Phocean.net

bugmenot.com

JC — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:34:09 +0000

I just discovered the BugMeNot service today.

It offers a database of logins shared by the community to login to free websites that require free registration.

This is usually annoying to subscribe to such a website just to download a freeware or read an article, and it often makes people choose unsecured or random logins.

They even provide an extension for Firefox. Thanks to this great website, you are probably going to save a lot of time.

Packetlife.net

JC — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:54:19 +0000

I added a new link to Packetlife.net, which is a really amazing website about networking, with focus on Cisco stuff.

The work that the author made is truly impressive : blog, cheat sheets, gentle forum and even a lab (I haven’t test because I don’t need it, but if you are a student, it is great for students and so far I have never seen any other website offering it), all integrated with a quality level that is rare to find even on professional website.

This is one the best website I have never seen in all categories and certainly the best about Cisco networking. If you are interested in this topic, visit there right now.

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Simulated massive cyber attack filmed by CNN

JC — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:32:10 +0000

This video, while “amusing”, is quite interesting :

Though not many details are given, I am quite skeptical about the possibility of such a massive attack.

However, it shows well that security is not just a technical matter. It has many implications in law, politics, economics, and a whole information system must be prepared to that, starting with our leaders.

That would be a HUGE effort for our politicians here in France – if they ever care…

Cold boot attack, not a threat to Full disk encryption (FDE)

Netios 0.73

JC — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:51:59 +0000

Netios 0.73 fixes some bugs and

Complete changelog :

2010-02-10 (0.73) Jean-Christophe Baptiste

* remove useless options
* fix various bugs

Check there (tools page) for more details and a download link.

Hostcheck

JC — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 12:44:21 +0000

I continue to publish some my coding.

Hostcheck is a simple Perl script that can be useful to quickly check if a list of host is up.
It just read a host file and check if the host are available doing a ping test or trying to open a socket.

Nothing great, but it may help to quickly check that most of things are right after a network change, for instance.
Because we want to test many hosts, and not to scan, the pace is fast so it may not be 100% reliable. The idea is to see roughly is the connectivity is correct or if your whole LAN is down.
It uses colors and is easy to read, so it might be good to show to your manager !

I hope it will be useful. More info and download link are there.

Netios 0.72

JC — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:20:55 +0000

Netios 0.72 fixes some bugs with the show_run mode and large config files. I also found some issues concerning the prompt detection, so it should be fixed now.

Complete changelog :

2010-01-14 (0.72) Jean-Christophe Baptiste

* ciscoclass.py : forgot to remove a debug print
* ciscoclass.py : finish and fix a bunch of bugs in the show run function, format the config file properly
* ciscoclass.py : fix the prompt regex

Check there (tools page) for more details and a download link.

So much noise from Google about the attacks in China !?

JC — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:42:41 +0000

And Google is making so much noise about that ?

If what is said is true, it nothing else but a trojan. A good one, but nothing new otherwise.

I would also say that the most targeted company was Microsoft. After all, it was an Internet Explorer 0-days breach that was exploited. Once the computer was infected, I bet that the trojan was doing much more than just targeting Gmail. To maximise the chance of an attack to succeed, a good trojan comes with a bunch of functionalities and harvest as many things as possible on the computer. Thus I doubt the target was only Google.

As Steve Ballmer said (hey, I didn’t think I would ever quote him here ! ), it happens every day. And it must not be something new in a country like China. And suddenly, Google cares ? Whereas they quietly applied censorship in China until then ? I always become suspicious when a multinational company claims it cares about human rights to the detriment of its business.

Maybe Google is just really wanting to get out of China for some reason (not so popular there with the competition of Baidu?) and is looking for an excuse. More details will certainly be coming so time will tell…

Privacy and Facebook

JC — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 09:51:42 +0000

That is exactly why I have never used – and will never use – Facebook or anything like that.

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SSL/TLS RFC updated against CVE-2009-3555

JC — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 11:23:09 +0000

A solution has been finally brought up to fix CVE-2009-3555 and the temporary solution that broke client authentication.

At least, the IETF agreed on a fix as Marsh Ray informs us, though it will still take some weeks for the whole validation process to complete.

Moreover, as it requires both the servers and the clients to be patched, it will take months before the patches can be applied and one can have a working client authentification architecture. The longest will be the client side, of course, so I feel sorry for those who have a large park to manage.

As far as I am concerned, fortunately, I will just have a few browsers that I manage directly to update. Anyway, still more patience is needed !

Netios 0.71

JC — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:34:37 +0000

I release a new version of Netios : 0.71.

There are a lot of changes, starting with cosmetics, but the biggest one is the support of multiprocessing.

It is now able to process several routers at the same time, so using it on a large list of machines results in a big speed up.

A downside is that it now requires at least Python 2.6, as multiprocessing started to be supported with this version only. Most Linux distributions now include Python 2.6, but still not all. Anyway it will be more and more the case. If you can’t uprade your distribution, you can stick with 0.60 which still do most of the work fine.

It is also now able to fetch a configuration file remotly, but it requires more testing before I feel confident in the way it works.

The complete changelog :

2009-12-20 (0.71) Jean-Christophe Baptiste ;

* ciscoclass.py : handle correctly the cisco pager — More — so that “show run” mode should work even with large config files
* sshclass.py : allow to override terminal size system settings (make use of the cisco pager to avoid filling the buffer)

2009-11-16 (0.70) Jean-Christophe Baptiste (private release)

* implement multiprocessing
* improve code documentation
* clean up UI
* reduce useless logging
* netios.py : bug : missing startTime parameter in f_skip_error and f_command functions

I cross my fingers so that there are not too many bugs, but if so, please don’t forget to report it to me.

Check there (tools page) for more details and a download link.