Linux

Automating VirtualBox Snapshots

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I depend a lot upon VirtualBox for my security-related research and testing. That being the case I make a lot of changes to my VirtualBox VM’s and losting a given state and not being able to rollback to last known good state would be very bad. Yes, you can take snapshots manually via the GUI … Read more

Ubuntu – Distribution Agnostic Virtualbox Auto-Install Script

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Just threw together a very simplistic shell script that will: 1. Add the Virtualbox repository to /etc/apt/sources.list and will automatically build it by pulling the “Codename” variable from ‘lsb_release’. 2. Download and install the GPG key associated with the Virtualbox repository. 3. Perform an ‘apt-get update’ and install Virtualbox with no prompts. You can checkout … Read more

Emacs – Working with Regions

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In this weeks segment on Emacs wizardry let’s learn some of the basic commands for working with regions of text so you can move around your Emacs region faster than Blackberry’s are forgotten about. Keystrokes Command Name Action C-@ or C-SPACE set-mark-command Mark the beginning (or end) of a region. C-x C-x exchange-point-and-mark Exchange location … Read more

Linux PAM Resources

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Pluggable authentication modules (PAM) are a mechanism to integrate multiple low-level authentication schemes into a high-level application programming interface (API). It allows programs that rely on authentication to be written independent of the underlying authentication scheme. PAM was first proposed by Sun Microsystems in an Open Software Foundation Request for Comments (RFC) 86.0 dated October … Read more

Ubuntu 11.10 – Static IP Address Problems with DNS

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I had purchased an uberiffic desktop PC from System76 a few months ago and set it up with a static IP address along with a dynamic DNS name to access from the Internet. Prior to upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 it had worked flawlessly. After upgrading, all of sudden DNS look ups failed. I searched all … Read more

How to Install Firewall Builder 5 In Ubuntu

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Firewall Builder is a GUI application that allows you to create sophisticated firewall rules. Currently only version 4 is available in the Ubuntu repositories, so here is how to install version 5 in Ubuntu: 1. From a Terminal window type: wget http://www.fwbuilder.org/PACKAGE-GPG-KEY-fwbuilder.asc -0- | sudo apt-key add – 2. Add the line deb http://packages.fwbuilder.org/deb/stable/ VersionName … Read more

Linux Foundation Breach

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I was actually browsing through the Freedombox site to look at the project and when I clicked on one of the links to the Linux Foundation I received the breach notification that now reads (Condensed Version): “Linux Foundation infrastructure including LinuxFoundation.org, Linux.com, and their subdomains are down for maintenance due to a security breach that … Read more

Top 5 Books for the UNIX Security Geek

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Here is Justin’s top 5 UNIX security books. Title Author ISBN Practical UNIX and Internet Security Garfinkel and Spafford 1-56592-148-8 UNIX System Security David Curry 0-201-60640-2 The UNIX Programming Environment Kernighan and Pike 0-13-937681-X UNIX & Linux System Administration Handbook Nemeth et al 0-13-151051-7 Building Internet Firewalls O’Reilly and Assoc 1-56592-124-0