Virtual Datapower First Configuration and Initialization!

Finally I got my hands on with DataPower Virtual Appliance. It was hard to tinker on real environments. Even using them as your lab environment is somehow bothersome. But having a virtual one is very good since one can do most of the software tinkering without having to worry.

I will show you how to get the thing up and running with admin gui, in fact it is so pretty easy; this whole post is like unnecessary.

Once it boots the first screen we saw is login screen. It is dummy at this point. Just type admin for login name and admin for password...

After that it asks if Disaster Recovery mode to be enabled, say yes,

Just right after it is going to ask a new password, not every password will be accepted. Type a secure one,

Then it is going to ask if wizard is to be used. 'Yes' is the answer,

First to be configured is Network. It is also true for the hardware variation. Until network to be configured, we use the serial telnet connection. It holds true for virtual one, in theory we are using the console port right now. No interface has ip yet, configure as needed. I use dhcp for all 4 interfaces, VM host side interfaces should be 'bridged' not NAT. Least until initial configuration part is done,

Step 1 (network is completed), now is time for the step 2 and 3. They are easy, give a DNS and unique identifier... Such as;

Step 4-5-6-7 are also easy, screenshot is below and pretty much self explanatory;

Now it is actually done but we cannot use DataPower yet. We need to accept the terms and license. This can only be done via the Web-GUI. it actually tells how to enable it, type it exactly...

 

web-mgmt
admin-state enabled
local-address 0 9090
exit

 

open up a browser of choice. Type the first interface's ip like http://x.x.x.x:9090 then accept the terms. If you do not know the ip that it took from dhcp type "show interface" without quotes.

 

In the console now you can write mem and save the config. That's it. You can use you DPXI52 virtual appliance as if it is a real one.

Hostname Change for WebSphere 7+

Hello, this post is also about WebSphere. As you may prolly know WebSphere family is a `hostname dependent`, uhmm let's say, architecture. If you want to migrate your server or even take a clone of the OS and sysprep it and start it, you are going to need some extra steps to start Websphere correctly. Even many cases without below steps you may not be able to start even Deployment Manager. Frankly the errors WebSphere generate are also no help at all, messy and confusing. So doing as below will save you a lot of trouble.

Let's assume you successfully migrated your server (or clone etc...), everything is in order and starting WebSphere is the next thing in place. Great! As you are aware since we cannot start DMGR and wsadmin.sh connects to DMGR upon initialized we are in a little bit trouble. We need to start wsadmin.sh without connecting, fortunately IBM thought a parameter to do so. In some cases this parameter is unnecessary, cause if it cannot connect to an active DMGR it simply goes offline mode, this is exactly what we need but most of the cases it will give and error and you are not going to be able to do anything with it. So let's be safe and use the parameter. Start the wsadmin.sh under the bin directory of DMGR profile like below;

./wsadmin.sh -conntype NONE -lang jython

After this we have 2 choices to change the hostname config of the DMGR. An interactive one and a automated silent one. Let's do the interactive one. You can easily automate the process if you write some python code. Type the below command to start interactive mode;

AdminTask.changeHostName ('[-interactive]')

*Node Name (nodeName):

type the nodeName of the DMGR node. Usually people use dmgr01 or something like that. Type it an press enter.

*Host Name (hostName):

Type the new hostname. This hostname should be pingable from the machine you are working on. So if there is a dns suffix or anything type it as it should be.

System Name (systemName):

Type the name of the cell that the DMGR manages.

Regenerate Certificates (regenDefaultCert):

Just press enter. This'll generate the cell and node certificates so the dmgr and nodes can talk to each other securely as before. It is at this point an unavoidable thing to do in fact. You can change them later if your company's internal security dictates or anything like that. Anyways press enter and let it renew them.

After that, it'll ask to finish or cancel it;

Select [F, C]: [F] F

Finish is the default answer. Just press enter or type F and press enter. It'll give the wsadmin command line back. We should save our new config;

AdminConfig.save()

After saving the config we can exit.

At this point our DMGR is in working order once again. But if we have any other node on this machine, we should change their hostnames too... Let's start wsadmin.sh the same way and start the interactive way and change the hostname for the other node. Below the commands and an example;

AdminTask.changeHostName ('[-interactive]')

*Node Name (nodeName): AppServerNode01
*Host Name (hostName): newhostnameoftheserver
System Name (systemName): wascell
Regenerate Certificates (regenDefaultCert):

Finish it and save the config just like we do for DMGR. Exit the wsadmin.sh for good and return to shell or command prompt.

