HR Geeks

I would like to announce the release of a 757Labs tool, mp3nema.

MP3nema is a tool aimed at analyzing and capturing data that is hidden between frames in an MP3 file or stream, otherwise noted as “out of band” data. This utility also supports adding data between frames, and capturing streaming audio.

This tool is under the GNU GPLv3 license. So have at it!

Thanks to Tele, skhisma, and the rest of the labs!

-Matt (enferex)

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I would like to announce the initial release of the 757Labs’ PDFResurrect tool:

PDFResurrect is a tool aimed at analyzing PDF documents. The PDF format allows for previous document changes to be retained in a more recent version of the document, thereby creating a running history of changes for the document. This tool attempts to extract all previous versions while also producing a summary of changes between versions. This tool can also “scrub” or write data over the original instances of PDF objects that have been modified or deleted, in an effort to disguise information from previous versions that might not be intended for anyone else to read.

This tool and accompanying whitepaper can be found over at the labs:
http://www.757labs.com/projects/pdfresurrect

Special thanks goes out to all the hr-geekers, and 757labs. Many were consulted on this and provided suggestions. including Tele, Derez, Remad, Count, Sunpuke. Special thanks to Brent, not really part of the 757 crew, but aided in proofreading the paper. Thanks Guys!

-Matt (enferex)

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While it’s not a new tool, it’s new to me!This weekend I was cleaning up my office and decided it was time to throw out a bunch of old hard disks and two old PCs I have been hanging on to for no good reason. I’m a lazy, lazy man, and I knew there had to be a semi-automated way to wipe all these disks without a writing a foreach loop

Say hello to my new friend Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

I installed all the disks in the two PCs and booted them both off a USB key with DBAN. It detected all the disks in the machines and prompted me with my wipe options. The nice part about this utility is that it wipes all disks simultaneously. If you’re in a hurry you can type ‘autonuke’ at the boot menu and it will start wiping all disks automatically. Good if the feds are knocking on your door…

It took just under 36hrs for DBAN to finish wiping all the disks with a 5x wipe. It will never replace my thermite, but it’s incredibly handy.

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Okay, sure I could have purchased the 50-Piece resistor assortment pack from Radio shack for $6, but why bother when you can goto China and eBay and for $25 get 2500 resistors.

I will never go wanting again.

This place might join my list of favorite China direct companies Sun-Pec.

My others include:

LED Shoppe

Cell Phone Shop

Who do you use for China-direct stuff other than China-Mart, err.. Wal-Mart.

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One of my big tasks at work is rolling out a completely new platform for our internal production and development networks. The goal is to move all of the servers that support these networks to VMs running in Hyper-V under Win2k8 (Yes I’ve sold out my UNIX roots).

As all of our applications are web based, I’m also been given the task of setting up a new SQL 2k5 database cluster that will utilize a portion of the new SAN. This DB cluster will be an active-active setup with a total of three servers.

I setup a couple VMs on my notebook to experiment with different SQL disaster and Win2k8 server failover scenarios. As I wanted my test network to completely standalone on my notebook, I needed to find a way to bring my SAN home with me. I found a really neat app from Rocket Division that would allow me to create a virtual iSCSI SAN on the host OS share virtual disks to my VMs.

For this experiment the 30 day demo works just dandy. There is also a free personal edition but it is limited to only one host connection. The app has an incredibly small footprint and runs quite happily on my notebook with my other VMs. I only have 3GB of RAM on my c2d notebook and am able to run 4 Windows VMs, the iSCSI emulator, and iTunes with really decent speeds.

For my disks, I choose to creates virtual image files on your host PC must like VMware. I’ve never needed more than about 1GB of storage for per LUN for my testing, but it will go all the way up to a terabyte. The options to use physical disks, RAID1 of image files, and snapshots makes for a pretty feature rich test environment.

There is an alternative iSCSI target application called WinTarget that’s worth checking out. I really dig Starwind because of it’s incredible ease of use and small footprint.

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toxicboy has recently accepted Make magazine as his lord and savior and has been feeding me some neat project ideas. One of the more interesting items he’s passed along was the Arduino Diecimila Plus USB board. For the low price of $34.99 it’s worth checking out.

I’ve had dreams of building my own UAV to spy on my neighbors pets and thought this little guy would be a great addition to my project. As chance would have it, Hack A Day
has a link to an Arduino powered blimp.

I did some searching for other UAV projects that use the board I found a sub built by University of Ottawa. The ARISE website has some details and an incredibly boring video of their project. Even the catchy music can’t make that video interesting.

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I’ve discovered a neat SSH trick / timesaver. You can create per-user ssh configuration files - ~/.ssh/config - which can contain host aliases.

For example, I SSH to ‘host.long.stupid.domain.com’ a lot. I can shorten this by putting:

Host myserv
HostName host.long.stupid.domain.com
User myDomainUser

into the configuration file. Now, I can do:

user:~>ssh myserv

and ssh will effectively run:

ssh myDomainUser@host.long.stupid.domain.com’

without having to type it all. Combine that with ssh keypairs (~/.ssh/authorized_keys2), and you can save a serious amount of typing!

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Here’s a cool tool for everybody using OS X that needs to work with files on other UNIXy machines. It’s called ‘MacFUSE‘, and is based on the work done for the Linux FUSE user-space file system driver. Basically, it provides a framework for userspace file system drivers in OS X, using a plugin style architecture. There are quite a few plugins available already, but the most useful by far is ’sshfs’. The sshfs plugin uses the MacFUSE system to provide OS X system mounts to remote file systems using ssh/scp. Once you install it, and give it connection details, the remote filesystem shows up just like any other SMB / network share mount in Finder. Drag / drop works, assuming you have permissions on the remote side to create/modify files. Opening files, mime detection, etc all appear to work flawlessly. It also hasn’t crashed or locked my mac up yet (I’ve been using it for a few hours with TextMate, to do remote editing without getting frustrated by Terminal.app).

MacFUSE Site - http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

SSHfs installer | read_me (requires MacFUSE first)

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