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Setting up a cyber lab

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

It is a good idea to be careful when deploying an unknown virtual machine created by someone else. We should not allow it access to the Internet or our local network. In this article I will describe the steps I take to achieve this.

Virtualisation

My virtualisation platform of choice is VirtualBox - it is simple to set up, easy to use, and open source. VirtualBox supports importing machines using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VirtualBox offers an 'Internal Network' which is completely isolated from the host network environment. We shall connect any unknown virtual machines to this internal network.

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Plans for the year ahead - 2021

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

No can argue it's been an easy year, for now let's think about our plans for the year to come.

I have set some simple goals for 2021:

  • Become more active on the Stack Exchange network
  • Learn as much as possible about cyber security
  • Finish my PC emulator and release it to the public
  • Increase the frequency of my blog posts

Resize an NTFS partition using Linux

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

Today I spent some time resizing an existing ntfs partition, in order to make space for an LFS build.

Here's the existing partition structure:

# fdisk -l -u /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 465.8 GiB, 500106780160 bytes, 976771055 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa7cea7ce

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1  *      2048    206847    204800   100M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdb2       206848 976766975 976560128 465.7G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
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How to share a directory over a network using NFS

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

NFS or Network File System is a quick and easy way to share files between Linux hosts on a network. Client machines are able to mount specific directories on a server machine and access the files as if they are on the client's local filesystem.

Configuring an NFS share is as easy as installing a package and editing a config file. For the steps below I'm using a Debian client and a Ubuntu based server.

Configuring the server

Begin by installing the nfs-kernel-server package if it isn't already installed:

sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server
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Ubuntu - restart wifi connection without rebooting

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

Restarting a wifi connection without rebooting

I have a Mythbuntu box who's only connection to the outside world is through a wi-fi connection. It can be frustrating when the connection drops out at a critical time - during an upgrade to the next LTS release for instance. Here are some things to try to reset the connection.

 

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Backup your web server with rsync, mysqldump and tar

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

In this article I will demonstrate one way to backup up a Debian based web server, together with MySQL databases.

The concepts shown here should easily adapt to work on most Linux distributions.

The tools we will use include rsync, mysqldump and tar.

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Building Ogre3D with Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 (Visual Studio Community 2015)

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

Today we will build Ogre3D graphics rendering engine (http://www.ogre3d.org/) using Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 compiler (Visual Studio Community 2015).

Building Ogre can take some time and things don't always go smoothly, which is why I decided to document the entire process. I will follow the basic process as documented in the official guides:

Just be aware that I may be using a slightly different directory structure within my build. Substitute my paths for yours where applicable.

The latest stable release is 1.9 and has been around for a long time, so it should build without too much trouble.

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Setting up a LAMP server (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP)

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP

Probably the most common installation of web server, at least for a Linux system, is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Also possible on a Windows system, in which case it would be known as WAMP. I will cover setting up the former here.

I assume you already have a working Debian based Linux distribution. If not then I highly recommend Debian, or for Raspberry Pi users, Raspbian.

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Building Boost C++ libraries with Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 (Visual Studio Community 2015)

Posted by Sylvester Rac on

Today we will build Boost C++ libraries (http://www.boost.org/) using Microsoft Visual C++ 14.0 compiler (Visual Studio Community 2015).

We will build both 32 bit and 64 bit binaries.

Download and extract files

Download the latest release (at this time Boost 1.59.0 hosted on SourceForge) http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.59.0/boost_1_59_0.zip/download

Extract the files to a directory of your choice; I use /lib_source/

I like to keep my third party libraries separate from my own projects. I copy the final compiled binary files to a separate location, depending on the compiler used. For MSVC 2015 the folder is /lib_msvc14 (for MinGW it might be /lib_mingw47). You get the idea.

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