Archive for December, 2007

I had a goal to accomplish something over this holiday season:

It wasn’t do more for the needy, it wasn’t spread joy and love, or to promote goodwill toward mankind.

It was to get an old assed computer to surf the web with Windows 3.1

This is actually two computers stacked on top of each other in disgusting splendor. Behind their yellowed exteriors lies an incredibly slow, worthless CPU covered in dirt that smelled like urine.

The computer on the top had a 486DX core sporting a 33mhz clock rate and bus speed. It had 8 megabytes of RAM, 365 megabyte hard drive, a 3 1/2″ floppy and a 5 1/4″ floppy. I noticed a rusted-metal logo on the front that said “ALR EVOLUTION IV, VL Architecture”. The inside of the case was nasty, made me afraid I was going to catch the lock-jaw.

ALR stands for Advanced Logic Research, and I’m pretty sure they used to be like the Alienware of servers and business machines. I found a website where some geeks are trying to build a 6 processor legacy server out of parts they get from eBay, while synthesizing ones they can’t find, although judging by the looks of things, I think they may have given up and moved on: ALR Revolution 6×6 Motherboard Information

ALR was bought out by Gateway in 1997, explaining why none of us have really heard nor care about what ALR is, I figured there had to be a somewhat interesting story since the logo reminded me of the Nebuchadnezzar ship from “The Matrix”.

I couldn’t boot up the computer all the way because I didn’t have a keyboard that uses one of those big assed DIN connectors. I especially think that it was B.S. because it had a connector for a PS/2 mouse right beside of it that was the normal size for keyboards and mice for quite some time, only recently replaced by USB.

I thought the interior of the computer was very unique. It seems to me that old computers all look the same, not varying much from each other or the IBM clone physique. This computer is different, it had a funky fresh flavor all it’s own.

If you look closely there’s an open slot without a spacer, plus there’s some mismatched screws on the drive brackets (looks like someone found a part they needed before I got to it). Something that really caught my eye was the really strange looking graphics card manufactured by Western Digital through their subsidiary called “Paradise” (Western Digital manufacturing graphics cards? yessir).

From what I can tell, it looks like it uses the one part of an ISA slot (like an 8 bit card), and it carries all the way back to these PCI-looking brown slots (called VL or Video Local bus slots). I thought it was pretty weird.

Something else I thought was strange was this card that was directly beside the graphics card. It says on the back it is a “256K Cache Card for Evolution IV M/B”, it’s funny now because 256 kilobytes is like a regular sized Jpeg, but back in the day, that wasn’t so small and this computer must’ve been tough shit with this card devoted to it’s cache. The slot it sat in is called an ALR Proprietary slot, I guess you could have put different cool shit in it…

The socket the chip plugs into is a neat color and has a neat release lever. “Overdrive Ready” – I’m pretty sure means that I could have swapped the chip with a i486DX2 that runs at 66mhz, which the other old-assed computer actually has, and if it wasn’t for that stupid keyboard connector and the disgusting case, I’m sure I would have at least tried.

The middle picture shows just how important ALR was in the computing industry, the Intel Chip is branded with the ALR logo along with a phone number: (714) 581-6770

This motherboard had a stick of 4 megabyte SIMM RAM in it as well as what appears to be another 4 MB actually integrated into the motherboard… I guess so nobody could steal a stick from you…

The hard drive as I mentioned was a staggering 365 Megabytes, it’s a Quantum Lightning ProDrive that has a label that looks as if some tech center in an office stuck it on because they swapped drives into other computers… that’s my guess.

It was so hard for me to get a decent shot, but it looks like it says in half-assed cursive “Denise McDougla” with the rest of it rubbed off from wear. The dumb lady must’ve formatted her hard drive a few too many times for her hard drive label to be wore off, either that or was spoiled rotten and was given a new computer every time something better came out…

According to this handy owners manual I found online, this computer could be upgraded to a whopping 52 megs! It also looks like there were a lot of optional shit it could have came with, but I guess ol’ Denise didn’t think those options were necessary for their beast to perform.

So I disassembled the entire box and proceeded to assemble my loot into the other ancient computer I was given: The AT&T brand i486DX2-66!

To Be Continued…!

Be sure to check out the next balls-to-the-wall exciting installment of:

Old Assed Computers!

I don’t know just how well known this vulnerability is, but it is in my interests to shed some light on just how vulnerable this script is at its default, meaning when it’s installed “as is” without any “extra” programming or fixes. The Smarter Scripts freelancer script is a web application written in PERL (cgi) that allows a person to setup a site like Scriptlance.com and the like. Finding a vulnerable version of it only takes a search engine like google or yahoo. And if I’m not mistaken there is no default secure version.

“Index of /” inurl:freelancers

Query that.

What your looking for in the link to the crawled space are url’s that are addressed like /cgi-bin/freelancers or freelancers/data etc…Having directories traversable on the web can be dangerous for one thing, especially if your running a site that handles money. So as it unfolds within the Smarterscripts freelancer directory structure there lies a nifty little file called admin.pass, lol.

Imagine that.

The file is a plain text file that stores the administrator password to the script allowing a would be attacker access to the entirety of the applications backend of course. Member names with their passwords, banking informations, balances, last ip, last log in etc… all stored here….as well as an opportunity to download a backup of the so called “database” and upload a backup to take the place of the existing one.

smoooooth…

Merry Christmas everyone! We hope that you all get what you want this year and that the final days of 2007 find you well! Lots of new great stuff will be coming in the next days and especially in 2008 so we look forward to your visits a just as much as your participation in The Book of Fly! See you!

