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BackTrack BT Encryption Grep Linux Nessus Passwords SSL Ubuntu VMWare WEP Windows WPA

Backtrack 4 – USB/Nessus Boot with Persistent Changes

This how-to will show you a method for building a USB thumb drive with the following features:
  • Persistent Changes – Files saved and changes made will be kept across reboots.
  • Nessus and NessusClient installed – Everybody needs Nessus
  • Encryption configured (Note: This is not whole drive encryption)

Tools and Supplies

  1. A USB thumbdrive – minimum capacity 4GB
  2. A Backtrack 3 CDROM, Backtrack 4 DVD or an additional USB thumbdrive  (minimum 2GB) – Used to partition the thumbdrive.
  3. Optional: UNetbootin – A tool to transfer an iso image to a USB drive.
Download the Backtrack 4 Pre Release ISO here.
This tutorial is based on booting Backtrack 4 first. This means that you need some form of bootable Backtrack 4 media. This can be a virtual machine, DVD, or USB drive. Use your favorite method of creating a DVD or USB drive or you can use UNetBootin to create the thumb drive.  Below is a screenshot of using UnetBootin to install Backtrack 4 on a USB drive.
Installing Backtrack 4 with UnetBootin
It is as simple as selecting the image we want to write to the USB drive, the drive to write it to, and then clicking the ‘OK’ button. Warning: Make sure you pick the correct destination drive.
Partition the USB thumbdrive
The first step is to boot up Backtrack 4.  With the release of Backtrack 4 Final, a 4 GB drive is required if we are going to enable persistence.  For Backtrack 3 and Backtrack 4 Beta, we could get away with a 2GB drive.  We will also need to figure out which drive is our target drive. The following command will show the drives available and you can determine from that which is the new USB drive:
dmesg | egrep hd.|sd.
We need to partition and format the drive as follows:
  1. The first partition needs to be a primary partition of at least 1.5 GB and set to type vfat. Also remember to make this partition active when you are creating it. Otherwise you might have some boot problems.
  2. The second Partition can be the rest of the thumb drive.
Below are the steps to take to get the drive partitioned and formatted. These steps are taken from this video on Offensive Security website. A ‘# blah blah‘ indicates a comment and is not part of the command and user typed commands are bolded. One note, we will need to delete any existing partitions on the drive.

fdisk /dev/sda # use the appropriate drive letter for your system
# delete existing partitions. There may be more than one.
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 1
# create the first partition
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-522, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (1-522, default 522): +1500M
#create the second partition
Command (m for help): n
Command action
e   extended
p   primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 2
First cylinder (193-522, default 193):
Using default value 193
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (193-522, default 522):
Using default value 522
# Setting the partition type for the first partition to vfat/fat32
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): b
Changed system type of partition 1 to b (W95 FAT32)
# Setting the partition type for the second partition to Linux
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 2
Hex code (type L to list codes): 83
# Setting the first partition active
Command (m for help): a
Partition number (1-4): 1
Command (m for help): w
# now it is time to format the partitions
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdb2

Two things to notice above in the format commands; 1) we are using ext3 instead of ext2 and 2) you must include the -L casper-rw portion of the command. Being able to use ext3 is great because of journaling. The -L casper-rw option helps us get around the problem we had where we had to enter the partition name in order to get persistence working. As you will see, that is no longer necessary.  So go ahead and partition and format the drive according the layout above.
Make it a bootable Backtrack 4 USB thumb drive
  1. Mount the first partition.
  2. Copy the Backtrack files to it.
  3. Install grub.

Following are the commands to execute. Again, ‘#’ denote comments and user typed commands are in bold.

