Jared Mauch’s Comments

May 27, 2009

FreeBSD USB Boot

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 3:07 pm

One of the common perils of FreeBSD is that it’s not as user friendly in some cases as I believe it should be. It has taken some time for DVD images to become common for installation, and creating a bootable USB device has been problematic at times too. I figured I would provide an image that has worked (for me) on a few different systems. It doesn’t always work, but should help you out in a pinch. It enables console on the serial ports (com1/com2) after it boots up, so can help out in a pinch since the distributed bootable media does not include obvious ways to access utilities such as ufs/ffs capable mount or ways to put the console on com2 without rebuilding from source.

I hope this link helps you (and others) out, and if it does, I will try to post updated USB media images to help others.

http://puck.nether.net/~jared/mirror/FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg.bz2 – MD5 (FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg.bz2) = 2ca1fd7a66d9251d503fdd56ff2b9707

This image is for 512MB media and has no root password set, uses GRUB 0.97 and enables console on ttyd0/ttyd1. GRUB also should be enabled for both the serial console (COM1) & monitor. The same is true for the FreeBSD loader.

You will need to uncompress this (bunzip2) and write it to your USB media with a tool such as dd.

*WARNING* Make sure you use the correct output file (device).

Example:

dd if=FreeBSD-7.1p4.dmg of=/dev/da0 bs=1024k
483+1 records in
483+1 records out
506986496 bytes transferred in 51.327206 secs (9877539 bytes/sec)

If you want to write this from a mac, find the correct device eg:

sh-3.2# diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *931.5 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            931.2 Gi   disk0s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *483.5 Mi   disk2
   1:                    FreeBSD                         483.0 Mi   disk2s1

In this case, you want /dev/disk2

April 17, 2009

60-day review to be completed today

Filed under: internet,politics — Jared Mauch @ 4:08 pm

Various news media are ramping up coverage of the federal networks “cybersecurity” policies. Personally I loathe anything starting with “Cyber”, but the review will be completed today and the report will be sent to the presidents desk.  Some other media coverage are items like:

There have been recent media reports of infiltration of water and power companies by attackers.  I’m not sure what the federal role would be without increased regulation.  This is likely to be met with resistance from industries that see pervasive compromises in their enterprise networks.  Government networks are just large enterprise networks, protecting their secrets the same way a company protects their secrets.

February 26, 2009

Protected: common carrier

Filed under: internet,politics — Jared Mauch @ 1:37 pm

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February 11, 2009

fring beams your audio via Israel

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 6:06 pm

While evaluating the SIP client fring on the iPhone it came to my attention that they were doing the registration from behind a machine in Israel. This means your authentication credentials are possibly compromised, and your audio stream may go half-way around the world and be subject to intercept by a number of different parties. Not exactly what you want from your VoIP client. Then again, if you’re paranoid about security, you won’t talk about things that really matter over VoIP anyways.

January 6, 2009

Savings Rate positive

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — Jared Mauch @ 11:16 am

Being a news junkie, I read something last week talking about how the savings rate was now positive whereas it has long been negative, and just came across an article with more data surrounding the current change in savings rates at the WSJ.

I know I personally am in this paradox zone, having opened two different savings accounts in the past year and earned more in interest this past year than the past 5 or so combined. Life should be interesting this coming year.

December 31, 2008

Good malware?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Jared Mauch @ 2:16 pm

I’ve always thought about the idea of “Good” malware as a solution to some of the problems out there. The idea being that you use the same techniques used to compromise systems but to change some settings to a more secure value, but using some of the subversive methods to propogate.

Some of the settings that I consider a good default to change:
* Daily checks for software updates + Auto-Install of these updates
* Disable compromising features (eg: AutoRun)

Things to perhaps change
* Disable ActiveX
* Enable firewall (w/ exception handling)
* Nuke all AutoRun items
* Nuke all MSIE malware/extensions except “safe” plugins, eg: flash, quicktime, silverlight, etc..

The natural problem with this is doing good things with these bad techniques would likely get you classified as a virus/malware, and certainly if you attempt to do some of the network-scanning activities to distribute yourself. Too bad one cannot justify such activities legally.

December 11, 2008

CSIS Releases report to the president

Filed under: internet,politics — Jared Mauch @ 10:05 pm

A few days late, but the CSIS released their report to the president on how to secure cyberspace. It’s a bit long but available via their website and worth a review of at least the executive summary, if not a more detailed read.

November 3, 2008

Make your AppleTV use a Squid Proxy

Filed under: apple,tv — Jared Mauch @ 7:50 pm

So, I have started toying around with my AppleTV and realized I wanted to make it a bit more sane for my environment.

1- Make it possible to ssh in to your AppleTV. You can do this with atvusb-creator/ (You can find various guides on how to do this online)

2- ssh appletv.local -l frontrow

3- sudo tcsh

I have a slower internet connection at home so desire to run all my web requests via my proxy-cache. The settings are hidden in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist . I went ahead and copied the file and made a backup (always a good idea!) then performed a few edits, replacing the section that reads Proxies with the following (naturally updating my IP address accordingly).

			<key>Proxies</key>
			<dict>
			<key>AppleProxyConfigurationSelected</key>
			<integer>2</integer>
			<key>FTPPassive</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>HTTPEnable</key>
			<integer>1</integer>
			<key>HTTPPort</key>
			<integer>3128</integer>
			<key>HTTPProxy</key>
			<string>IP.ADD.RE.SS</string>
			</dict>

Hope these things help you out.

October 9, 2008

AT&T 3G expansion continues

Filed under: internet — Jared Mauch @ 3:48 pm

Dexter, MI is the latest area to gain AT&T 3G cellular coverage. Yesterday there was nothing in the downtown area, today there was. Watching how the networks continue to deploy their limited capital resources will be something very interesting over the next several months and years, but in this case, it’s a welcome network upgrade.

October 8, 2008

Apple quietly revs iTunes to 8.0.1(12)

Filed under: apple — Jared Mauch @ 5:53 pm

Apple just posted updated iTunes for MacOS revving the software to 8.0.1(12) from 8.0.1(11).  The build ID changed to 801A16.  You can download the update and install it manually here: http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/27/54/061-5650/Hbk3xVT72JNydq45vrgF669p43QSmCz4nj/iTunesX.tar

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