average admins

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Well, the upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard went smoothly, as Wooley predicted in his comment on my previous post.

The whole upgrade took about an hour and 15 minutes (which included verifying the install DVD) on my MacBook. I now am running the latest and greatest version of Apple’s OS, a certified flavor of UNIX, and am, so far, extremely impressed. The dock is beautiful, Stacks look extremely useful and efficient, there are a lot of desktop customizable features, Spaces (which I am looking forward to setting up soon), and more.

I look forward to getting a bit more intimate better acquainted with Leopard in the upcoming days and months. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly. If you’re scared, don’t be. Mine was a breeze! I just wish I had upgraded the day this package arrived on my doorstep…

uname Output:

% uname -a
Darwin xbook 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Until next time…

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I have had Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X, Leopard, since it launched a couple of weeks ago. I used my in-store credit from my iPhone purchase reimbursement from when I purchased my iPhone 45 days too early for the price drop… or something… Anyway, I got Leopard and tonight I’m gonna install it!

Backups are running as we speak… I’m jonesing as we speak… I’m ready to install this new OS!!!! I’ll let you know how it goes…

Until next time…

Ok, after a month or so of technical difficulties, lack of article posting, and personal stuff and business, I’m making a comeback to the average admins. The site has been completely fragged and reinstalled with a fresh copy of the latest WordPress release, version 2.3.

You can post comments once again. I mean, actually you. Not just the SPAM bots any more…

The site will be themed again real soon, probably over the weekend. Until then, enjoy the default WP theme. After I make sure everything is working as expected I will start pushing some plugins back into the mix.

So, if any of my contributors are still out there, please feel free to hate on me for the downtime and get to positing!

Until next time…

I moved the average admins site to a new host today… I should have a lot more control over the site and more bandwidth to boot.

If you had an @averageadmins.com email address before and would like to have it still, please leave a comment and I will get it back on there for you.

Some things may not work like they did before. I took down the original AA blog so some links to the old blog may be broken.

Until next time…

So, today starts a new month, and with this new month comes a fresh slate of bandwidth to be sucked down across the Internet for no apparent reason. Our bandwidth usage for the past 2-3 months has been horrendous. Chris and I have looked through the logs in months past and all of the traffic appears to be legitimate. So, being that this is a self funded project, paid for by myself, I guess it will continue. New hosting with more transfer limits would be nice, but it probably isn’t going to happen and I hate that.

average admins has been what seems to be a great resource since November’ish 2005. We have had some great topics on here as well as some interesting questions and responses. Maybe the tides will change for the bandwidth bandits and they will start sucking down some other site with “suck worthy” content (no pun intended). So, if this month is anything like last month, enjoy the average admins site until around the 9th or 10th of the month… Then, it will more than likely be offline again due to bandwidth limit exceeded… I wish I could theme that error message so that it would at least have our look and feel…

Until next time…

Originally posted on cocoacrusty.com on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007.

I have been looking for a Mac OS X alternative to TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio ever since I started using my MacBook last year. Camtasia Studio allows you to capture videos of your computer’s desktop as you work in applications and then edit and arrange those captured videos to make a movie viewable in a number of different formats. You can even make interactive videos for training and educational purposes with Camtasia Software. Needless to say, the software is very impressive but it has only one drawback that keeps me from buying it… It is only available for Microsoft Windows machines and is not currently available for the Macintosh platform (and may never be available on a Mac unless we can do some CrossOver trickery).

Today, I was thinking about how I needed to redo a demo for some software I developed for my personal business, Fruitful Solutions, and I needed to see what was available for doing this on the Mac. My 30-day free trial of Camtasia Studio expired a while ago and I didn’t really want to pay the $299.00 for Camtasia Studio plus have to use my Windows machine to do the demo. I did some searching and came upon a great alternative for a really great price. Enter Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software.

Snapz Pro X, version 2.0.3, is a very powerful application allowing a number of screen capture features for still images and video. There are a number of different compression and output options available for both types of captures as well as the ability to record anything that is playing internally on the Mac’s audio system and from a microphone input. Basically, I get all the functionality I had with Camtasia Studio, minus some editing features that I can do within additional free software if necessary, for the very welcome and very low price of $69!

I used the software this evening to see how well it worked and after easily creating a video capture of my desktop and me messing around in some applications, I was sold. The output at 30 FPS was phenomenal and the file size was manageable. I believe this software has every feature that I am looking for to recreate my presentation and demo for my application, even at a price almost anyone with the need can afford.

