Month: December 2005

  • Common Networking Ports

    Along the lines of “knowing your network” with the network security guide. Here are some of the most commonly used network ports. There are 65535 ports that can listen for a connection, so this is not a thorough listing. (These are tcp unless noted otherwise.)

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  • Scheduling tasks in linux kcron

    I don’t know if kcron deserves a seperate entry for scheduling tasks under linux. Cron is what I typed on last time and it’s the daemon that controls scheduled tasks. The method for scheduling tasks that I went through last time is for the command line. Like many things in linux, there are other ways to get the job done. In this case, one way through the graphical interface is kcron…

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  • Mythtv remote frontend

    So, when I did the laptop upgrade I formated the root partition which means that working mythtv frontend was erased and it had to be set up from scratch. I had been running version 0.16 of mythtv on all the systems, but finding rpms for that older version looked challenging, so…. I went ahead with the upgrade to 0.18.1 on the desktop first. All went fairly smoothly using Thac’s rpms of mythtv.

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  • Linux Livecd Download

    This should probably go in the Windows tech support category too… but, as I’ve talked about before I’ve spent a good amount of time using different linux livecd’s. I’ve even made a few livecd’s of my own with Mandrake (now mandriva) linux, using the mklivecd scripts. One of the nice things about a livecd is that it’s self contained, portable and relatively secure (any compromise should be able ot be undone by rebooting.) There are linux livecds customized for just about every conceivable use. The ones I did varied from booting to an image slideshow to a full cooker based desktop.

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  • Network Security guide for the home or small business network – Part 18 – What about Dialup Users?

    So, most everything so far has been targetted to high speed internet users or business networks. That means if I use dialup I’m safe. Wrong. For starters, in many ways dialup internet is LESS of a risk than high speed broadband for two main reasons. First, high speed/broadband connections are typically on ALL the time. Which raises your exposure. Like the security through obscurity concept though… just because dialup is only online a limited amount of time, that shouldn’t be the only reliance on protecting your system.

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  • 5198 Security Vulnerabilities tracked by US-CERT in 2005

    The headline probably says most all… 5198 vulnerabilities tracked by US-Cert in 2005. This comes from The SecurityFix. It’s probably not every vulernability that was out in 2005, just those that US-CERT issued advisories for. The breakdown is 812 in Windows 2,328 in various Unix/Linux/Mac/BSD systems and 2,058 affecting multiple operating systems. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of core operating system vulnerabilities versus, addon software. One problem with this kind of breakdown is most linux distributions ship the addon software with the core operating system. That’s likely why it doesn’t get tracked that way.

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  • WMF exploit and DEP

    There’s a bit of controversy over the suggestion that Hardware DEP seemed to protect against the WMF zero day exploit. Sunbeltblog has responded to the controversy. George Ou in the first link above claims that there’s a lot of bad advice out about this exploit and that hardware DEP (Data execution prevention) doesn’t work to mitigate the problem.

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  • Lotus Notes WMF vulnerability

    This is really the same zero-day wmf vulnerability, but there is a twist. It’s been found that Lotus Notes v. 6.x and up are vulnerable to the Windows Meta File (WMF) exploit that’s making the rounds. Probably not surprising given that there are reports of many vectors of attack, not JUST the web browser. What makes this one noteworthy is that it is vulnerable EVEN WITH THE regsvr32 WORKAROUND. The only other solution that’s been reported thus far is DEP (Data Execution Protection) with supported DEP hardware.

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  • Scheduling tasks in linux cron

    Windows has scheduled tasks which most people are only halfway aware of. Linux has very powerful scheduling capabilities coming from it’s unix heritage. cron is the daemon that deals with scheduled tasks under most linux distributions. There are a couple ways that you can schedule cron tasks. The first is from the command line.

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  • Building RPM’s – building for several different releases on one machine

    I support a few linux systems outside my own group. Those systems are not as quick to get upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Mandrake – now Mandriva as my home systems. But, I occasionally need to build rpms for them. I don’t want to have a build environment on each one and have to make sure they each have all the devel libraries installed. So what to do?

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