Published at August 31, 2008
in IT.
One week ago I moved to Luleå, Sweden from Estonia for studies. I had 3-tier firewall in my home network for testing, playing with diffirent configuration and just for securing my computers. Now I took only two laptops with me without any routers, my soekris-based firewall or home server with firewall, proxy and IDS. There is a lan cable with 20+ mbit internet and a public IP mapped to your computer in each dormitory room.
Today I have found an old good service in my bookmarks to scan your pc for open ports: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 and after scanning found out I had 3 open ports. Two were used by my httpd server and one I guess by skype. I didn’t like it very much when these things are open to public, so I tried to close these ports for public in my firewall configuration. And the funniest thing that I couldn’t. I had windows “online armor” firewall that was one of the best free firewalls on Windows according to the PCMag or CNET. If you block a port, the you can’t access it locally or globally, if you block a program from accessing the network then you also cannot use for ex. the webserver. So I uninstalled it and put Comodo firewall (I guess it’s the right name). It had the same functionality - just beautiful windows gui with no possibility to tune the params. At home I used OpenBSD’s PF to firewall my network but I failed to find the port for windows. Though I have found the ipfw windows project on the SF: http://wipfw.sourceforge.net
It has the same syntax, runs as a service and easy to configure! The bad thing is that it is no more mantained :(
Just thought that I would my this blog a bit techie and write about the things I do at work.
Recently I came across a problem when there is OWA and Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager installed on one server. If installed using the default settings Symantec service cannot start so I cannot create any packages with it. If installed using custom settings Symantec uses ports 80 and 443 to communicate with clients. The very same ports uses Exchange for OWA thus when both services are running Outlook becomes unavailable. The solution is very simple and takes only 10 minutes. Start the installer, choose “create a custom web site” and proceed with the installation. The new site will appear in the IIS directory where you can change the standard port. Don’t forget to restart the IIS afterwards.
Published at June 24, 2008
in IT.
It is interesting why AV industry have not created a webapp antivirus solution that would sit on a web server and scan scripts for known “script viruses”.
Due to being busy this week I have missed some great news that NASA spacecraft Phoenix has landed successfully on Mars on the 26th of May. This is one of the first pictures it has taken.
Published at May 6, 2008
in IT.
Last year I was in Riga, Latvia at the EMC2 Forum. At that time it was all about EMC2 products and the aim of the forum was more advertising products rather than showing live demos and holding technical talks. Besides, I was very tired so all in all I didn’t like it much. This time it was different.
It is very pity that I didn’t take my camera with me, though I wanted to. I consider myself a geeky person but the first thing I noticed were girls saying “Hello” to me and showing the direction where I should register myself and take the badge. One of them I met earlier last week when I was going to Tartu. It was here Japanese tattoo on her back that took my attention first and then everything else. Today we had a friendly chat and she showed me her tattoo. I felt a little shame for learning the Japanese language for two years and still failing to read and translate what the text said. I understood some parts and she helped me to get the rest.
There were both technical and talks with live (and not) demos and lectures for sellers. Some funny moments were when one of the guys from VMWare was asked a lot of questions about the licensing of certain product and then on how to license the Windows on it, he first went out of the room shouting for somebody from Microsoft. Having no luck he quickly returned back and said “Ahh, fuck it”. It was funny the way he told it. And it made the presentation more live, not just mumbling for oneself.
This is not the first time I attend such events but it is definitely the first one I had so much chat with unknown people there. I met one our company’s client with whom I recently spoke via e-mail trying to solve some problems. I also saw one guy with an OpenBSD sticker on his laptop and went straightly to talk with him. I never thought that somebody here in Estonia is using OpenBSD in his environment. Usually it’s Linux and more often Windows. I was wrong. There was one interesting guy with whom I had a chance to speak. He is working for Mikrolink (one of the biggest IT companies in the Baltic states) doing some projects on VmWare. We exchanged the contacts to have a talk later somewhere else.