If you’re in the market for some screen capture software for your Mac, I highly recommend looking into Snapz Pro X. There is a trial version available so you can try before you buy. Give it a shot. I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed.

Until next time…

Originally posted on cocoacrusty.com on Monday, April 16th, 2007.

This post is the reason I posted my previous blog entry on installing the Metasploit framework on my Apple MacBook. Chris sent me a link to this movie showing someone exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows. The .ANI Header Stack Overflow vulnerability allows a remote attacker to send a malicious e-mail to an unsuspecting user with an unpatched Windows machine and gaining remote shell access.

After Metasploit was installed on my MacBook, I followed the steps in the movie as they were shown and it worked like a champ. The recipient of the e-mail has to be viewing the e-mail in HTML. I was only able to exploit this vulnerability when using Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft’s Outlook Express e-mail client’s when the client was setup to view messages in HTML. Either way, I gained access to one of my own machines using this exploit and it showed me just how easy it would be for someone with malicious intent to really wreak havoc on a novice or unsuspecting user.

I am impressed at the whole concept behind the Metasploit framework for exploiting known vulnerabilities and delivering payloads with basically the push of a button. The interface and command logic is easy to understand, for this exploit anyway, and I look forward to learning more about the framework, the exploits, and the payloads in the near future.

Until next time…

Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on Monday, April 16th, 2007.

I have known about the Metasploit framework for quite some time but have never really known how to use it or taken the time to learn. Recently, Chris inspired me to try it by showing me a movie explaining how to exploit a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows related to the .ANI Header Stack Overflow Vulnerability (more on this in my next post).

Before I could begin working with this nifty little exploit in Metaspolit I had to get the framework installed on my MacBook. Metasploit is a suite of Ruby scripts and will run on virtually any Unix based operating system and Windows (with some minor tweaking). I checked the MacPorts for Metasploit and it was available as a port install but the latest version in the ports tree was 2.7. I needed at least version 3.0, and later determined I needed a development version, version 3.1, from the trunk to get the exploit I was after.

The first thing I did was upgrade my Subversion client on Mac OS X. I got the universal binary from here and installing and upgrading my Subversion was pretty painless. It installed like most other Mac applications from a package.

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Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on March 27th, 2007.

I first saw this nice little trick a year or so ago. A fellow admin and friend of mine, Tommy, used a Bluetooth® headset to automatically lock his Windows machine whenever he stepped away from his computer and his headset was no longer in range of his PC’s Bluetooth® dongle. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this blog post yesterday, but I am glad I did. This post shows you how to implement a similar solution using an application called Proximity and some Apple Scripts to achieve the same result.

The cool thing about this solutions for the Mac is that the events that are triggered when the specified Bluetooth® device enters and leaves the Mac’s Bluetooth® proximity are Apple Scripts. Apple Scripts allow you to easily program for the Mac. Apple Scripts are pretty much the same thing as shell scripts for any other operating system and command line environment, like batch scripts for Windows and Bash or C Shell scripts for Unix based and derived operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD. Basically, with a solution like this, you aren’t tied to the developer’s ideas of what should happen when you step away from your machine. The ball is totally in your court and your goal is only limited by your creativity and your programming ability.

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Originally posted at cocoacrusty.com on March 27th, 2007.

Ok, so I blogged a while back in November of 2006 about being back in the wardriving game. Well, it turns out, that wasn’t entirely true. See, after I posted that entry on averageadmins.com, I never really did any wardriving. When I finally got ready to get back in the game and make some maps and what not using KisMAC and Google Earth, my MacBook’s built-in wireless NIC wasn’t 100% compatible with KisMAC. It seems that the 2nd generation of MacBooks changed their wireless chipsets and the new chipset isn’t 100% compatible with KisMAC. So, according to this document on the KisMAC developer WiKi, my best bet was to get a USB wireless NIC with a Prism2 chipset. So I did…

The bad thing about having to get this type of hardware is a) most of the devices with these chipsets are older wireless cards and kind of hard to locate, or b) the newer cards that are still manufactured with this chipset are pretty pricey. Well, I did a little eBaying and found a D-Link DWL-122 for around $60 with shipping and insurance. This was a great find as this device was still new in the box and the price wasn’t that bad considering I had to locate an affordable wireless card with a specific chipset. I placed my order on the 20th of this month and got it in yesterday… Guess what?! That’s right kids! I’ve already put it to use.

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