The Linux Help and Tutorial Thread

[PoppaGeek]

I have edited the Ubuntu Server post about a dozen times now trying to make sure I got everything needed and as clear as I could. As always any suggestions or corrections are appreciated.

[PoppaGeek]

How to Use a GUI on a Ubuntu Server

OK for those who want to have a dedicated cruncher running Ubuntu server but want a GUI available when something needs to be done on the server. The link shows how to install the LightDM then configure the server to start in text mode and shows how to start the desktop once you are logged in. Then exit the desktop so X and LDM will not steal your CPU cycles.

I have not tried this and I am not familiar with the LightDM. Search Google Images to see what it looks like.

Someone just gave me a plate of warm chocolate chips cookies. GOTTA GO!

[NKrader]

So both are done and able to be used all the time :-)

Entered that command d_a and didn't change anything still can't see with ifconfig and repeating the dmesg command gets the same error

[PoppaGeek]

I am thinking maybe it is a hardware conflict.

Sure looks good.

[NKrader]

I am thinking maybe it is a hardware conflict.

Sure looks good.

uhhhh.
they work fine under windows in the same system. guessing some sort of stupid command somewhere will make it work lol..

THANKs! im pretty happy with how they look just hanging out! will be even happier when they are both crunching!

[PoppaGeek]

uhhhh.
they work fine under windows in the same system. guessing some sort of stupid command somewhere will make it work lol..

THANKs! im pretty happy with how they look just hanging out! will be even happier when they are both crunching!

uhhh whatever.
I know they do but I do not know if Windows and Linux handle memory and IRQs the same way. I doubt they do with memory.It was memory map errors right?

[NKrader]

I know they do but I do not know if Windows and Linux handle memory and IRQs the same way. It was memory map errors right?

indeed.

[NKrader]

couldnt see any wired ethernet devices either. used

sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

didnt see anything, was i going in the right direction?

i cannot get it to connect to wired connection..

[PoppaGeek]

couldnt see any wired ethernet devices either. used



didnt see anything, was i going in the right direction?

i cannot get it to connect to wired connection..

Yes you are in right direction and should see something like this for at least the wired ethernet:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet dhcp

[NKrader]

Yes you are in right direction and should see something like this for at least the wired ethernet:

didnt really show much, it had weird interface thingy with blue lines.

ran
dmesg |grep eth

see it there and it says
eth0 link not ready
eth1 link not ready

[PoppaGeek]

didnt really show much, it had weird interface thingy with blue lines.

ran
dmesg |grep eth

see it there and it says
eth0 link not ready
eth1 link not ready

That sounds like a cable problem.

[NKrader]

That sounds like a cable problem.

meh, i know the cable is fine..
and im getting lights on both ends of the cable..

[PoppaGeek]

Using

dmesg | grep eth0
or

lspci

can you see what chipset it reports? If not what is model number of MB?

[NKrader]

Using

dmesg | grep eth0
or

lspci

can you see what chipset it reports? If not what is model number of MB?

Reports nvidia and loading reverse engineered driver

[NKrader]

yep, dont even worry about my problems anymore,

installed windows server last night and 35seconds later was connected to wifi and crunching away

[PoppaGeek]

Hello reader of the unofficial Linux Help and Tutorial Thread.

Here at the LH&TT we want you to know what you can expect.

First we have a state-of-the-art call center.



Where you can expect a friendly greeting from a smiling face.



We recruit our staff from the far reaches of the internet selecting only the most skilled and friendly people.



All call center techs attend training seminars on a regular basis.(yes that is a real girl.)



We are aware that Linux can be a challenging adventure, for some more than others...



But you can rest assured all your concerns will receive the respect you deserve and the attention you require.



And as always we provide a 100% money back guarantee.
You Satisfaction is our single minded goal.
We will stick with you to the end.


Butt! If for any reason you are unhappy with the services provided please see Rico at the customer service desk.




Don't thank us! It is what we are paid to do.

[PoppaGeek]

As a further service by the staff of the LH&TT we have provided 2 valuable links for those needing immediate answers and more specific help.

Linux Help #1

Linux Help #2

And if that fails. Option #3

[NKrader]

And if that fails. Option #3

should just start with this step :p

[PoppaGeek]

But then you would have missed all that opportunity to whine and complain.

I have 5 crunchers running Vista 64. I have 4 running Linux. There are reasons for each to be running what they are.

I personally could care less what OS someone runs. I am just trying to help crunchers who might want to use Linux. How much help I actually am I have no real idea. But I have never tried to sell anyone on anything.

[OldChap]

Yep you're younger but I am prettier.

OK OC your turn.

I knew I forgot something...

After many weeks of pleading poverty Rie and I finally got to see the look on the kids faces when their presents DID materialise after all. Getting one over on the kids when they are teenagers and know me so well for my dry humour is less than easy these days.

They had bought me a Christmas hat .... It seems though that they have changed their tune after all...



My best wishes to all the Linux boys

[PoppaGeek]

OMG I am no longer "the pretty one".

