manager.
– All your bookmarks are accessible from Firefox and VIA StartAid.com through your personal account
– Built in Side Bar
– No Synchronization required, all changes are real-time
– Import existing bookmarks from your browser or favorite social bookmarking site.
– Your personal profile will allow you to track all your bookmark stats.
– Drag and Drop management system.
– Quick and Detailed bookmarking options.
– Organize bookmarks allows you to move multiple bookmarks and categories at once
– Quick Link buttons for your toolbar

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ICMP4: First Lecture Schedule is up

The small version of the Chaos Communication Camp, the ICMP4 aka. Intergalaktische Club Mate Party is less than one month away. The first lectures are popping up on the schedule, including mine

I will be holding a presentation which is a mix between a hacking and a social track about criminalization of computer security and computer analysis tools using wireshark as an example.

Why a packet sniffer?

  • can be used to analyze security breaches and penetration test of ones own  principal network design regarding wiretapping
  • can be used to analyze common network interconnectivity problems
  • can be used to learn and understand how network communication actually works
  • can also be used to gather personal information on people and their communication (eavesdropping) which is the actual contrary of this tool set, after all if there was no malicious content, no one would give a rats ass about it. This is not what my lecture will be about…

Why Wireshark?

  • its open source and available for multiple platforms
  • its currently one of the most developed packet sniffers out there with very cool additional features
  • captured packet output format is compatible with tcpdump so the actual sniffing part does not even require wireshark nor a desktop environment

Presentation will be up about one or two days before the event, I might also upload an English version in case someone is interested.