To avoid saving the truecrypt password in history files and mounting the Truecrypt partitions on bash the following trick helps:

history -d $((HISTCMD-1)) && sudo truecrypt --mount <PATH_TO_TRUECRYPT_VOL> --non-interactive -p <PASSWORD>

This will avoid saving the password in the .bash_history file and also mount the truecrypt volume from the command line.  Of course, if you use this in a shell script then the shell script will have the password in it, so you must not do that.

I’ve been waiting for a good writeable NTFS file system. I used Captive-NTFS but wasn’t really happy with it. Lots of errors when I used it last in July – August 2006 (if I remember the timeline correctly). Now we have a great writeable NTFS file system for Linux called NTFS-3g.

On my Kubuntu machine, I installed it as:
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
I also installed ntfsprogs available from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/ntfsprogs for my Kubuntu machine. The use for the NTFS-Progs is that you can use utils like ntfs fix if your mounted NTFS is tainted. If you do not have a latest version installed of ntfs-progs you might run into issues where ntfsfix might not work. Use the latest version from the above link. You might need to install libntfs9 from the debian package as
dpkg -i libntfs9_1.13.1-6+b2_i386.deb
Now I was getting tired of having to unount my NTFS partitions first and then re-mount them in ntfs-3g mode to make them writeable. So I installed ntfs-config and also the patched pmount debian package. Then all you have to do is run ntfs-config and choose the option that suits you best.
Now all my USB drives that have NTFS on it mount in read/write mode!

i updated my backtrack 4 R1 finally using the directions mentioned here. However, after the upgrade my Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 wireless adapter stopped working. My first thought was that the driver was corrupted or something after the upgrade.
But looking through the ‘dmesg‘ command output it became clear that during the startup a particular file iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode could not be located. I thought a reinstall will do it (always works right?).
# apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi
No luck yet! Searching for these files showed me that they were in two locations and both of these were identical (verified via md5sum) :
/lib/firmware-2.6.30.9/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
/lib/firmware-2.6.34/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
So I just added a symbolic link as follows:
ln -s /lib/firmware-2.6.34/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode /lib/firmware-2.6.35.8/iwlwifi-5000-2.ucode
Voila! It now worked! Hope it helps!

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!

cURL (groks URL) can be used as a SOAP client to send XML SOAP requests to web services. But the problems that I was facing in sending the data directly with the -d switch of curl is that DOS command shell would greet me with an error message:

< was unexpected at this time.

But there is a great way to send data in the POST requests by using the -d switch with the @ symbol. For example to send the xml data in the xmlfilewithdata.xml in the POST request to http://www.somesite.com/thewebservice you could use the following command:
curl -d @xmlfilewithdata.xml http://www.somesite.com/thewebservice

Off go all the errors and there it is …. your SOAP client – cURL!

I was getting CUPSD errors when trying to use my Laser Brother HL 2040 printer. But, you can install Brother HL-2040 by going to the brother website and downloading the linux drivers located here:
http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_prn.html#HL-2040
I just installed the lpd driver using the command as follows:
$ sudo dpkg -i brhl2070nlpr-2.0.1-1.i386.deb
When printing now, just select local lpd and then select brother-HL2070 printer from the list (the drivers for both versions are same).

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