# mount the first partition, sda1 in my case.
mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

# copy the files, you will need to find where the ISO is mounted on your system.
cd /mnt/sda1
rsync -r /media/cdrom0/* .

# install grub
grub-install –no-floppy –root-directory=/mnt/sda1 /dev/sda

That’s it. We now have a bootable Backtrack 4 USB thumb drive.
Persistent Changes
This is done much differently and more easily than it was in Backtrack 4 Beta or Backtrack 3. First of all, for basic persistence, we don’t have to do anything at all. There is already a menu option that takes care of it for us. Unfortunately, it is only for console mode so we need to make a couple changes.  We want to do the following things:
  1. Change the default boot selection to persistent.
  2. Set the resolution for our gui.

To do so, do the following. Again, ‘#’ …comment….user typed…blah blah.

cd /mnt/sda1/boot/grub
vi menu.lst

# change the default line below to ‘default 4′ and append ‘vga=0×317′ (that’s a zero) to the kernel line to set the resolution to 1024×768
# By default, boot the first entry.
default 4
.
.
.
title                Start Persistent Live CD
kernel           /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper persistent rw quiet vga=0×317
initrd            /boot/initrd.gz

:wq

Here is my entire menu.lst file for reference.

# By default, boot the first entry.
default 4
# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 30

splashimage=/boot/grub/bt4.xpm.gz
title                Start BackTrack FrameBuffer (1024×768)
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper nopersistent rw quiet vga=0×317
initrd                /boot/initrd.gz
title                Start BackTrack FrameBuffer (800×600)
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper nopersistent rw quiet vga=0×314
initrd                /boot/initrd800.gz
title                Start BackTrack Forensics (no swap)
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper nopersistent rw vga=0×317
initrd                /boot/initrdfr.gz
title                Start BackTrack in Safe Graphical Mode
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper xforcevesa rw quiet
initrd                /boot/initrd.gz

title                Start Persistent Live CD
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper persistent rw quiet vga=0×317

initrd                /boot/initrd.gz
title                Start BackTrack in Text Mode
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper nopersistent textonly rw quiet
initrd                /boot/initrd.gz
title                Start BackTrack Graphical Mode from RAM
kernel                /boot/vmlinuz BOOT=casper boot=casper toram nopersistent rw quiet
initrd                /boot/initrd.gz
title                Memory Test
kernel                /boot/memtest86+.bin
title                Boot the First Hard Disk
root                (hd0)
chainloader +1

Reboot and either select “Start Persistent Live CD” or just wait since we set it to auto-boot to persistent mode. To test it, create a file and reboot again. If your file is still there, everything is golden.
Install Nessus
Download the Ubuntu Nessus and NessusClient packages from nessus.org. The 32-bit 8.10 version worked fine for me.  Again, with Backtrack 4 things are little easier. To install the Nessus server, simply execute the following command to install the package.

dpkg install Nessus-4.0.2-ubuntu810_i386.deb

Things used to be a little bit more complicated for the client, but with the release of the pre-final version, it is just as easy as installing as the server.

dpkg install NessusClient-4.0.2-ubuntu810_i386.deb

Finally it’s time to configure Nessus. Execute each of the following and follow the prompts. My entries are below for fun.

#create server certificate
/opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-mkcert
This script will now ask you the relevant information to create the SSL
certificate of Nessus. Note that this information will *NOT* be sent to
anybody (everything stays local), but anyone with the ability to connect to your
Nessus daemon will be able to retrieve this information.
CA certificate life time in days [1460]:
Server certificate life time in days [365]:
Your country (two letter code) [FR]:US
Your state or province name [none]:Confused
Your location (e.g. town) [Paris]:Somewhere In Time
Your organization [Nessus Users United]:
.
.
.
Congratulations. Your server certificate was properly created.
.
.
# add user
/opt/nessus/sbin/nessus-adduser
Login :Me
Authentication (pass/cert) : [pass]
Login password :
Login password (again) :
Do you want this user to be a Nessus ‘admin’ user ? (can upload plugins, etc…) (y/n) [n]:y
User rules
———-
nessusd has a rules system which allows you to restrict the hosts
that Me has the right to test. For instance, you may want
him to be able to scan his own host only.
Please see the nessus-adduser manual for the rules syntax
Enter the rules for this user, and enter a BLANK LINE once you are done :
(the user can have an empty rules set)
Login             : Me
Password         : ***********
This user will have ‘admin’ privileges within the Nessus server
Rules             :
Is that ok ? (y/n) [y]y
User added

We want to disable Nessus starting at boot. We are going to do some things a little later than require that Nessus not be running at boot.
/usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f nessusd remove

This command does not remove the Nessus start scripts. It only removes the links that cause Nessus to start at boot time.