We still have some work to do, as this is not enough; nodeAgent won't start if you try to do so. we need to manually sync the node, so node will know the new configuration and start correctly. Go to the profile's binary directory.

sh syncNode.sh DMGRHOST DMGRSOAPPORT

Type the username and the password if the console security is enabled. Let it sync itself. That's it, now the node agent should start normally and we are done.

PS: If you are doing all this when your original server is running, there is a probability that new dmgr connects to the old machine's working nodeagent. I know it is silly, just to be safe after all this just restart the dmgr and nodeagent one last time and you are done.

WebSphere Messaging Engine and Stuck Messages

Hi, in this post we are going to do some house keeping to WebSphere Messaging Engine. In some cases messages got stucked in committing or removing state (IBM calls them indoubt messages). When that happens, it is impossible to manage them via administration console.

Service Integration > Buses > xyzServiceBus > Messaging Engines > abcMEBus > Queue Points > queueA > Runtime > message > delete etc...

So we need to use wsadmin.sh and some commands. I always use the wsadmin.sh under the DMGR profile. So start the wsadmin.sh and connect to DMGR, type your username and password if your cell is secure. What we need first is to get the correct message id. Use below command;

$AdminControl invoke [$AdminControl queryNames type=SIBMessagingEngine,*] getPreparedTransactions

This will give us a very long string, expect something like

!V0FTRAAAACQAAAFC72342347HesQAAAAIAAj8tAnvvXi34ge4rh5tjhe4f43e3wov5krh54i-r62ZrKqTBuEAAAAAAA2AAABQu*x3rEAAAACAAI-LQJRGDRHDRGS7714qL*ZK432fw4r2eeIv6*tmayqkwbhAAAAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC

Did you get such an id? Good. Now we are going to use this id in another command.

$AdminControl invoke [$AdminControl queryNames type=SIBMessagingEngine,*] commitPreparedTransaction msgid

Do not use quoation or anything just paste the message id we got from previous command as a whole instead of where I wrote msgid in italic.

This will commit any stuck messages in any state, if this does not solve your problem we have another parameter for rolling back the message.

$AdminControl invoke [$AdminControl queryNames type=SIBMessagingEngine,*] rollbackPreparedTransaction msgid

This will rollback, but I usually don't need to use it, committing manually solves almost all stuck messages.

Have a nice debugging.

Pyrit and CUDA, How To?

Hello again for another quick guide, this time I am trying to light your path to Pyrit-CUDA on Kali Linux and an hybrid notebook. By hybrid I mean, 2 GPU; 1 Intel 1 NVidia.

It was originally my first experience with gp-gpu experience and it was ridiculously hard. I mean I really gave more time and effort than actually learn to crack some WPA in the first place. Whole drivers and SDKs, finding the right libraries, correct combinations, etc... was very tiresome; I tried and crashed Kali and re-install like so many times actually forgot the count.

Anyways the below is the way I got it working with my Fujitsu Lifebook LH532, essentially it is a Core i3 notebook with a GT 620m GPU.

First thing is first, like on many Debian start with;

apt-get update

Of course if anything goes wrong you know what to do. Get a better sources.list and kernel-headers.

Then this is the critical part. It will quite possibly crash your setting if it is not like mine. But what the cow, you prolly did crashed your system so many times already; at this point you are willing to try anything...

apt-get install nvidia-detect nvidia-libopencl1 nvidia-opencl-common nvidia-support nvidia-opencl-icd nvidia-visual-profiler nvidia-glx nvidia-installer-cleanup nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-smi nvidia-alternative nvidia-opencl-dev libglx-nvidia-alternatives nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-cuda-toolkit nvidia-vdpau-driver nvidia-xconfig glx-alternative-nvidia libgl1-nvidia-alternatives nvidia-settings libgl1-nvidia-glx xserver-xorg-video-nvidia libcublas4 libcudart4 libcufft4 libnpp4 libnvidia-compiler libcuda1 libcuinj4 libnvidia-ml1 libxvmcnvidia1 libcusparse4 libcurand4 python-pycuda-doc python-pycuda-headers python-pycuda nvidia-cuda-doc nvidia-cuda-gdb

I found above command as a whole on a japanese blog, and cannot find again to give credit. But thanks to dude who did in the first place. I remember he stated this line should work for Ubuntu on a hybrid notebook also.

Again sources.list is very important if you intend to complete above command successfully.

If everything is still working order, then do the magic below;

/root/.bashrc <<

PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/nvidia-cuda-toolkit/bin
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/nvidia-cuda-toolkit/lib:/lib
export PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

After this we actually have CUDA on Kali, just restart the system and see if it is still booting up :) if not well re-install Kali, sorry.

----------------------------------------------------

Now time for actually settin up Pyrit-CUDA, don't worry tho; worse is behind and there is no danger crashing after this point.