This one guy I work with overheard me talking about something about computers and asked me if I wanted an old computer. He isn’t very knowledgeable, and all he could say was that it was in his basement when he moved in.

He had no idea what kind it was or where it came from.

I thought to myself that it would probably be like pentium II-ish or something, and if it really was a really old computer, it would be kind of cool to have laying around, like an Apple II or an old Macintosh… that would look cool on a shelf in a basement, right?

With those low expectations, I found that I had high hopes.

He brings me in not one, but two dirty 486′s. One has just a 3 1/2 floppy, the other has a 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 drive. He also brings me in a small monitor that has some problem with the vertical hold, one of those big-assed IBM keyboards and a kinda neat looking squared Compaq ps/2 mouse.

I couldn’t complain. I mean I agreed to taking them, plus he did say and emphasized “Old Computer”.

He probably thought it was even better to have brought two.

I have yet to turn them on and really look around, he says he booted one up and saw “A Window, it kinda looks like Windows”.

I turned one on at work and I saw the BIOS screen, and even though the monitor was flipping around wildly, I could make out 486 @ 66mhz with 8 MB RAM.

At the moment, I’m kind of worried that I’m going to get the reputation at work of either being a guy who will gladly help you get rid of your old computer stuff, or the negative side of looking like a pack-rat garbage collector.

One key element that cheered me up was that I noticed a networking card in the back of the nicer looking one, so I came up with an idea:

During my vacation from work, what if I combined all the components between the two into one computer, then try to network it with my setup and try to browse the web with it.

It’s going to be a stupid but fun project.

…Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to find a browser that’s compatible with Windows 3.11

The other day Maboroshi of Techshinobi and Flyninja released a new file watching program named ‘Fuct Up File Program’. The utility watches file system changes of files and directories that are specified by the user and utilizes the power of regmon to watch the registry. The interface is very simple to use and is pretty self explanatory.

The application was written in Python and can be found here

10 years in the making, 10 years of waiting, might finally come to an end.

3dRealms released a new teaser trailer to Duke Nukem Forever, and words can’t describe it.

We’ve missed you, champ.
Read more on Duke from the super-fans at http://www.duke4.net and of course the official site of Duke Nukem at http://www.3drealms.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx7zLdXUie0&eurl=http://www.duke4.net/news.php[/youtube]

This is a tool I developed exclusively for Flyninja and Suck-o made by me Maboroshi

Updated Now Traverses Directories and looks for changes in files also

Download: http://www.techshinobi.com/software/filewatcher.exe

Install is simple I won’t explain that

Basically this tool allows you to watch for changes in your file system and registry:::

How to use guide

Step One#

Launch the Program > Start > All Programs > Tech Shinobi > File Watcher

once the program is open you will see

To run the Real Time File watcher click watch. #note# you can run Regmon at the same time if you like to watch for registry changes

This is a program I developed to watch for things such as spyware and viruses, what they change when and what files they add when they are installed on Your system

This is a beta app 0.9 Version

Cheers and have fun

Maboroshi

Ok so Backtrack 3 Beta is out and has been getting alot of attention from what I can see. So here I am sitting in my shorts about to tell you how I installed it to my HDD. I ran the live CD frst to get a feel for the operating system, now I am familiar with Backtrack 2, so getting into this wasn’t all that difficult. If you don’t know about Backtrack, then you should go ahead and head over to Offensive-Security to get the scoop because explaining the distro is out of the scope of this article.

My first step was to acquire the .iso image of Backtrack 3 Beta and burn the image to a disk, I used a DVD simply because I wanted to be safe with space, and I have seen responses that the distribution wasn’t burning to a CD (difference of what 8mb almost? anyways) .

Next I fully wiped my c:\ drive for the new operating system and made sure I did’nt have any straggling partitions.

Next I had to recreate my partition table, I used fdisk in the command line, but there are other programs that can make this task a bit simpler like QTparted which you can find already pre-installed in other distributions. I created 3 partitions the first one was my boot partition table with the ext3 filesystem and allocated about 50mb for it, second I created a 2gb Linux swap, and third I created a partition in the ext3 filesystem and allocated the rest of the remaining disk space to it. You should label the partitions accordinly. My table looked something like this:

/dev/sda1………………………….50MB……………..ext3………………..

/dev/sda2…………………………2GB ………………..linux-swap………

/dev/sda3…………………………247.5GB………….ext3…………………

Create some new directories and mount sda1 and sda2

bt~# cd tmp

bt~# mkdir boot

bt~# mkdir bt3

bt~#mount /dev/sda1

bt~#mount /dev/sda3

Now run your live disk of Backtrack 3 and go into KDE (startx command) when its finished loading goto the Backtrack menu and scroll down to Install Backtrack (not tested) and open it, a green box will appear with some settings you will have to fill in, the first box for the source, I removed what was in there and replaced it with /boot, then replaced the second text box with /tmp/bt3, make sure to choose REAL for the install method and make sure the checkbox for restore .mbr(main boot record) is NOT checked. Then press install. Wait for it, usually the install will hang a bit at around 80%, be patient its just working on a huge file. When installation is finished, close the window and logout to the command line. Now you need to copy some files. At the command line type ls to list the files and directories, you see /boot and there should also be a directory /tmp. Copy all the files from the /boot directory to /tmp/boot and once again to /tmp/bt3/boot . The command to copy is: cp [file to copy] [where to copy to], and if you want to make it easy for the directories use the switch -a

bt boot # cp [file] [to location]

or

bt boot# cp -a [dir] [to location]

reboot your system, and remove CD, voila! you should have it up and running Stay tuned because I also installed Backtrack 3 a different way that of which I will post another time.