An interesting thing happened today …I was trying to redirect some input to /dev/null in cygwin…using something like:
some_exec -p params 2>&/dev/null | grep blah
I kept getting an error : bash: Ambiguous redirect.
I then realized that I should probably doing a simple direct and not a re-direct…seemed to solve my problem. Come to think of it…it makes sense, why should I need to redirect when I’m sending it to /dev/null…should simply be able to direct it using:
some_exec -p paraa 2>/dev/null | grep blah

Installing Firewalk turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be. There were some compilation issues and some library errors.
The chief amongst them was:

checking for arp_get in -ldnet... no
configure: error: No libdnet?  http://libdnet.sourceforge.net.

I did install libdnet using aptitude but it did not do the trick. Thereafer, searching a few forums got me this information. The “Libdnet” that Firewalk looks for is libdumbnet1 in the ubuntu language.
So I got the Debian packages from the following links:
libdnet1
libdnet-dev
I continued to get that error and no wonder because there was nothing in /usr/lib.
So I executed the following commands :

$ cd /usr/lib
$ sudo ln -s libdumbnet.so libdnet.so
$ cd /usr/include
$ sudo ln -s dumbnet.h dnet.h

Then there was a compilation error:

firewalk.c: In function ‘firewalk’:
firewalk.c:193: error: label at end of compound statement
make[1]: *** [firewalk.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/trance/Desktop/Firewalk/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

So then opening the firewalk.c file in vim (and following up on line 193) showed that the “break;” statement was missing after default: switch statement.
So then I added the the following characters (without quotes) “break;” at a line above the comment as shown below:

                    default:
                        break;
                        /* empty */

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo cp man/firewalk.8 /usr/local/man/man8

Now firewalk was installed and ready to use!

I decided to play around with Spike fuzzer and encountered some weird errors during installation. I was using gcc 4.1.2.

gcc -ggdb -o generic_listen_tcp generic_listen_tcp.o dlrpc.o 
dlargs.o spike.o listener.o hdebug.o tcpstuff.o 
spike_dcerpc.o base64.o udpstuff.o spike_oncrpc.o -ldl -L. -ldlrpc
/usr/bin/ld: generic_listen_tcp: hidden symbol `__stack_chk_fail_local' in
/usr/lib/libc_nonshared.a(stack_chk_fail_local.oS) is referenced by DSO
/usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Nonrepresentable section on output
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [generic_listen_tcp] Error 1

If you are also getting the same error, I would recommend that you do the following

SPIKE/SPIKE/src$ ./configure

Now open the Makefile in your favorite editor and edit the CFLAGS line to include the following option:

-fno-stack-protector

This is how my CFLAGS line looks like in the Makefile:

CFLAGS = -Wall -funsigned-char -c -fPIC -ggdb -fno-stack-protector

This should make it build fine (I do get a few warnings but that’s cool…it still does not result in a no-build.

I was playing with PaiMei and trying to get some initial stuff working on Pai Mei Reverse Engineering framework by Pedram Amini.
It was a smooth ride until the following steps:
1. Install MySQL
2. Install wxPython
3. Install GDE and uDraw

There was a slight problem in the __install_requirements.py file that it would always look at C:\Program Files for the files whereas my files were in S:\Program Files.
Either way a small change from C to S in the __install_requirements.py did the trick. Thereafter, when I ran __setup_mysql.py script I got the following error:

Seems like MySQL should not be running in “strict” mode while you run this script. I got this information from the following link:
http://paimei.openrce.org:8000/ticket/5

I recently got a Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 player just for kicks to check it out. Seems like the hardware runs a stripped down Windows install having FAT32 file system on it. What was interesting was, that somehow my files got corrupted and had to format the drive (My Computer -> eSansa(G:) -> Right click to “Format..”). All the folders disappeared and when I restarted they reappeared. What seemed to crash it was the presence of a few folders that I created not realizing that Sansa did not support folders as the HelpDesk person told me. Makes me wonder what kind of unstable condition would a folder creation have caused. I think I’ll need to further research this error.