We should download the official packages from the official site. which are pyrit-0.4.0.tar.gz and cpyrit-cuda-0.4.0.tar.gz that you need. Before you do anything just get below 2 library first.

atp-get install libpcap-dev python2.7-dev

Then for Pyrit do the following;

tar -xzvf pyrit-0.4.0.tar.gz
cd pyrit-0.4.0
python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Now you have Pyrit if everything went smoothly, but not yet Pyrit-CUDA. Here goes the magic again;

tar -xzvf cpyrit-cuda-0.4.0.tar.gz
cd cpyrit-cuda-0.4.0

setup.py <<

for path in ('/usr/local/cuda', '/opt/cuda'):
>> (must be like below or appropriate)
for path in ('/usr/local/cuda','/usr/lib/nvidia-cuda-toolkit','/opt/cuda'):

python setup.py build
python setup.py install

Tadaa (Windows 3.1 sound) !!! We have Pyrit with CUDA support. Enjoy the show;

note: you can see the device by "pyrit list_cores" and test via "pyrit benchmark".

HD 7770 (x2) X-Fire Setting For OpenCL + Pyrit

Not long ago, I bought 2 HD7770 for my rig. And then decided to give a try to the Pyrit. Everyone knows Pyrit right? Ok.

It's actually pretty easy to set Pyrit up for gpu. IN THEORY! I spent 4-5 hours for my setting to operate correctly this time around... Last time I was trying Pyrit-CUDA on a hybrid gpu notebook and it was a real pain. Like real pain.

Anyhow, I use Kali as my distro cause at least it is pre-patched for all my wifi dongles. I, at least, don't bother with the firmware patching and stuff.

So let's start with the AMD-ATI official drivers. Use this script to install them, the guy who wrote is brilliant and did a tremendous amount of work. So we don't have to get through that hell every time we need to install AMD-ATI drivers. Script simply works just run it and pour a cup of coffee and enjoy.

Then we need to install AMDAPP 2.7 because the script installs drivers version 8.96 something. these can be found on official AMD site. If you somehow manage the install the drivers without above script, you probably have another version. You should check the appropriate compatible version of APP SDK and then download that specific version accordingly. You can trust the instructions on the official page. They work, unlike the driver installation part of the official AMD site.

If all is well so far, then we need some more libraries that is not included with the standard setup of KALI Linux. Below the command to do that;
apt-get install opencl-icd-dev
apt-get install libpcap0.8-dev

You may need to update kernel headers and apt-get update. I assume you are familiar with those or already done it.

Now it is time for us to compile Pyrit. We should edit cpyrit/setup.py script accordingly to this blog. Read carefully and do exactly, we should be fine. Then we compile opencl-pyrit module. We should get no error if everything is good so far.

We should be done at this point just test it if Pyrit sees your AMD OpenCL supported device by 'listcores' parameter. We should see the whole device as one single core just like a CPU core. That's OK though. Pyrit will utilize all the cores available on that OpenCL device.

Congrats, you have now acquired more power to crack WPA passwords faster. If you still have problems or could not complete the guide above for some reason, please let me know so I may be able to help.

PS: Sorry I published this post before I finished it and never realized. This is the finished version.

TL-WR710N Modifications

Hello all, I just hardware-modded a TP-Link wireless router and wanted to share.

First of all, the device has following hardware; Atheros AR7240 as platform, AR93xx as integrated wifi, 32 mb ram, 8 mb rom (this is very important, as most of the same class devices has 4 mb rom), a USB port, 2 LAN/WAN Ethernet interfaces. It powers up via a wall-socket.

 

The exact model I used is TP-Link TL-WR710N v1.2 (there are revision numbers to all TP-Link devices that can be seen on the labels of the boxes, in my case mine was v1.2).  

 

First modification I wanted to do was a battery mod; so I figured two cables can be soldered to the under the cap called c207, as red to square (+) and black to round (-) and the device can be powered up with 4 AA battery. If you desire so, you can use USB 1A too. I also shared the same pics on OpenWRT Wiki and Forums.

 

Next I re-connected the original wall-socket input cables. So if I wanted to use a wall-socket, I'll be able to.

 

Also I added a switch for usb mod, you can see below, not that important.

----------------------=--------------------------------------------=----------------------
Next was Antenna Mod; I first learnt that I need to break the connection between -below- these 2 connection.

 

then of course soldered a tail antenna from a broken adsl modem.

 

----------------------=--------------------------------------------=----------------------
After that I of course changed the firmware with OpenWRT and live happily ever after. TP-Link Routers are awesome devices for OpenWRT. I highly recommend TP-Link for such occasions. This device is also a very good example to that, 'cause it has 8 mb rom.

