Home test lab setup progress

Last week I started setting up my test lab for me to play around and learn things on my own.

So far I've setup one of my servers, its a Dell 2950,

600Gbs of HDDs between all 5 drives, cool
4Gbs of RAM, Sad! I know

Installed CentOS 6.3, I know 6.4 just came out but I'm going to let that settle first. Let everyone get their bugs out then I'll update to it. In the mean time I'll rock 6.3

Other than the OS I installed VirtualBox, but when came time to transfer my OS ios's I ran into a problem. My only linux experience is with Ubuntu so I'm used to NTFS support being installed by default. Nuh-uh, not in CentOS. So I had to fight with getting EPEL installed. Having never dealt with rpm instead of my ususal apt-get. After googling I found someones post which helped me add the EPEL but they had a bad/wrong mirror address so they won't get mentioned. To install EPEL I did

Rpm -Uvh http://mirror.seas.harvard.edu/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6.8.noarch.rpm

Follow the prompt/s allow it to install

Now for the ntfs support

Yum install ntfs-3g

External drive still gave me a little problem but I got it to work. I would post what the problem was but I closed the terminal window.

I got some RAM upgrade from work. Will bump my RAM from 4 Gbs to 16Gbs. Whoot whoot, ahem ok enough of that lol

Anatomy of a bug - the five minute insecurity window in the sudo command

Anatomy of a bug - the five minute insecurity window in the sudo command

via Naked Security - Sophos on 3/7/13

An authentication-related bug was patched recently in the Unix sudo command. Ironically, the bug was more likely to affect those users who were more security-conscious. Paul Ducklin explains...

Click on link above to read whole article.

White House agrees cellphone unlocking should be allowed, but jailbreakers left in limbo

via Naked Security on 3/6/13

The White House agrees with the 114,000+ US citizens who signed a petition to make cell phone unlocking legal. What they didn't address: the legality of jailbreaking and rooting.

Joe McCray, Building a Security Lab, Drunken Security News - Episode 322 - F...

  Joe McCray, Building a Security Lab, Drunken Security News - Episode 322 - February 28, 2013

via PaulDotCom Security Weekly on 3/3/13

Joe McCray is an Air Force Veteran and has been in IT security for over 10 years. His background includes both Network and Web Application penetration testing as well as incident response and forensics within the DoD and commercial sector.
Having a home lab is really key in our field. There always seems to be projects you want to work on that require a specific OS or software. You just need hardware at home, whether you are pen testing or doing security research. I grew tired of using laptops, and especially my own laptop. Having some low-cost servers will open up the possibilities.

Very interesting post on Tripwire

Very interesting video on a post on Tripwire about Open Source tools that could be used for a variety of things and ways.


This is the link to the Tripwire post - - > LINK

My take away from this is that it's a bit scary the amount of data an individual can gather on someone they don't even know using various methods from search engines to using tools such as the ones mentioned in this video. I can't help but to let my mind wonder into the social engineering concept use of these tools.


Update: I haven't posted in FOREVER. It's partially due to me being lazy, losing interest, life and work. My job is having me relocate which is cool and makes you feel somewhat important. The relocation was and wasn't mandatory. For better opportunity for me to learn more and expand in my carrer and for better company growth I had to move. Hope this move is the right move for me to grow withing the AntHill.

Outlook 2007 Security Alert: The security certificate has expired or is not yet valid.

Havent posted in a while, but life has been a roller coaster to say the least.  Lots of downs not enough ups to balance out.  Deal with it and move on.

Came across this weird and add problem today.  Had a user constantly get a Security Alert(see below) in outlook everytime she opened it.

As you can see I work for Nerv Corp saving the world from Angel(Alien) invasion.

After hours of beatting my head on the table, pulling my hair, Googling different combination of words to try to get new info and everythread that I opened talked about Exchange PowerShell I stumbled across this    - -> LINK <- -

Yes, it's just THAT simple

As you can see from there, her machine thinks it's Dec2009 at 2AM when it was May/2012 at 3PM.  Her time zone was incorrect too.

Fixed date and time and no more Security Cert Alert.

TED Talks: Misha Glenny: Hire the hackers!

Instead of putting hackers behind bars, give them a chance and guidance on how their skills should be used to better the overall security in our corporations and even our nation.

It seems that the daemon died.

The little things that makes running Ubuntu as your primary OS so entertaining.
Got this error after I set the updates to install and walked away.  I did forget to input my password when prompted for it so I'm guessing it had something to do with that.  Maybe it timed out, which ever or the fact the the laptop when into stand by probably had something to do with it too.  Just closed and reopened Update Manager and tried to install updates again.  This time I didn't walk away and entered my password when prompted and it installed just fine.  Maybe just a glitch of some sort.

♥ Linux