The next thing we need to do is register our installation so we can get the plugin feed. You need to go here and request a key. That is a link to the free feed for home use. Use appropriately.
Once you have your key. Execute the following to update your plugins. Please note that there are two dashes before register in the nessus-fetch line below. They can display as one sometimes.

/opt/nessus/bin/nessus-fetch register [your feed code here]

When that is done, and it is going to take a few minutes, you are ready to start the server and client. Be aware that with version 4.0, while the command to start returns quickly, the actual starting of the service may take a minute or two. In many cases, I have actually had to reboot before Nessus started working. You can use netstat -na to check that the server is listening on port 1241.

/etc/init.d/nessusd start
/opt/nessus/bin/NessusClient

Configure Encryption
Since we are using this tool to poke at peoples networks and systems, with permission of course, it is very important that the information we find be protected. To do this, we are going to setup an encrypted volume that will eventually become our home directory.
This can be done with the gui or via command line. We will be using the gui because we need to be able to format the volume with ext3 and, as yet, I have not been able to figure out how to do that via the command line on linux.
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_12;24)
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_16;18)
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_28;12)
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_28;12)
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_29;00)
Truecrypt_size
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_41;18)
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_44;24)
Truecrypt_type
Truecrypt Configuration (Time 0_00_50;18)
You will get a message that the volume was successful created. Click on the ‘OK’ button, then exit the Truecrypt gui, both the ‘Create Volume’ windows and the main windows. We want to be back at the command prompt at this point.
If you want to test the your filesystem, execute the following, note the -k ” is two single quotes, not a double quote:

truecrypt -t -k ” protect-hidden=no /my_secret_stuff /media/truecrypt1
mount
cd /media/truecrypt1
df .

This will show that the volume is mounted and the amount of disk space you have left. Our next step is to have this volume mounted when we log in. We do this by editing the root user’s .profile file. Add the truecrypt command above to root’s .profile so it looks like this:

# ~/.profile: executed by Bourne-compatible login shells.
if [ "$BASH" ]; then
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
fi

truecrypt -t -k '' --protect-hidden=no /my_secret_stuff /media/truecrypt1

mesg n

The next time you reboot you will be asked for the password for the volume and it will be mounted for you.

Now it is time to tweak a few tings

Tweak a few things
The first thing we are going to do is go ahead and configure networking to start at boot time. It’s convenient and easy to disable if we need to. All we have to do is execute the following command.

/usr/sbin/update-rc.d networking defaults

Next thing we want to do is make sure all our tools and the system itself is up-to-date. First execute the following:

apt-get update

This is update the software repository information. Next, execute the this command:

apt-get upgrade

The system will determine if there is anything that needs to be updated and then prompt you to continue. Individual packages can be updated by including the package name after upgrade.
This next bit is interesting and I was surprised it worked. We are going to reset the root user’s home directory during the login process to the mounted truecrypt volume. This will ensure that anything written to the home directory will be encrypted.  The following commands will set this up for us:

cd /media/truecrypt1
rsync -r –links /root/ .
# add the bold lines below
vi /root/.profile

