VMWare is excellent for malware analysts because it lets you keep snapshots of pristine Virtual machine states and you can revert back to them when you want to.
I encountered a weired error this time around on my Windows XP Pro VM. Whenever I would try to take any snapshots I would get an error: “Error taking snapshot: Windows XP Professional.VMX-Snapshot1.vmsn file already exists”. When I looked into the folder there was no .vmsn file with that name. I deleted all the files .lck and .lock files and still to no avail. Then I saw the files named as
Windows XP Professional-000001-s00?.VMDK.
The regex for these files was:
Windows XP Professional-00000?-s00?.VMDK
where ? is one character replaced by 0-9. Upon deleting these files, my snapshots started working properly.

This had me stumped but it’s not that tough. The persona website getpersonas.com tends to install personas without any permissions. But you can disable it by typing “about:config” in the Firefox address bar and remove any entry in the following property: lightweightThemes.usedThemes
There it is…you’ve now disabled personas!

I wanted to install Cisco VPN client on BackTrack3. You can get the Cisco VPN client source using the following command:
wget ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/rvr/upload/vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
tar zxvf vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
cd vpnclient/
wget http://tuxx-home.at/projects/cisco-vpnclient/vpnclient-linux-2.6.22.diff
patch < vpnclient-linux-2.6.22.diff
./vpn_install

I got this information from the following blog.
I ran into an error whereby the kernel sources were not found for the VPN client to install. I then got the BackTrack3 kernel sources.
cd /lib/
wget http://www.offensive-security.com/kernel.lzm
mkdir test
lzm2dir kernel.lzm test

Now go into the vpnclient directory and execute the following:
./vpn_install

Accept the defaults (except in my case I selected “No” on automatically start VPN client). When it asks for the sources point it to:
/lib/test/usr/src/linux-2.6.21.5

Then the VPN Client should compile without any issues. Then you just need to place your Cisco VPN client Profile (.pcf) in the /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles directory. You will need to first start the VPN client service first using:

/etc/init.d/vpnclient_init start

Once the service is started just connect using:

vpnclient connect mypcffile user test password <whatever>

Please note that the full name of the Profile file in the above case is mypcffile.pcf but I’ve deliberately excluded the .pcf extension.
This should work.

Web services security has been very much talked about in the recent times. Especially, with the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) gaining increasing importance. One of the interesting ways to protect these web services encapsulated in SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is using digital client-side authentication certificates. Programmers typically use Java Key Store (.JKS) files to establish connectivity to these applications. However, if we want to create a custom client using some scripting it creates an issue as we tend to use languages such as perl, bash, etc. to create connectivity. So I ran into this excellent tool called KeyTool IUI. This tool helps you import the Java Key Store (Tools -> Keystore Manager -> JKS Keystore) and export it in the PKCS#12, X.509 PEM, and DER formats. You can further use OpenSSL to change the formats as you please or separate out the components of the certificates.
You could even take these certificates in X.509 or PFX formats and convert into JCEKS, JKS formats! Pretty cool huh? 🙂 Nice software!

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

I recently purchased 2x2GB Memory upgrades for my fantastic Dell XPS M1210. To upgrade the memory there were 2 slots one located at the base of the laptop (the black bottom) and the other was located below the keypad. I searched a lot on the Internet but could not find the location of the 2nd slot.
The owner’s manual also did not mention the location of the DIMM B slot (the 2nd memory slot). See the details on the manual about how to remove the keyboard to reach the 2nd memory slot.
The key to reach the 2nd slot is to first remove the hinge cover (the cover that has three button saying Power, “Media Direct”, etc.). The hinge cover is not screwed so you can just lever it up using a thin, flat object and pop-it up, remove the three screws fixing the keyboad, pulling the keyboad out and right in the middle you will see the memory slot.
Hopefully, this post will help someone upgrading memory on their Dell XPS M1210.