Recently on Pauldotcom Security Weekly, they had an interview with  Gordon “Fyodor” Lyon from insecure.org.  Before the podcast I could not find a way to upgrade nmap to the latest version on Ubuntu.  I had tried several times to compile from source but nmap would not create all of the proper files. I could run

nmap -V

and nmap would still show the stale version from the ubuntu repositories.  After listening to the Pauldotcom episode I checked out the insecure.org site and found out how to install the latest version using subversion.

  This procedure requires that you install subversion

sudo apt-get install subversion

Next you can just type this in a terminal

  Nbtscan is a  program for scanning networks for NetBIOS name information.  It  works very quickly and can be usefull for information gathering about the network you are connected to.  Nbtscan is not installed by default in Ubuntu so you will have to install it.  Use synaptic or just use the command

sudo apt-get install nbtscan

I have made a script and put it in my /home/drew/bin/ directory so that all I have to do is type the name of the script into a terminal and I get instant results.

  Here is a copy of my script

#! /bin/bash
sudo nbtscan -hv 192.168.1.0/24 > test.txt && mousepad test.txt

This will send the output to a text file and open it with mousepad ( which is not installed by default as well - Just use gedit if you want to)

The reason I use mousepad is to demonstrate how quickly the nbtscan actually runs.

  Try typing

  I have been using a program lately called snarf. I always use it with the -v option. I have incorporated it into my version of bashpodder and I also use it for all of my command line downloads.  Snarf is not included by default in ubuntu, so you will have to manually install it.

sudo apt-get install snarf

Here is an example of how I would use it.

snarf -v http://hydrogen.oshean.org/psw-airpwn.m4v

the output should look something like this

I am back from a long summer hiatus and I am going to try to keep things going here.  I have been very busy over the summer but now things are slowing down a bit.  I hope to keep your interest in this site over the next several months and I think I have found a way for me to consistently  keep posting to my blog.  Stay tuned, and please read the blog as well as the main page.

As usual, your comments and corrections are always welcome.

Drew

This procedre will make hamachi start as a service without any interaction from the user on ubuntu hardy heron 8.04.

  Those who have had very long jiberish file extensions attached to the files downloaded from libsyn my be interested in this information. Recently libsyn added some extra information to their files to control how the downloads are handled.I found that the conflict is with “wget” which is used by many of the linux/unix podcast clients from what I understand.  I communicated with libsyn via email a few times and they were very helpful in trying to find a solution to the problem. The program I use is Bashpodder which of course uses wget. I have found it to be an amazing utility for downloading my list of many podcasts until recently. I am not interested in trying several different podcast clients. I just want Bashpodder to work again.

  I have been hearing about people having trouble with the intel GMA965 graphics card being blacklisted in gutsy gibbon 7.10 and not being able to get compiz to work.  This was very common in gutsy but now in the relese of hardy heron 8.04 the card has been removed from the blacklist.  I have this card in my toshiba laptop and it worked fine in gutsy as well as in hardy.  The key in gutsy was to install linux-backports-modules and xserver-xgl. This may also work in hardy heron as well but I have not needed to do this as mine is working fine with compiz right out of the box.

  For those of you who are still having trouble with compiz and the GMA965, go to a terminal and type

  I have heard a lot of people complaining about firefox 3 being the default installation in the latest release of Ubuntu. I have been happily using firefox 2 with all of my extensions still functioning as they had before the upgrade to Hardy Heron 8.04.  I concider myself a heavy firefox extension user with 10 MUST HAVE extensions and a few that I could live with or without.  With that many dependancies and firefox 3 being so far from it's official release, I have no choise but to keep using firefox 2.

  I have found that when I try to uninstall firefox 3 it will also uninstall liferea feed reader and songbird so I need to have both firefox 3 and firefox 2 installed together. Having both installed at the same time causes some conflicts, so I have found a way to have the two co-exist on my installation of hardy heron.

This article is for demonstration purposes only. If you decide to follow these instructions you should only do so on a network that you own.

There is one trick that will definately speed up your internet browsing in ubuntu, and not just firefox.

This trick should work with all versions of ubuntu. What you want to do is change your dns server to a faster one. I have tried opendns and it does work pretty good, but I think this one works better.

The first thing you want to do is change the dns settings in the network manager. Open up a terminal and type