Peace...

7 Cents For The 2013!

This post is dedicated to Arzu Kotan, who insisted that I should write more and made me convinced. This one is the first of many to come.

 

2013 was full of new hardware. To me, it was dominated by hardware news and not software. Which is strange, ‘cause end user seems to be interested in the software not the hardware. And yet all the major buzzes were mostly hardware. Let’s take a look at what I was most interested in 2013 in seven bullets.

7. Windows 8.1 and DirectX 11.2 arrived, even they are software they are somehow hardware related. Not that they changed our lives, certainly they’re welcomed graciously, AMD and NVidia played their last cards on their current generation hardware for the DX 11.2. Intel also played its card and released Haswell Micro-architecture. Of course it is not game-worthy. But at least -with a correct cpu- now we can have barely playable modern games at low resolution. Before Haswell, Intel HD xxxx was a joke. I'd appreciate low power gaming. Also now Haswell is a competitor at OpenCL game. I'd say it is losing horribly but at least competitor now.

6. Oculus Rift is still a no go. This brings us to wearables… 2013 brought them to our doorstep, however 2014 and 15 will be the decisive years for the technology. Because of that I am expecting a leap on battery-duration/issue of gadget oriented life.

5. Dawn of the Linux gaming era; I still don’t think it is ever going to dominate the market, the direction with the Steam powered boxes/machines sounds right to me nonetheless. Some of them have pretty bumped up monstrous specs. Many of them are simply beasts. 2014 will be a very expensive year for gaming community, so many things to buy, continues on…

4. a) Nokia’s Windows Phone lineup got matured into something spectacular. Especially Lumia 1020 is practically a super slim professional camera that you can use Windows on. Icon (leaked in 2013) will be even more.
4. b) Nokia and Android rumors took place in the darkest corners of blogosphere. I never thought it will become a reality. As far as I know and concern every OEM tinkers with possibilities, but I assumed this, even it was true, will be a rumor or a dirty experiment. As of my writing, $#!7 just got real. That’s a shock for me. I really did not expect this.

3. Intel’s Galileo; my hobby time is mostly consist of drinking, gaming, tinkering hardware. Although I like hardware projects, I am mostly uninterested in arduino. I do not have a specific reason but I really never touched arduino as of yet. On the other hand that X86 based arduino SoC is very appealing. If I’d have my hands on one of them, I have already 1 or 2 projects in my mind. 2014 will tell.

2. Many new SoCs has been released or announced. So far I’m very interested and excited about Tegra K1. It has 192 CUDA cores; which is very, very impressive. If utilized correctly, that can be a game-changer. Personally as an original Surface RT user, I would like to see it in Surface 3; I would immediately consider an early update as I am pretty happy with my Surface RT anyway.

1. X-Box One; clearly my choice of best hardware. Microsoft’s newest addition to the gaming community’s arsenal held much of the anticipation. Alongside with the new Halo title (possibly “Halo 5”), dedicated cloud gaming, exclusive music and video content and etc. it was the best thing ever happened in 2013 for me.

That's it for this post, thanks for reading.

Edimax 3G-6200nL & Raspberry Pi

I am sharing the setting I recently got together. At the time of preparing it, it makes much sense to me. After completing it, I found it pretty useless; but maybe it gives some inspiration to someone to do similar thing for a more useful project so I am sharing.

First I flashed my old Edimax 3G-6200nL with OpenWRT, details are on the OpenWRT forums, a guy did an awesome job to put together the trunk image.

'Tho the configuration of the router was very hard and painful due to only 16 mb of ram on the device, many resets has been issued till I am done with it and disable the LuCI for good for some more space in the memory. The model 3G-6200n has 32 mb of ram, just a reminder.

I used the router's Wi-Fi to connect to an AP. Share the connection through its Ethernet. So Raspberry Pi gets internet wirelessly (well kind of... lol) and used the router's USB to power up the Pi, strangely it did the trick no problem. I am using only one mini blutooth dongle on the Pi for both keyboard+mouse. But I also modded the Pi with a very mini fan and a cooling plate, fan operates from the gpio of the Pi itself as seen in the photos.

So what do I have here?

2A@5V adapter of the 6200nL powers up both the router and the Pi as in such configuration. I have a Linux ARM PC with a dedicated router which consumes as little as 2A@5V.

full size of the photos:
http://sdrv.ms/17d2GOK
Let me know if link of the full size photos is problematic.

Installing Windows After Linux!

Hello, this time I am gonna try a different type of post. I am not gonna give any in-depth-details about the commands and stuff but rather share my experience to dual boot as installing Linux first and Windows after. First of all let me give you the configuration I have so you could judge it if you should try below steps in such operation if it suits you anyhow...

