October 31, 2006

Release of Backtrack 2.0 Beta

Some news and some experiences:
mutts and max released Backtrack 2.0 Beta about 2 weeks back. I have not got much time to test it extensively so far. Some inputs from the initial runs:

-It looks even more sexier (very important :)).
-It has latest madwifi drivers. Phew, looks like I am finally relieved of compiling madwifi-ng with every release of backtrack. Very welcome change :)
-Kernel sources with the distribution. Here goes 1 more external module away.
-Replacement of UnionFS by aufs with zlib for modules. This allows for more stuff to be packed in less space. But, it also leaves older modules incompatible (who needs them anyways ;)).

I tried to run it on my thinkpad z60t. My wireless card (Thinkpad a/b/g mini-pci, based on Atheros chipset) came up just fine with madwifi drivers. Monitor mode also seems to work fine. For monitor mode, I had to use wifi0 as source in Kismet configuration, while rest of the networking stuff works fine with ath0.

For graphics, do run 'xorgsetup' while you're in black and white land. It will setup your xorg.conf and doing a 'startx' will take you to the KDE.

So far it looks really cool. Thanks to muts and max. They are doing some neat stuff. Backtrack is already my favorite distribution for any kind of troubleshooting or security stuff. I'll be posting more of my experiences as I get the time to test it more.

Happy Backtracking till then.
-M

October 13, 2006

pyMailer: Sends Mails

This is one tool that I had written about one and half years back. Why am I talking about it now? Well, I have recently realized that it's quite a useful thing. I find myself using it quite a bit. You may also find it of some use.

What does it do? As the title says, it just sends mails. To understand the usability, it will probably help to know why I wrote this? I wanted a tool to backup my files to my gmail account in quick and easy steps. I wanted to use gmail smtp server as I thought gmail would be reliable. Using gmail smtp was not easy, as it required login and tls support from the client. I know I could have used Thunderbird and other clients. But, idea was to have something simple and quick to use. So, requirements were like:

1. Definitely a command line interface
2. Platform independent (should run on linux and windows at least)
3. Attaching files should be easy and smooth.
4. Should have support for TLS
5. And possibly should have support for GUI and an option to save configuration so that I don't have to write email addresses again and again.

I could not find such a thing in the open source software land, so wrote one myself. It's written in python and meets the above requirements. Apart from that,

- It's written in way that it can be extended easily and modules can be used in other programs too.
- The scripts version runs on my Mac OS X without any change

Here are the links:

Homepage:
http://pymailer.sourceforge.net/
Sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pymailer/
Some screenshots (on Windows):
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=132341

Check it out. You can certainly find some use for it. :)

-M
---
Manu Garg/http://www.manugarg.com/"Journey is the destination of life"