In the capitalist world, it is said that the companies survive on the hyper-consumerism of the people. The highly competitive economical scenario results in an environment where (as they say) consumer is the winner, but not without a fight.
A few weeks back, my Compaq Presario Laptop 2575us went bad. Well, the laptop is 2 yrs old and it has already been serviced twice so I guess my patience thresholds have diminished over a period of time. But this time around a person with even immense patience could have lost his mind. So here’s what happened. My laptop’s S-video port had been dysfunctional since the time I can recall but I never had so much time to let my laptop go out of my hands. This time when I sent it for repairs my laptop almost disappeared from the face of the earth for almost 25 days. And when they returned it to me to a wrong address I had a premonition of difficult times. The “repaired” laptop even failed to start.
This really infuriated me coz my 25 day wait had gone down the drain. So I called up the customer care and they asked me to ship the laptop to service center yet again. But this time around they wanted me to wait for 3 days before I could FedEx it to them. It was completely unacceptable to me. So I spoke to the supervisor and became as adamant as a stone. I continued to ask him for next day shipping and he continued to repeat that he could not do that. A 2hr45min sparring continued on the phone and it resulted in him being the loser as he disconnected the phone. He kept saying that this discussion is going nowhere as we cannot reach an agreement and I kept insisting that the call had multiple destinations : 1. To the HP supervisors and 2. To the BBB .
This guy called himself Nick and he also refused to give me his employee number. I knew very well (because of past experience that Compaq uses words like “You have no proof for your requests” etc.) so this time I needed some real strong evidence of my conversation. So I requested the permission from this Nick guy to allow me to record the conversation. I think this made him a little wary of my intentions. But still he did not give me his details. I think he was really scared because he felt that my wrath could result in him facing the music from his bosses in Palo Alto, CA. There were a few interesting discussions, for example, he said “I am Nick and you can identify me with this name alone.” to which I retorted by saying “Well…I know that Nick is a common name in U.S and you guys might as well redirect my call to NY Knicks judging by the way things are going.”.
So the next day I called up the HP Customer Care Service Manager’s Line at 1-877-917-4380 , code 94 option 1. This time I spoke to a guy called Douglas Gilmore who was equally tough with me (if not more). He refused to acknowledge any of my concerns initially. But later as the conversation progressed, it went on from being just a plain discussion to a heated argument. However, I did not utter even a single foul word because I knew that he could use my language as a pretext to disconnect my call which I was not willing to risk at all. So throughout the discussion I kept my head cool and tried to explain the things to him. But after going through the history of the whole thing, he realized that I had suffered a lot because of this laptop and that the attitude of the Customer care was rather cold. So he finally agreed to give me a replacement after much requests. This was probably my best argument till date and I think that it was some good thinking on my part as well as some codial behavior on the part of the managers that I could get what I truly deserved: a replacement to my defective laptop.
-Rajat.
Japanese art forms

A moratorium for 3 months on the blogspot. The things have changed dramatically when it comes to the life. A lot has happened in my life since the time I left Los Angeles, CA to come to New York, NY. The two of the biggest cities of not only the USA but in the world as well.
First things first…got a job for Ernst & Young’s Advanced Security Center and so like most of the people who work in New York I live in Jersey City, NJ and travel to work. The travel is not too bad as it takes about 45 mins door-to-door. Also, by living in New Jersey instead of 5 boroughs (New Yorkers call the collection of 5 islands of Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, Statten Island as the 5 boroughs) one saves the 4% annual New York city tax.
Now for the topic of this blog which is “Moving”…which is probably the most troublesome experience that people have. It wasn’t too good for me either but it could have been worse if it were not for the help of some good friends. People say that you realize the truthfulness of your friends during the time of adversity. It was exactly what I found. Whereas some people came to the fore to help me in all the ways they could, some stayed at the bay (and in some cases … making sure that the buoy of my life was in doldrums). Well…having said that life is but a bunch of grapes … some sweet and some sour (this is something I heard in the Hindi Movie “Khatta Meetha”)!
Finding apartments in the New York area can be a harrowing experience, especially if you are hard strung on budget. That was exactly what I found. The best places to look for are New Jersey Craigslist and New York Craigslist. Other places are Rent.com and Apartments.com but I did not find them much useful. I found that New York had some really good places to rent even with a tight budget. All these places were in Queens (Rego Park, Forest Hills). The good part was one could get a 2BR for $1450+ in these places. These places were not too far from the Subway stations and had a travel of 40-45 mins to Manhattan and 1 hr to Long Island (using Long Island Rail Road aka LIRR).
Jersey City in NJ is also a very good bet. But there are some places in Jersey City that are posh as hell but you have to pay the price for the class. Exchange place and Pavonia/Newport are examples of these places (with prices around $1700 for 1 BR) . Grove street is also a place which is somewhere in between the posh and the not-at-all posh. Even though the prices in Exchange place and Newport are really high but the class is well worth the money. Especially when you consider that getting a similar type of apartment in Manhattan will cost at least twice or may be thrice as much. Another avenue for exploration is Hoboken, NJ. Hoboken was personally my favorite place to look for an apartment because it is a place with a vibrancy associated with it. Almost looks like a European city bustling with restaurants and youth on the streets! It is also not too far from New York. However just like Pavonia/Newport & Exchange Place this fun doesn’t come cheap! The apartment costs are similar. The difference between Newport – Exchange Place & Hoboken is that the construction in Hoboken is older and you need a realtor for getting an apartment more than you need in former. Realtors have standard 1 month rent as the fee as their service charges.
In case you are wondering what a realtor is – a realtor is a person who searches for an apartment for you that fits within your budget and choice. But when it comes to realtors one must be wary of them because they can sometimes be a dangerous bet to pick!
West coast was much easier to find apartments in from my experience but it could be because I was looking for apartments in a University area which is probably easier.