# ~/.profile: executed by Bourne-compatible login shells.
if [ "$BASH" ]; then
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
fi

truecrypt -t -k '' --protect-hidden=no /my_secret_stuff /media/truecrypt1

export HOME=/media/truecrypt1
export HISTFILE=/media/truecrypt1/.bash_history


cd

mesg n

:wq

The next time you reboot, when you are finally in the system, your home directory will be /media/truecrypt1.
There is one last thing we want to do. We want to change nessus to log to the encrypted volume. This is very easy. The file that controls this is /opt/nessus/etc/nessus/nessusd.conf. We need to create a place for the log files to go. So execute the following

cd /media/truecrypt1
mkdir -p nessus/logs

Once you have done that, edit the /opt/nessus/etc/nessus/nessusd.conf file and change this:

.
.
.
# Log file :
logfile = /opt/nessus/var/nessus/logs/nessusd.messages
# Shall we log every details of the attack ? (disk intensive)
log_whole_attack = no
# Dump file for debugging output
dumpfile = /opt/nessus/var/nessus/logs/nessusd.dump
.
.
.

to this:

.
.
.
# Log file :
logfile = /media/truecrypt1/nessus/logs/nessusd.messages
# Shall we log every details of the attack ? (disk intensive)
log_whole_attack = no
# Dump file for debugging output
dumpfile = /media/truecrypt1/nessus/logs/nessusd.dump
.
.
.

That’s it. You are all done now.

BackTrack links
Categories
BackTrack Bootable BT BT 4 BT4 Linux Passwords Ubuntu UNetbootin USB Utility VMWare WEP Windows WPA

How to make Backtrack 4 boot from USB

In this article we will describe how we can make a USB Bootable drive for Backtrack 4 Linux distribution. The new release is based on Debian/Ubuntu and not on Slackware as it was used to be in earlier versions (Backtrack 3 and below).

In this article the UNetbootin Windows version tool has been used to demonstrate the above scenario.

Requirements:
Minimum USB Drive capacity 1 GB
Format the USB to FAT32

Tools:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
http://www.remote-exploit.org/cgi-bin/fileget?version=bt4-beta-iso

Workaround:

1. Download BT4 Beta ISO
2. Download UNetbootin to make our usb bootable
3. Run Unetbootin and select bt4-beta.iso for diskimage
4. Select USB Drive letter and click on OK to start making a bootable usb drive

After the creation process finishes restart your machine and boot from the new usb bootable drive created and enjoy Backtrack 4 Beta on your system.

Default Backtrack 4 username is root and password is toor.

Note: Be sure that your install the MBR on the USB drive by executing drive:bootbootinst.bat on your USB drive.

Keywords:

backtrack 4 usb thumb drive bootable
backtrack4 usb boot laptop
how to make bt4 bootable from usb

BackTrack links
Categories
Amazon Web Services AWS CLI Command Line EC2 Encryption Linux S3 SSL Windows

Glossary of Amazon EC2 terms

Amazon machine image (AMI)
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of your software.

Amazon EBS
A type of storage that enables you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave like raw unformatted external block devices. They have user supplied device names and provide a block device interface. You can load a file system on top of Amazon EBS volumes, or use them just as you would use a block device.

Availability Zone
A distinct location within a region that is engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provides inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same region.

compute unit
An Amazon-generated measure that enables you to evaluate the CPU capacity of different Amazon EC2 instance types.

EBS
See Amazon EBS.

Elastic Block Store
See Amazon EBS.

elastic IP address
A static public IP address designed for dynamic cloud computing. Elastic IP addresses are associated with your account, not specific instances. Any elastic IP addresses that you associate with your account remain associated with your account until you explicitly release them. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by rapidly remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account.

ephemeral store
See instance store.

explicit launch permission
Launch permission granted to a specific user.

group
See security group.

instance store
Every instance includes a fixed amount of storage space on which you can store data. This is not designed to be a permanent storage solution. If you need a permanent storage system, use Amazon EBS.

instance type
A specification that defines the memory, CPU, storage capacity, and hourly cost for an instance. Some instance types are designed for standard applications while others are designed for CPU-intensive applications.