Hmm those whiskers are getting past noob almost to learned.

[PoppaGeek]

An interesting read for them that find computing systems interesting.

When the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billon ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it's packed with advanced technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of software code.

In the past, you couldn't just put off-the-shelf computer systems aboard a ship for mission critical tasks?when I was aboard the USS Iowa, we had to shut down non-tactical systems before the guns were fired because the shock and vibration would crash systems hard. So typically, individual computer systems are ruggedized. But that adds heavily to the cost of the systems and makes it more difficult to maintain them.

The design of the Zumwalt solves that problem by using off-the-shelf hardware?mostly IBM blade servers running Red Hat Linux?and putting it in a ruggedized server room. Those ruggedized server rooms are called Electronic Modular Enclosures (EMEs), sixteen self-contained, mini data centers built by Raytheon.

The Navy?s newest warship is powered by Linux

[PoppaGeek]

The last few days I have been working on a project that I thought I might share as it seems a good opportunity to show some Linux commands and configuration. It is inspired mostly by the HaK5 Pineapple project. I find the concept fascinating and thought about getting one to play with. Then I got to thinking I might try and do something similar with my 1st gen Raspberry Pi. While only 256 megs of ram and a 700mz cpu, networking stuff does not require much memory or mz. I am using all command line as a GUI will slow things down. A SD card, 4gigs or more, is used as a boot and storage device.

My goals.
Battery powered Raspberry Pi with 2 WiFi interfaces. One in ad-hoc mode the other monitor mode. The monitor mode is for scanning for WiFi networks and devices. The ad-hoc so I can ssh in from laptop and manage and control Raspberry Pi.

Wardriving. Simple really. Use an old Garmin GPS and Alfa AWUS036H along with Kismet to ride around and map WiFi networks. I mean literally. The capture files will be imported into a map showing the APs.

Since the Pi has 2 USB ports and I do not want to use a USB hub they are 2 projects although overlapping in setup. The battery is PowerGen 13000mAh and has run the Pi and 2 WiFi interfaces for 2 days non-stop. It has a 2.1 amp output port so enough power even for the Alfa. The Alfa has a RealTek chipset known for working well in monitor mode and comes with a high gain directional antenna as well as a high gain omni antenna. It is also easy to double the power setting on the Alfa to 20db.



I have tried 3 Linux distros that run on the Pi so far and am settling for PWNPi At the time of this writting it appears as though their web site has been hacked. PWNPi is a debian/raspbian based penetration test distro similar to Kali or Backtrack. I think it will be my choice as it comes with all the utilities I want already installed as well as the drivers for my hardware.

Arch was noticeably faster and lightweight compared to the debian based distros but it is also different enough in commands and utilities that it added a learning curve I am not interested in now. Rasbian and PWnPi are familiar and more comfortable for now. Raspbian is a nice and well thought out distro but it's focus is on education, programming and has a lot I do not need and missing a lot I need.

I will comment here that in my opinion breaking into someones WiFi, a network protected with a password, is akin to breaking into their house. If the network is open that is different. I do not break into homes or networks and only an a$$hat would. I simply find this an interesting project and it is forcing me to relearn some things not used for a long time and hopefully learn a few things along the way.

Also it can be interesting just seeing the names, ESSID, of some WiFi networks. I have seen "SheDaBoss', "F**KoFF", "NSA SURVEILLANCE" and "FBI Van". Nice to see people still have a sense of humor. If you know AT&T uses 2Wire WiFi modems then you can get an idea who is winning in a neighborhood. AT&T or Comcast. Scanning for clients shows even Smartphones, Rokus, Xbox and more. It is also surprising to see how many are open, with no passwords, and how many are using very easy to hack settings. All a noob needs to do is watche a 15 minute youtube video and hack neighbors wifi. Downloads all sorts of nasty crap on their IP#. I know of several cases where people had to prove it was not them that downloaded the child :banana::banana::banana::banana:.

All this is also useful to see how easy it is to get into your own network or maybe test friends and families networks and to see what is going on.

[PoppaGeek]

Now to the command line.

First issue I ran into was using the dd command in Linux to copy the PWNPi.img to a SD card. I could not get it to boot. My mistake turned out to be using a partition name instead of the device name.

Correct way.
dd if=/home/poppageek/Downloads/PWNPi.img of=/dev/sdb

I had been adding a 1 to the end of /dev/sdb so I had /dev/sdb1

Then I discovered that of the 4 gigs on the SD card I had only 150 megs free space on the Linux partition. But the Linux partition was only about 3gigs. The VFat boot part was only 57 megs. The example below was done after I formated the 670 meg part.

root@pwnpi:/# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3904 MB, 3904897024 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 119168 cylinders, total 7626752 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
Disk identifier: 0x000f06a6

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/mmcblk0p1            8192      122879       57344    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2          122880     6266879     3072000   83  Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3         6268928     7626751      678912   83  Linux

showed me 670 megs of the SD card was unused, free space. Scanning networks can create a lot of files and several can get very large. I needed this space and being on a seperate partition I did not have to worry about it filling the OS or root partition.