-Rajat
http://rajatswarup.blogspot.com/

I have used Michal Zalewski’s Ratproxy on Google code. I like it a lot. But I also like to have it on Windows. But it seems that the makefile that comes with ratproxy is not really compatible with cygwin.
If you have the gcc, make, openssl, openssl-dev packages installed on cygwin, all you need to do is remove the -Wno-pointer flag from the CFLAGS entry from the Makefile.
So my Makefile’s CFLAGS line looks like:

CFLAGS  = -Wall -O3 -D_GNU_SOURCE

I also replaced $(CC) with gcc just because I felt like it. 🙂
Compile it with make command.
Do not forget to dos2unix the ratproxy-report.sh otherwise you will get some errors with ‘\r’ and some other random stuff when you run the report generator shell scripts.
Run ratproxy as :
c:\tools\ratproxy>ratproxy.exe -p 8000 -v c:\testdir -w ratlog -d example.com -extifscfjmXCk
Once you have the log to generate a nice looking pretty report:
bash$ ./ratproxy-report.sh ratlog >reportname.html

Update 06/20/2012:
If you get the error shown below:
ratproxy.c: In function `listen_loop':
ratproxy.c:1635:5: error: incompatible type for argument 2 of `waitpid'
/usr/include/sys/wait.h:43:7: note: expected `__wait_status_ptr_t' but argument
is of type `unsigned int *'
Makefile:30: recipe for target `ratproxy' failed
make: *** [ratproxy] Error 1

Do the following:
1. Go to line # 1635 and change the line to while (waitpid(-1,(int*)&x,WNOHANG) > 0);
2. Goto the command line and type

make

You should be able to compile ratproxy.

I was getting CUPSD errors when trying to use my Laser Brother HL 2040 printer. But, you can install Brother HL-2040 by going to the brother website and downloading the linux drivers located here:
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_prn.html#HL-2040
I just installed the lpd driver using the command as follows:
$ sudo dpkg -i brhl2070nlpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
When printing now, just select local lpd and then select brother-HL2070 printer from the list (the drivers for both versions are same).

So the other day I was on a pen test and I got hold of the hashes. Since my laptop got fried I needed a new version of SMBProxy. There were a few issues that I had with the compilation though. I got a few errors in the file crypto.c.
Moreover, SMBProxy ues crypto library libdes written by Eric Young available here.
I give here a guide to compiling SMBProxy that worked for me.

First, compile and install libdes

1. Download libdes 4.01
2. tar zxvf libdes-4.01.tar.gz
3. cd libdes
4. make gcc
5. sudo make install

Now, you’ll find that the file libdes.a is now in /usr/local/lib.
Second, compile and install SMBProxy. Now here there were a couple of compilation errors that I had to deal with.
Here’s the diff output for crypto.c

trance@z0n3:~/Desktop$ diff smbproxy/crypto.c smbproxy-orig-src/crypto.c
40,41c40
< #include
< #define MD4_SIGNATURE_SIZE 16 --- >
46c45
<> static u_char Get7Bits(UCHAR *input, int startBit) {
58c57
<> static void MakeKey(UCHAR *key, UCHAR *des_key) {
74c73
<> void DesEncrypt(UCHAR *clear, UCHAR *key, UCHAR *cipher) {
85c84
<> void mkResponse(UCHAR **ntlmhash, UCHAR hash[MD4_SIGNATURE_SIZE], UCHAR* challenge) {
88c87
<> UCHAR ntlm_response[24];

Having done this there were still a few issues with the make comand.
The Makefile can be generated by running the following command:

trance@z0n3:~/Desktop/smbproxy-orig-src$ ./configure

Here’s the diff output of the Makefile:

trance@z0n3:~/Desktop$ diff smbproxy/Makefile smbproxy-orig-src/Makefile
10,11c10,11
< smbbf_include =" -Iinclude">
< libs ="">
—
> SMBBF_INCLUDE = -Iinclude
> LIBS = des
31c31
< $(LIBDES) $(LIBS)
—
> $(LIBDES)

The following libraries are required: openssl, openssl-dev, libdes for successfully compiling SMBProxy.

apt-get install openssl openssl-dev

A simple way to install Backtrack 4 on a USB stick is to use UNetBootin. UNetbootin can be used to create live (i.e., bootable images with a fully functional OS on it) USB images. This is the first time I tried this route and it seems to work alright.
Otherwise, if you are the linux fans, our good old friend dd does a great job.

dd if=bt4-final.iso of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=noerror,sync

It’s a brand new day with no novelty! Back to the lab today trying to now get access to the packet data to calculate the hash values. I suspect that inside netfilter’s sk_buff structure there’s an unsigned char* data field. This probably is exactly what I need to get the hash values. There’s this awesome link which has great information about sk_buff structure. The unsigned int len; has the size of the complete input data including the headers. I guess if this len value == size of the actual data for the IP header (which could be TCP header / UDP header / ICMP header) then if we are using chunks of this data to find hashes then the following algorithm could be used:

no_of_chunks = len / BYTE_SIZE_FOR_SIGN;

for (int i = 0; i < no_of_chunks; i++)
{
  storeInTable(hashRabin(data,i*BYTE_SIZE_FOR_SIGN,
               (i+1)*BYTE_SIZE_FOR_SIGN - 1 ,0));
}
storeInTable(
hashRabin(data,no_of_chunks*BYTE_SIZE_FOR_SIGN,
        no_of_chunks*BYTE_SIZE_FOR_SIGN+addendum, 0)
);

This are my initial thoughts let’s see how it works out!

-Rajat.
Rajat’s Homepage