I started downloading rainbow tables LM Hashes for all symbols. They were 120 GB big and were available for download via torrent. But I’d been stuck at 92.2% of the download forever thinking that there were no seeders. As it turns out, the problem was in the torrent file. The torrent for the 120 GB LM Hashes all symbols can be obtained from 120 GB LM Hashes [all english characters] Rainbow Tables.

Let’s assess the situation: You have a 3G phone which allows tethering, a windows machine, a wireless access point and another PC that is connected to the LAN port of the wireless access point (or typically called a wireless router). The wireless access point is a home network and your ISP decides to disconnect your signal or is experiencing some problems. How do you share your 3G connection, so that other computers can connect through the wireless AP and use your cell phone’s 3G connection? It’s actually quite simple.

Tether your smartphone (in this case let’s say blackberry). Blackberry tethering in Windows over AT&T is allowed using a software called AT&T Communication Manager. Install ACM, and connect your Windows machine using a mini-USB cable to your phone. Goto Start->Run->cmd.exe. Type ipconfig /all to see the IP address and the DNS servers IP addresses.

Now connect the WAN link of your Wireless access point to this Windows machine’s ethernet port. Setup a static IP for this Windows machine say 192.168.10.1 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. Now go to Network connections (from Control Panel), right click on the Mobile connection representing your blackberry, click on Advanced. In the Internet Connection Sharing section, check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection” and select “Local Area Connection” (this is the same connection you connected to the WAN port of the wireless AP). Click OK. You may have to disconnect and reconnect your ACM connection to allow the settings to take effect.

Now that this is done, connect to the administration interface of the wireless access point to the other PC that is connected to the LAN port (or through the wireless) to the access point. Go to the administration interface of the wireless AP, and set a static IP for the router in the same subnet as with the Windows box (the one you set with 192.168.10.1). Set the static IP on the AP to be say 192.168.10.2 (remember this has to be the same subnet), netmask as 255.255.255.0 and then the most important, the default gateway to 192.168.10.1 (the IP of the windows box on the ethernet card). To set the DNS server addresses, use the same addresses you found using ipconfig /all in the first step. Otherwise you could also use open DNS servers or any other DNS servers but it’ll be best to use the DNS servers pointing to the ones used by the tethered connection because you can rule out DNS issues if something isn’t working and it comes down to troubleshooting. Once on the router, the static is set, the gateway is set, the DNS is set, you should be able to connect from your wireless network to the internet through your 3G connection! 🙂
Happy internet sharing! 🙂
Here is a schematic diagram:

[tethering]                [static IP]    [static IP]   [internal IP]  [DHCP address]
                                   |         |                |           |
[ phone ] <==> [Windows machine]:eth0 <==> wan:[Wireless AP]:lan <==> [client]

Another trip to the national parks of US. This time in Arizona State! The Grand Canyon in AZ, USA lying on the Colorado Plateau in Northwestern Arizona is a blistering (not because of heat, though) example of soil erosion caused over more than 4000 years by Colorado river.
We organized a trip of 8 people in a Toyota Sienna. It turned out to be a fantastic van and it could easily carry the load of all the eight people and still not run out of steam like we did on the trail.
We reached the Canyon at around 7:50 am on the Saturday morning after an 8 hr drive. But getting apermit at such a short notice in summer is really difficult. So we ended up with no campgrounds in the Mather campground as well as the Backcountry CBG campground (Bright angel creek, just 0.5 miles from the Colorado river). So we first went to 10-X Campground just near the Grand Canyon Airport. This campground is on first come first served basis and takes only 10 bucks for a day. Anyway, we did not have too many choices with the campground so we had to take whatever spot we got.
Then at around 11:30 am we started on the Bright Angel Trail. According to the canyon officials the worst times to take the trails is between 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. But the brave souls that we were, our enthusiasm and inexperience with Canyon led us to believe our valor more than we had! So we began the trail with a backpack carrying water and food for each person. Every man for himself!
But we met a volunteer on the way who advised us that unless we were Marathon runners (which we are not by any stretch of imagination) going to the Plateau Point and coming back on the same day is not advisable. The thoughts that he put into our minds germinated into a tree of doubt which we could not climb.
We could reach only the 3-mile point and climbed back up. But as it turns out we had made almost 70% of the elevation and most of the inclining hike. Had we continued the further trail was not at all steep. But this is hindsight or may be a case of sour grapes or maybe a case of inflated self-esteem !?!!
Then after coming back exhausted from the trail we set up our tent and after some food went off for a well-deserved siesta. The next day after lot of deliberation from Gandhe and Sardar we made it again to the Canyon to look at the points on the South Rim itself. After going afound in the bus we saw most of the points and then headed back to LA with the same reverse route (64 S – 40 W – 15 S – 10 W)!
-Rajat.
My homepage.