I had a single hard disk in my laptop as single partitioned (ext4) 500GB for Kali with latest updates, everything is working right, no problem in anyway. It is a very healthy system, but I will never ever never trust my NTFS formatted archive external disks with any version of Linux or Mac or anyother OS if that matters. I will never use those disk under any circumstances on other operating systems except Microsoft ones as their content is invaluable, years of backups, works, codes, datas, you know my digital life. I lost my other machine to a hardware failure and so I also wanted to have a Windows 8.1 preview version as my second OS on this machine. I downloaded from the official Microsoft site and the risky operation series has begun. I strongly suggest you to take backups before try anything. In fact don't try this at all, these are only my experiences I decided to share.

I will try to write the steps I followed in bullets, give commands or links if necessary along the way;

• Downloaded the Windows 8.1 preview iso from the official site. Just do a Bing search for it you'll quickly find it. Or click "w", I am annoying =P
• Made the iso a bootable flash drive. There are innumerable guides out there, just Bing it, or Google it.
• After that I booted my system with Kali live usb stick, and used gparted to shrink my single partition's size by 190GB, that is how much space I wanted for my Windows 8.1 Preview. Decide and shrink your partition with your live Linux USB, I believe any modern live stick will do job. {I somehow couldn't manage without this second live Linux usb stick there are guides to shrink a partition but I couldn't do it.}
• Then I booted into Windows install stick (I think you can use any version but for the sake of my experience I will assume you are using also 8.1 preview) and installed my 8.1 preview to that newly emptied free unallocated space. after installation it looked like this =>here sda1 is my Kali, sda2 (the small area between sda1 and sda3) Windows boot partition, sda3 is Win8.1Pre, last part is linux swap.
• But at this point I was cut off of from my Linux. No way to boot into. Stuck with Windows, I followed this guide I found. I know it is in Italian, I don't know any Italian. You could simply follow the commands or have Bing translate the page for you.
• And now I am stuck with only Kali, but now I had Windows installed over my disk somewhere. I just cannot boot into it. That's I figured pretty good, and thought can be a very manageable situation. But once again for the sake of the completeness of my whole experience I am gonna write the misssteps I took. In italic don't do them, just read them and go to the next bullet.
1. I booted into my Windows Install USB stick and try to recover MBR there. I succeeded with some commands from the prompt like bootsect and stuff, but that got me stuck with only Windows once again.
2. Then I re-recovered my grub from the guide above I linked, then again I was stuck with only Kali, with Windows over there unreachable.
3. I tried old distros' with the option "boot the first partition" live CDs. Nothing worked, for a time I had a very healthy Kali and an unreachable Windows.
4. Then I try some other guides I found, involving bunch of grub config file editing and grub-updates etc... those only worsen the situation. I decided the safest way to achieve my goal is to have Kali and making the whatever it is going to take manually
• Then I started to play with /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.
• After some trial and error, these below lines worked for me.
• menuentry 'win'{
  set root=(hd0,2)
  chainloader +1
  }
• I added above entry to the file mentioned above completely manually to the appropriate place. If you are following this then take a look at the file, examine it carefully and edit it accordingly.
1. using grub.d/xx_win stuff (I mention this because chances are good you are gonna find such guides involving that online pretty easily, they didn't work for me) messes my configuration and makes me to start to recover the grub process all over again and again.
• That's it; now I have dual boot.

I am guessing I took a very rocky and long way to have a dual boot system, but you may be in my shoes and need some light. Therefore my post may help to your cause. Have a nice journey and dual boot.

Remember don't follow this post to have dual boot. It may only help if you are nearly exactly in my situation to begin with. There are, I believe, tons of easier and safer ways to have dual boot in the first place.

VirtualBox on Kali Linux, How To?

It's been ages since I write anything, but it was constantly in my mind that I was reminding myself "c'mon Ozgur you should write something on your blog, you have a blog. Write!"

Now is the time, it'll be a very quick step-by-step.

Recently my new hobby is testing pentest distros. Of course along the way I know now some of my neighbours Wi-Fi passwords. After testing and trying out versions and configurations and drivers and CUDA and some other stuff, I think I am gonna settle on either Kali or WeakNetLabs. I can make Ubuntu an OK degree pentest distro as best of my abilities also, but I claimed it impossible to enable CUDA with my hardware. It will simply not be happening. I tried everything I know and can be found on forums and stuff. It will not work. So I continued...

WNL comes with CUDA 5.0 and pretty recent and decent Nvidia drivers out of box but I have some little other issues I first need to fix so it will take another post to go that way.

