It’s amazing to me how many veteran IT gurus are unwilling to teach people new to the industry. I remember logging onto IRC chat rooms and seeing one person after another being degraded or insulted for asking valid legitimate questions. I was shocked to find that this was NOT the norm in the amateur (ham) [...]

Working in IT can be stressful. Many technologists go unappreciated and are only noticed when something is not to the user’s liking. This creates a feeling of being undervalued. What can you do? Here is a small list of tasks that may help. Create a daily log where you write at least ONE way you [...]

The boy looked at the digital horizon. Squinting; not with his eyes but with his mind. He was trying to make sense of it all. It’s almost in focus but not enough to make sense of it all. “Why can’t I see it?” Take a step backwards; no that makes it blurry. Take two steps [...]

UPDATE: 5.9.1 seems to work without the need to manually compile libssh. Simply replace the libssh part below with sudo apt-get install libssh-dev Also, grab 5.9.1 using wget -c http://freeworld.thc.org/releases/hydra-5.9.1-src.tar.gz Wikipedia describes THC-Hydra as “… software … that uses a dictionary attack to test for weak or simple passwords on one or many remote hosts [...]

This week I learned to use a command line XML Toolkit called XMLStarlet. It’s pretty easy to use considering I was trying to create the same process in Java using XOM. I’m a bit familiar with SQL Select statements and wanted something similar to that. XMLStarlet can use XPath statements which aren’t as powerful as [...]

This is my second year in my son’s school PTA and I decided to make more of an effort this year. I was happy to be elected the acting CIO of this small group and decided that they need their own website. Here is my contribution to my son’s education. Spring Valley Elementary School PTA [...]

I recently needed to retrieve Biblical texts out of a few paragraphs. My original text was something like this: (John 14:30; Luke 4:6) … “the entire inhabited earth.” (Revelation 12:9) I jumped over to my text-editor’s Search feature to see if I can find a way to do this. I noticed it had a Search [...]

Users are still known to use simple passwords. If you need to help convince someone of the importance of strong passwords, you can use a brute force tool to demonstrate what a good password list can do. The first brute-force tool I ever picked up was THC-Hydra which supports all kinds of protocols like HTTP, [...]

Wikipedia describes THC-Hydra as “… software … that uses a dictionary attack to test for weak or simple passwords on one or many remote hosts running a variety of different services.” Its useful for doing quick tests against your servers to make sure that your users are not using simple passwords. In pen tester speak, [...]

OMG, Installing Metasploit on Ubuntu is SOOO easy now. I installed it all of 5 minutes by following the instructions at http://www.metasploit.com/redmine/projects/framework/wiki/Install_Linux.