So on my laptop running Mint I opened Menu > Preferences > Disks and choose the SD card then the unused partition at the end of the "disk" or card and formatted it using ext4. Here is how to format and mount a partition or entire disk using command line. Instead of using ext3 though use the newer ext4.

Putting the SD card back into the Pi and booting I now wanted the new partion to be mounted on bootup.

First I did a mount command.

/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,user_xattr,barrier=1,data=ordered)
devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=118872k,nr_inodes=29718,mode=755 )
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=23788k,mode=755)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=47560k)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/mmcblk0p1 on /boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437, iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

On the last line I see that the main linux partition is on /dev/mmcblk0p1. I know from Disks on my laptop that the new partition is the third one. So the new part should be /dev/mmcblk0p3. Next I need a directory to mount the new partition under. So cd / [ENTER] This puts me in the / directory and mkdir /data to create a directory named data. Now to test it

mount -t ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p3 /data

-t ext4 tells mount the type is linux file system ext4

No errors so I ls -la /data and I see

drwx------ 3 1000 1000 4096 Jan 1 17:17 .
drwxr-xr-x 24 root root 36864 Jan 1 17:41 ..
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Jan 1 17:17 lost+found

To have /data mounted at boot I first backed up the file about to edited:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.org

and then added this line to /etc/fstab

/dev/mmcblk0p3  /data           ext4    defaults,noatime  0       2

So my /etc/fstab looks like:

root@pwnpi:/# more /etc/fstab
proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot           vfat    defaults          0       2
/dev/mmcblk0p2  /               ext4    defaults,noatime  0       1
/dev/mmcblk0p3  /data           ext4    defaults,noatime  0       2
# a swapfile is not a swap partition, so no using swapon|off from here on, use  dphys-swapfile swap[on|off] for that

Make real sure it is all correct before you save it and reboot.

More info on /etc/fstab.

Also in /etc is the mtab. this is a file that keeps track of all mounted file systems, not just what is mounted at boot. It would include all from fstab plus any CD/DVD roms or USB memory sticks.






WORK IN PROGRESS.

[PoppaGeek]

Now for figuring out ad-hoc WiFi. I have never used ad-hoc so this is a learning experience for me.

At the very start I hit a wall that really baffles me. I have used the ifconfig thousands of times and never has it ever failed to do ask I asked as long as I asked correctly. But no matter what I tried ifconfig wlan0 down would do nothing. With dementia slowly making itself known I blamed myself. I was forgetting something or doing something stupid. I spent an entire night trying to find why I could not bring down a wireless interface.

After many searches I finally found someone on the Raspberry Pi forums having the same problem. It turns out Raspian and Raspbian based distros have a program called ifpulgd. It is a pesky little daemon that will quicker than you can blink bring an interface up, even one you just brought down. It is what is called a "helpful" app to make your life easier.

Obviously if you are using the Pi for what it was intended this is a helpful program to bring up interfaces you plug in and out. If you want full control of the OS, programs and hardware, not so helpful. <iface> being wlan0 for me.

To bring the daemon down:

sudo ifplugd -S -i <iface>

To bring the daemon back up.

sudo ifplugd -R -i <iface>

Since I will be writing scripts to configure and bring up and down interfaces 2 more line are no problem.

These commands can be entered on the command line one at a time but now that I know they work I put them in a shell script.

#!/bin/sh
ifplugd -S -i wlan1
/sbin/ifconfig wlan1 down
/sbin/iwconfig wlan1 mode ad-hoc
/sbin/iwconfig wlan1 channel 3
/sbin/iwconfig wlan1 enc off
/sbin/iwconfig wlan1 essid raspi
/sbin/ifconfig wlan1 168.254.154.242 netmask 255.255.255.0

To execute the script I first chmod +x script_name.sh then at the command line sh script_name.sh in the directory the script is in or type the entire pathname with the scripts name.

I am not using sudo as I am running PWNPi as root. On a pentest distro this normal. On any other it is not recommended at all. Use sudo and do not use root account unless you really need to.

Notice there are 2 commands being used here that look alike. ifconfig and iwconfig. iwconfig is very powerful and has many settings it can change if the driver supports it.

The internal wifi interface in my laptop does not support ad-hoc. So I am using a generic USB that does. While the laptop sees the ESSID raspi it will not connect and there are no errors.

And again it was a helpful program that kept my laptop from joining the ad-hoc network. The network-manager.

On the laptop running Mint:

sudo service network-manager stop
sudo ifconfig wlan3 down
sudo iwconfig wlan3 mode ad-hoc 
sudo iwconfig wlan3 channel 1
sudo iwconfig wlan3 enc off
sudo iwconfig wlan3 essid raspi
sudo ifconfig wlan3 169.254.154.243 netmask 255.255.255.0
sudo ifconfig wlan3 up

ssh root@169.254.154.242

I am not using encryption or passwords. iwconfig has settings for passwords, encryption types and many more.