On the other hand, Kali is playing well with my hardware if I use Cuda 4.x and old Nvidia drivers. Which, frankly, I am ok with. Normally I update everything to the latest but in this case I will make an exception since it is really too hard to get it done everything correctly for me (which I mean WPA cracking via CUDA =P ).

Back to the guide; I will try to give you little heads up before you use Kali as a host for VirtualBox images. I will assume you login as root and since it is a pentest distro you should be familiar with most of the stuff already.

apt-get update

if you have still 2 or 3 lines of  sources.list after this, it is a good time to find an appropriate sources.list for your distro which Kali I hope not BackTrack.

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

this should update 20 to 60 mbs if not it is probably because of the sources.list is not rich enough. You may get some errors like cannot locate 37-trunk-amd64 or such with header update, but it is a matter of fixing the sources.list really.

after that we should head to the https://www.virtualbox.org and press downloads. You should see the version and platforms. Find and click
VirtualBox 4.x.yz for Linux hosts on. You will not see anything close to our distro. But you can very easily locate the last one;
All distributions choose your platform, either 32 or 64 bits. Download the file, I am assuming you download it to the ~/Downloads/. Following finishing download make the file executable with chmod and then run it.

chmod +x VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

./VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

what you should see if everything goes right is;

 Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox for Linux installation............
VirtualBox Version 4.2.16 r86992 (2013-07-04T14:33:09Z) installer
Installing VirtualBox to /opt/VirtualBox
Python found: python, installing bindings...
Building the VirtualBox kernel modules

VirtualBox has been installed successfully.

You will find useful information about using VirtualBox in the user manual
  /opt/VirtualBox/UserManual.pdf
and in the user FAQ
  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/User_FAQ

We hope that you enjoy using VirtualBox.

after that type and go the default installation directory;

cd /opt/VirtualBox/

get a list there. You will see a VirtualBox executable righted file. Run it directly from the console.

VirtualBox

Voilà!

There you have your VirtualBox on Kali.

I tried also XP on it and it worked just as fine without any hassle. It's a good setting now. CUDA to crack and i3 CPU - 8GB ram to play with.

Enjoy. Next time I will write about qbittorrent application and its nicest settings I figured out for Kali or maybe on WeakNetLabs.

Cloud Services...

Sorry for the long silence (whomever I am going to apologize anyways), I have written these below lines a while ago but had no chance to form them into a blog post. So here goes nothing and my 2-cents.

In an era which is "the thing most matters is the choice of complete service provider", we are living. Current heavily armed forces are Microsoft, Apple, Google. They serve nearly everything you can think of; from OSes to games, office solutions to cloud services.

And I believe soon we are going to see some posts like "my everything is on Live, how can I migrate to Google?" or "I am an Apple guy, how to go Microsoft way?"

At that point, if it ever happens, in my humble opinion; the one provider who makes this conversion easy and with smaller/shorter steps will win this cloud service war in the end. What I mean is -just stay with me- if a user want to migrate, he/she has to do it manually to the bones nearly... Calendar, music, contacts, other content such as apps, documents etc, etc. Everything must be backed-up first and moved nearly manually right now.

What I am saying is that I believe; if a provider offers to be such a conversion with easy steps possible, that provider will win this "Cloud Servicing" stuff right that moment in my book.

Think like that, sorry but end-user gets dumber and dumber by the moment and such internet based services (even whole networks, providers, etc...) are keeping up by being dumbed down even more. True right? I think so... but moving from one such service provider to the another is still not an easy task. I accept it is not that difficult but it is also the least easy thing to achieve nowadays.

I hope one of the providers will see this opportunity and make a move to end this race, so we can move to the next competition...

Fury Of The Furries...

2011's Nostalgia to me is that the game called Fury Of The Furries.

In "Fury Of The Furries", player assumes the control of a furry bouncy small ball creatures (LOL ?!). There were 4 types of this creatures, one with hadooken, one with the ability to swim (actually dive I think), one is like Spider-Man, and one can eat rocks. The game design consisted of puzzle oriented levels that we lose one ability and get another to do some tasks in order to reach the next level.

It was a brilliant puzzle platformer. "Why did I remember this game out of all others?" is a good question. Because I think, it would be an awesome port to smartphones such as Windows Phone or Android and stuff... Many games which are puzzle platformers on those appmarkets are so repetitive after some levels. This game was not! Since the developers and publishers port whatever they find these days, In my opinion this would be a really nice choice.

From Wikipedia I found out that the publisher and the developer is Kallisto Entertainment. Maybe some publisher can do this port, I hope?

Anyways Happy New Year!

Viruses In 90s...

Let me first tell you the very first pc of mine...

Back in, if I remember correctly, 1991 my parents bought me 80x286. My journey into computing so began.