gibibyte (GiB)
a contraction of giga binary byte, a gibibyte is 2^30 bytes or 1,073,741,824 bytes. A gigabyte is 10^9 or 1,000,000,000 bytes. So yes, Amazon has bigger bytes.

image
See Amazon machine image.

instance
Once an AMI has been launched, the resulting running system is referred to as an instance. All instances based on the same AMI start out identical and any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or fail.

instance store
The disk storage associated with an instance. In the event an instance fails or is terminated (not simply rebooted), all content on the instance store is deleted.

group
Also known as a security group, groups define firewall rules that can be shared among a group of instances that have similar security requirements. The group is specified at instance launch.

launch permission
AMI attribute allowing users to launch an AMI

Linux
Amazon EC2 instances are available for many operating platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, and others.

paid AMI
An AMI that you sell to other Amazon EC2 users. For more information, refer to the Amazon DevPay Developer Guide.

private IP address
All Amazon EC2 instances are assigned two IP addresses at launch: a private address (RFC 1918) and a public address that are directly mapped to each other through Network Address Translation (NAT).

public AMI
An AMI that all users have launch permissions for.

public data sets
Sets of large public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. Amazon stores the data sets at no charge to the community and, like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. These data sets currently include data from the Human Genome Project, the U.S. Census, Wikipedia, and other sources.

public IP address
All Amazon EC2 instances are assigned two IP addresses at launch: a private address (RFC 1918) and a public address that are directly mapped to each other through Network Address Translation (NAT).

region
A geographical area in which you can launch instances (e.g., US, EU).

reservation
A collection of instances started as part of the same launch request.

Reserved Instance
An additional Amazon EC2 pricing option. With Reserved Instances, you can make a low one-time payment for each instance to reserve and receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance.

security group
A security group is a named collection of access rules. These access rules specify which ingress (i.e., incoming) network traffic should be delivered to your instance. All other ingress traffic will be discarded.

shared AMI
AMIs that developers build and make available for other AWS developers to use.

Solaris
Amazon EC2 instances are available for many operating platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, and others.

snapshot
Amazon EBS provides the ability to create snapshots or backups of your Amazon EBS volumes and store them in Amazon S3. You can use these snapshots as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes and to protect your data for long term durability.

supported AMIs
These AMIs are similar to paid AMIs, except that you charge for software or a service that customers use with their own AMIs.

tebibyte (TiB)
a contraction of tera binary byte, a tebibyte is 2^40 bytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. A terabyte is 10^12 or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. So yes, Amazon has bigger bytes.

UNIX
Amazon EC2 instances are available for many operating platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, and others.

Windows
Amazon EC2 instances are available for many operating platforms, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, and others.

Categories
Amazon Web Services CLI Command Line EC2 Linux S3 Windows

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Command Line Tools Reference

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Command Line Tools Reference Guide provides the syntax, a description, options, and usage examples for each command line tool. This section describes who should read this guide, how the guide is organized, and other resources related to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is occasionally referred to within this guide as simply “Amazon EC2”; all copyrights and legal protections still apply.

View guide here.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Command Line Tools Reference (straight to the meat and potatoes)

Categories
Apache cacti Cacti Examples graphing Linux monitor Passwords rrdtool Ubuntu Windows

How to install Cacti on Debian or Ubuntu

Cacti is a web based PHP/MySql graphing solution using the RRDtool engine. Classically, it can graph network bandwidthes with SNMP. But in fact, a lot of different graphs can be done with snmp, shell or perl scripts.

Cacti’s strength lies in the fact that it can be installed and used incredibly easily. You don’t need to be a guru or spend tons of hours on the tool to configure it. Even a beginner can use it very quickly. On the very active Cacti forum, you can share “Cacti templates” with other users which can can save you a lot of time. You can very easily add plugins to the Cacti too enabling the possiblility to integrate other free tools like ntop or php weathermap. In our opinion, this is by far the best RRDtool frontend.