It was very positive and fun to be there. Hope that there will be something similar soon.
I’m constantly reading books. Several books simultaneously. One at home in the evening one hour before going to sleep, one during the breakfast, one in the transport while going to work or back home. Partly this is because sometimes when the books is two technical, it becomes a little boring to read it all the time, especially when it is big like my CISSP guide (>1100 pages) I am reading now, and partly because I have different types of books: paper books, pdf books, chm and plain text books. Some are more comfortable to read on my PDA, some from the laptop and some holding them in your hands.
I am not very good in advertising something or writing a review. If something attracted me, I will say “I loved it” and tell my friends to read it. Today I have finished reading a book called “Hacker Cracker” by Ejovi Nuwere and David Chanoff about the life of a hacker who lived in very hard conditions with drug addicts and killers near him.
Unfortunately I don’t know the author personally, but I have been reading his blog for about a year or so (I have the link on my page). He is a guy from whom I learn something and reading this book was a real pleasure. You can see the procces from the beginning how he went to school, how different things happened to him, how his views then changed. The process “I read” from my livejournal when I read my old post, the same processes I have read from this book. It is really great when you see how something is changing. Definitely a must read!
While the first book was about a one person from the computer underground, the second one is about the underground in the whole. It is about the biggest names in early hacking scene, it is about the hacking scene itself, how the things begun and continued to develop. I don’t really love history, I always had problems in school with this subject, but reading about the history of computer security industry, about the hacking and phreaking was intriguing. I have read the whole book in three days. So I recommend it to you to read. Even if you are not a technical person you will find something interesting there.
Published at April 13, 2008
in software.
While watching some cartoons on the youtube.com I found out that it now supports rss. What a wonderful thing it is. I began using rss only half a year ago or so. Before I had bookmarked all the pages I wanted to visit and every morning while having a cup of tea at work, I checked every page for an update. The thing didn’t change a lot when I first began using feeds. I used firefox to get the headlines and then read it if there were any updates. While the number of links grew steadily it became more and more complex to check and read them, so I looked for a piece of software to make this process more comfortable and found the feedreader.com.
The program suited me perfectly. This is the first estonian (country that I currently live in) software that is really great and worth using.
Published at April 13, 2008
in personal.
I always have problems planning my time. There are a lot of things I want to do, I want to read and want to explore but due to my laziness I usually end up sitting in the Internet and chatting with friends. Though I do understand that such time-consuming activity doesn’t make me smarter, I cannot make myself do things I want to.
I searched the net in order to find any programs that would organize my time, make a nice schedule which I would follow, but found nothing. Then I decided to write my own but again without any luck. After a little struggling with the time problem I finally decided to uninstall all the IM clients from my computer. It helped. A little. The second thing I did was to buy A1 sheets of paper, write my evening schedule on it and post in front of my PC, so I could see it all the time.
I cannot say that the efficiency I began using my computer grew 100% but now I spend much less time chatting and surfing the network.
By the way, I have uploaded the code of pff to SF.NET and created a small page: http://pff.sourceforge.net
Published at February 17, 2008
in IT.
I am not programmer. I didn’t learn it in the university. I don’t work as a programmer either, though I use it sometimes at work and more often at home. It is great when you can write yourself something that saves time doing some action even when the programming itself took more time than doing the action. I was never part of a team of software developers but I guess now it is a time to try it. Recently I have created a project at sourceforge and soon will publish there first testing version of my thesis project I’ve been working on. I have already uploaded a couple of screenshots.
The project consist of two separate parts: the web interface for the OpenBSD’s packet filter and the stripped down to 64Mb version of OpenBSD to work as a bridge firewall on Soekris boxes.
The project is located here: http://pff.sourceforge.net
Cannot say anything special about the graduation. This was the moment I have been waiting for a long time and the funniest thing about it is that it have passed unremarkable. I have no feel that the studies are over (for half a year, but still), that soon I will leave, that soon the dream will come true. No feelings at all.
I am changing and the process is visible.