But this post is about anti-virus programs (what? They are called "programs" in the past). In 1991 and following 4 years I used F-Prot. It was so simple and clean. After exposing myself to Windows 95 in late 1995. I tried several anti-virus programs however never settled on any single one of them and this went on at least for a year. At some point I noticed I was so careful and never caught a virus since '94 (MS-DOS 6.21). Then again I used several programs till Windows 98 came out. With that upgrade I abandoned virus protection altogether. If I really needed a virus check in those early unprotected years (98-00), I emailed the file in question to myself and let yahoo or hotmail does the dirty work for me. Anyways this also went for at least 2 years till Windows 2000 came out. After then everything changed over a night.

Found this on the WEB, thanks to one who captured it =)

First of all; trojans came back. To me it was the only way to catch on harmful code. Other than that NT based OS was pretty clean and neat. In order to save myself from trojans and etc... I never run an executable file from anywhere except for official sites of well-known commercial sites.

Second, networking got better significantly. Well, we all know XP's 60 second reboot bug/virus (oh boi what a pandemic it was) prior to the time service pack 2, but I never caught that 'cause I always use up-to-date OS.

I still, today, do not use any kind of security application. Either I am lucky or my cautiousness is paying good. By the way, I own a Mac and a Windows 8 Developer Preview. However with a little bit caution I do not think my Mac or Windows 8 are in anyway danger. Of course it is only true for an up-to-date Lion and Windows with MS Security Essentials and default firewall.

What I don't understand is how come viruses were more threat than now back in early 90s without networking. Did we really exchange that much files with people via floppy disks? I don't think so. Even if I remember incorrectly, the ratio that I remember was horrible. Whenever I took some file from someone and scan it, F-Prot was like mad. Every-time. Strange but true. So I came to a conclusion that I remember incorrectly and ask around friends who is from different profiles and owned PCs back in those days. They all said one way or another the same thing, "we were not safe back then". So this my little poll proves that somehow, we were really exchanging that much executable file in the past. However there is still a chance that in fact viruses were so (maybe too) much common, we catch on easily.

I also must state that there are bluetooth viruses, harmful phishing page links etc for our smartphones. It is still dangerous out there but if you be so careful and do not to accept anything from an unknown connection (bluetooth or otherwise) or click on nothing you do not know, it is pretty easy to avoid PDA viruses as far as I concern.

What I really am paranoiac about is that phishing pages. If I click on something bad and give any kind of login information about any service to any phishing page, it is highly probable that I am going to get hacked sooner than I thought; so I try to be very careful about where I am surfing.

Anyways, what I am trying to say is that back in old days viruses are so easy to catch up but somehow so easy to get rid of and so less harmful. Nowadays is none of these are true sadly.

A little trivia about very very old days; "In February 1953, there was a total of 53 kilobytes of random access memory (RAM) on the planet."

Windows 8 (M3) On 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V!

This may look like a complex title but it is so. I am just trying out Windows 8 leaked build on a Hyper-V VM of a 180 days trial version of MS Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Server.

Let me just show you some pictures...

This one is the moments away from finishing the installation.

This is when I'm done with user and first use settings.

I changed that wallpaper ("shh let's not leak our hard work" thingie) so you can read that text (build 7989 winmain thing and the disciplinary note), and my trial 2008 Server.

So, now I am gonna try to install Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview. Strangely Windows 8 (Build 7989 Milestone 3) came with IE version 9. I understand that there is "Windows 7 Ultimate" text everywhere on this very early preview version, but why IE9? IE10 will most certainly be completed (and already released in some form) and bundled with Windows 8. So why not include the IE10 beta even now in this leak? May it be 'cause they want it (this Windows 8 version) as stable as possible, therefore avoid unnecessary beta utilities? It can't, because it is not supposed to leak?! or maybe... hmm.

A little surprise, by the way, came with Windows 8, IIS 8! There it is;

Click on it for full size image.

Internet Information Services version 8, in other saying IIS 8, is or will be ready with Windows 8 Family (server and desktop editions) and armed with something they called Smooth Streaming.


UPDATE: I tried IE 10 Platform Preview 2. It works very smooth and fast, I am impressed. Really, It was good.

Also, last time when I write this post, I forgot to take the picture of Microsoft Beta Fish so here it goes ^ .