The introduction of low-cost flying alternatives in the Indian skies is a good thing for the Indian consumers as one would reckon. However, the consumers only stand to gain if they get a service which at least gets them their money worth.
Sadly though, the quality of service provided by these low-cost airlines is also “low-grade”. The business principle seems sound that people who want food/refreshments in flight buy it but that does not necessarily mean that one gets hard pressed to board the flight itself. The airline management needs to rethink that low-cost does not mean high tension. My flight experience was as follows:
I was to board the flight from Delhi – Mumbai at around 9:00 pm. However, until 10:30 pm there were no announcements which made me ponder about the very existence of the flight itself. At about 11:00 pm it was announced that the entry would be from Gate # 3. The people rushed in like a horde of animals trying to get into a DTC (Delhi Transport Corporation) bus. Then a technical snag – the key was unable to open the gate # 3 – occurred to make the matters worse. The gates were changed to Gate # 1 resulting into a new frenzy of people trying to reach gate # 1. In what ensued, there were a series of announcements for passengers to board the flight, however, there was a slight problem. The officials on Gate # 1 were not ready to let passengers through. The flights like “Air Deccan” have given a new meaning to the term “fight to the finish” as your fight to get a seat in the flight never ends!

Now I’ve no problems considering that the population of India is huge. However, I do have a problem when seemingly intelligent (?) people do not display basic intelligence. Air Deccan issues unique numbers on it’s boarding passes when people check-in. Why these numbers are not used for seat assignments is a question that only Air Deccan can answer. Apparently, they use these numbers to identify which passengers have / have not boarded the flight.

Unitl these companies realize that cheap tickets should not mean cheap quality the consumers will continue to remain at a loss in these airlines which are advertized as a “high value for money”.

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

Come end of semester and the project deadlines start impending! The situation I am in is one of great thrill and rush! For the CS558L I’m doing this project in which I have to implement an automated worm fingerprinting mechanism but not only that combining it with ITrace I want to make Worm attacks and DDoS attacks a thing of past!
The scheme in plain English is to detect automatically if your network is being attacked by looking at the traffic and if so communicate this information to whoever you are forwarding this packet to! The ICMP messages that will be forwarded will carry information about who sent this traffic and other such information (including the signature of attack traffic). The receiver with all this information could gather the source of attacks. If all the routers followed this scheme then we will be able to reconstruct the entire path of the attack so the entry point of the attack could also be sealed….(hopefully leading to a Worm and DDoS attack-free internet)!!!
Really hopeful…aren’t I??? 😉
But again this technique has the same single flaw as the other techniques in that it needs co-operation between ISPs.
I am currently coding this scheme in the Linux Kernel 2.6.11.7 and this is my first tryst with linux kernel programming…let’s see what future holds for me!

The problem: Using Digital Certificates issued by a Certification Authority (CA) with curl.

The situation: I have a .cer (Digital Certificate) file, .pfx (Personal Information Exchange file i.e., the private key for the certificate). I cannot use either of these to authenticate to the web service as curl would not accept these formats.

The solution:
1) Convert it into PEM format (X.509 certificate) using openssl.
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out abcd.pem
Enter a passphrase and a password.
2) Still you cannot use this with curl because you’d get a few errors.
3) Convert this PEM certificate into three different certificates for the client, the private key and the certification authority certificate.
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out ca.pem -cacerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out client.pem -clcerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in abcd.pfx -out key.pem -nocerts
4) Use the following command:
curl -k https://www.thesitetoauthenticate.com/test -v –key key.pem –cacert ca.pem –cert client.pem:

This stuff is also mentioned on curl forum at http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2005-09/0138.html