For details about how to use Cacti, see the very good Cacti Manual.
RRDtool is a program developed by the Swiss Tobi Oeticker who was already the creator of the famous MRTG. RRDtool is developed using the “C” programming language and it stores the collected data on “.rrd” files.

The number of records in a “.rrd” file never increases, meaning that old records are frequently removed. This implies that one obtains precise figures for recently logged data, whereas figures based on very old data are mean value approximations. By default, you can have daily, weekly, monthy and yearly graphs.
Some of the advantages of RRDtool over MRTG are the following:

  • it is much quicker
  • it can use negative values
  • it can use more than one data source in a graph
  • the generated graphes are very customizable
  • it can be used by a wide variety of front-ends such as Cacti
  • the RRDtool records stored in .rrd files keep the same size and do not increase.

The following programs are needed to run cacti:

  • apache2 for the web server
  • mysql-server for the database
  • php5 for the server-based script
  • php5-common
  • php5-cgi
  • php5-cli
  • php5-mysql
  • snmp – snmp tools used to collect data to the remote hosts
  • rrdtool – a perl script to format collected data to rrdtool files
  • php5-gd – the graphical library used by a Cacti plugin named php weathermap

INSTALL PROGRAMS
Use apt-get to install the programs
#apt-get install apache2
#apt-get install mysql-server
#apt-get install php5
#apt-get install php5-common
#apt-get install php5-cgi
#apt-get install php5-cli
#apt-get install php5-mysql
#apt-get install snmp
#apt-get install rrdtool

INSTALL CACTI WITH APT-GET (recommanded)

#apt-get install cacti

You will have to configure the mysql settings through a little wizard.

At the end of the tutorial, a mysql database and user named cacti will be automatically created.

Now Cacti is ready to be used via: http://localhost/cacti The default login and password are admin.
Cacti will check if all the required tools are correctly installed.

Initial Cacti Configuration
Select “New Install”

Verify the required tools are correcty seen by cacti

Note that the poller.php script which send the requests to the remote hosts is lauched by the apache2 user, it means www-data.

To reconfigure cacti, use the following command:

#dpkg-reconfigure cacti

If you want to activate the poller manually run:

#/usr/share/cacti/site/php5 poller.php

Sometimes you need to activate it the first time, then it should run automatically every 5 minutes by default.

rrdtool install on debian

See also Multi-CPU Utilization Graphing in Cacti.

Categories
Linux Windows

Where is ntbackup in Windows Server 2008?

Microsoft replaced the ntbackup.exe backup utility in 2008 and Vista with wbadmin.

Wbadmin enables you to back up and restore your operating system, volumes, files, folders, and applications from a command prompt.

To configure a backup schedule, you must be a member of the Administrators group. To perform all other tasks with this command, you must be a member of the Backup Operators or the Administrators group, or you must have been delegated the appropriate permissions.

You must run wbadmin from an elevated command prompt. (To open an elevated command prompt, click Start, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.)

For more information on wbadmin go to this Microsoft TechNet page.

Remarks

The wbadmin command replaces the ntbackup command that was released with previous versions of Windows. You cannot recover backups that you created with ntbackup by using wbadmin. However, a version of ntbackup is available as a download for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista users who want to recover backups that they created using ntbackup. This downloadable version of ntbackup enables you to perform recoveries only of legacy backups, and it cannot be used on computers running Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista to create new backups. To download this version of ntbackup, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=82917.

Categories
Amazon Web Services AWS EBS Shared Snapshots

Amazon EBS Shared Snapshots

Today Amazon announced a new feature, “EBS Shared Snapshots”:

Amazon EBS shared snapshots make it easy for you to share this data with your co-workers or others in the AWS community. With this feature, users that you have authorized can quickly use your Amazon EBS shared snapshots as the basis for creating their own Amazon EBS volumes. If you choose, you can also make your data available publicly to all AWS users. Because all the data is stored in the AWS cloud, users don’t have to wait for time consuming downloads, and can access it within minutes. You can quickly start sharing your data through the AWS Management Console by visiting the Snapshots section in the Amazon EC2 tab, or by leveraging the API Tools.