8.5 Billion! WOW!

8.5 Billion! WOW! Microsoft bought Skype for that amount. Dollars! Cash!

That's actually great, in my opinion. I mean now MS has a control of (select amount of) communication in nearly every handheld and all computers. Whether you use PSP or iPad, Android or Symbian, MacOSX or Linux you use a Microsoft Service. That's, however, ok for me. I like Microsoft products. I mean I have Mac Mini and iPhone but my only console is X Box 360 for instance and I use MS Office on Mac. What I am saying is, a widely used comm service such as Skype now belongs to Microsoft and that's too much power for a company like Microsoft but I am ok with it, and reading that people are also ok with it. No big deal? Right? Right. BUT 8.5 BILLION!? WOW I MEAN C'MON!!! 8.5!!! Eight point five! Billionzz!?

Anyways, very congratulations for MS and Skype...

Whoever Watches This Movie...

Thor the Movie has finally arrived. I watched it twice. It was awesome both 2D and 3D. I can say, for me, it is the best comic movie so far. It is the best, by far, comic adaptation. Period.

It is almost impossible not to get goosebumps when Anthony Hopkins says “Whoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.” Epic!

EPIC!

Renault Turkey...

Renault Turkey has one of the Turkey's leading automotive factories. Not only that as in automative it is also one of the biggest production giant factories. Approximately, it has a capacity to make a single car from zero on the assembly line every single minute. That's a quite impressive amount if you think it yearly... 60x24x365 cars...

Whether you know this little info or not, it is previously acknowledged that their annual endorsement is 2.2 billion Euro in 2007 (excuse me for having outdated info) and it is only rising from that point. Also, in the past ten years; they exported cars worth 6.7 billion Euro.

With those numbers kept in mind, one can clearly see the real value of the brand and of the factory itself. Turkey's fragile economy depends on such great establishments.

Browsers...

We are always going to be in need of, I think so at least, two different browsers... While working on windows, my primary choice is Internet Explorer of course; my secondary is Safari. While I am working or spending time on my home PC, which is a Mac, I use Safari as my primary and Opera as my secondary.

For Windows I use Safari for secondary because of I believe I must have same browsers on different platforms to accept something as, you know, baseline some-kind.

Ok, but why am I not using Opera as my second on the home PC so I still can have a baseline? Then again users who has and utilizes two browsers at the same time of course use their primaries more often. And if I use opera as baseline and the secondary at both environments, my usage will be small portioned (for Opera) and I will be missing the, you know, best of both worlds. Don't take me wrong, Opera is a great browser, but for mobiles you know.

Only if MS Internet Explorer was on Mac too that would change everything...

They Are In Lead...

I am only guessing here, but I think Proximity's client base is very happy with them. They make organizations/events that makes people from various social communities very happy, so they talk and create contents about the client. I mean I guess they do what they do best and make possible for a brand on social networks to exist happily, to be well known.

Proximity Istanbul's expertises are:

Consumer Engagement Strategy & Planning

Social CRM & Social Media

Event Marketing

Digital Advertising

They call themselves "experiential marketing agency specializing in word-of-mouth generating campaigns". That's a very long description, but I must agree with this definition completely. Their events are so good every-time I sacrifice a weekend for them, I ended up very happy and feel worth-whiled. I find myself talking about the event itself to my friends, how fun it was and stuff. If it is not an event, then it is a very personalized gift, which again makes me smile for good amount of time. That is a success for its own-right if nothing-else...

I do not know about the measurable consumer return and other marketing data gathering, but I can easily tell the clients they are working with are happy to engage with consumers in such experimental events over and over again. That alone gives the hint.

Lastly, as far as I can gather from the www they are a part of very big global network actually, over 2000 employees all over the world. I don't know if this information anyhow relevant, but that also gives the hint for it. They are big. They are in lead.

Eisenhorn, by Dan Abnett...

Hello all, nowadays my fulltime job is a bit crazy. I don't have much time for anything, except I am reading some Sci-Fi genre novels. Warhammer 40000, Halo, Star Wars are, of course, my favourites as always.

The thing is as soon as I got some more time I am going to begin painting some Warhammer Miniatures. I am craving for it but don't have time. This is mostly because this omnibus I read recently. The Omnibus they call because it includes 3 books and 2 short stories. Anyways; it was about this Character from Warhammer 40000-verse. Eisenhorn is a well read, well constructed, well backgrounded trilogy. Dan Abnett, indeed it is not my place to say, had done an awesome job. I liked it so much i am seriously considering reading it again in the near future. The book is about this inquisitor, Gregor Eisenhorn, who brings justice to the enemies of the Imperium. I know many of you, Warhammer Fans, are sick of Imperium and anything about Imperium (stories, games etc...). But believe me when I say this; this omnibus is something! I recommend it thoroughly. I am going to cut short this post as usual and will finish it with a quote from the book...

"In my lifetime, I have brought down nine marked Extremis Diabolus Hereticus. None went quietly." -Gregor Eisenhorn of the Holy Inquisition.