Please visit our Amazon EBS detail page for additional information on Amazon EBS shared snapshots and Amazon EBS and see our developer documentation for more information on the new API calls.

Categories
Amazon Web Services CLI Command Line EC2 Linux S3 Windows

How to run Bucket Commander: A command line interface for Amazon S3

Bucket commander is a command line tool for Amazon S3.

Bucket Commander needs a configuration file, which can be created using Bucket Explorer’s UI.

Bucket Commander takes three arguments. ” -action ” , ” -authenticate ” and ” -emailprofile ”

“ -emailprofile” is optional argument , you need to specify it only when you have configured the Email profile for getting report of Bucket Commander operations (Upload, Download and Copy) via Email.
Valid values for ” -action ” are:

  • upload
  • download
  • copy

To run Bucket Commander at least one credential should be saved.

In case of Single credential saved the authentication argument is optional.

For ” -authenticate ” specify the nick name that you see in “quick connect” drop down from Bucket Explorer’s UI.
For Bucket Commander to work it needs config folder and .Lic file, i.e. bucketcommander.xml and bucketexplorer.xml . Upload /Download/Copy details are picked from the commander xml and authentication details are picked from bucketexplorer xml.

If BucketCommander.exe runs on different machines then it will not be able to decrypt credentials so it will prompt to update credentials, now you need to update credentials by giving Access Key and Secret Key .

For ” -emailprofile ” specify the profile name that you have saved in Email profile configuration from Bucket Explorer’s UI.

How to send report with Bucket Commander

You can specify more than one Email Profile by comma separator for getting report of Bucket Commander operations via email to each specified profile.
An example of working command looks like:
Command on Windows

Bucketcommander.exe -action:upload/download/copy [-authenticate:nick-name][[-emailprofile:profilename1,profilename2]

Command on Linux

BucketExplorer.sh -action:upload/download/copy [-authenticate:nick-name][-emailprofile:profilename1,profilename2]

Note: On Linux you can open terminal from Applications->Accessories->Terminal in Finder
Command on Mac OSX

java -jar BucketExplorer.jar -action:upload/download/copy [-authenticate:nick-name][-emailprofile:profilename1,profilename2]

Note: On Mac OSX you can open terminal from Applications->Utilities->Terminal in Finder.

Download bucket explorer for windows, linux and mac osx

Categories
Exchange 2007 HTTP HTTP Redirect HTTPS Linux Outlook Web Access OWA Windows

HTTP Redirection in IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 for Exchange 2007

I spent a couple hours over the past two days trying to figure out how to redirect requests from the root of my domain to the /owa directory. To boot I wanted to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. I needed to simplify the method of connecting to Outlook Web Access – basically make it ID10T-proof. This way users don’t have to specify HTTPS or use the /owa directory. They can simply type mail.mydomain.com in their browser and voila, they are directed to the right location.

As with most things more than one way exists to skin this cat. The two most common ways I discovered (both of which have some limitations and problems) were to either use HTTP REDIRECT in IIS Manager, or to use a custom 403 error page.

The simplest and most elegant solution I found was to create a one-line default.asp file. Of course you have to have ASP installed/enabled on the server and default.asp needs to be in (preferably alone or at the top of) your default documents list.

Wait no longer – all you need in the default.asp file is:

<% Response.Redirect “https://mail.mydomain.com/owa” %>

That’s it. It’s that simple!

Now when your users access (http://)mail.mydomain.com they will magically and instantly be redirected to the secure and correct location of https://mail.mydomain.com/owa.

Categories
FREE Freeware Jam Software Linux Utility Windows Windows 2000

TreeSize Free – ever want to know how big various folders are?

Every hard disk is too small if you just wait long enough. TreeSize Free tells you where precious space has gone. TreeSize Free can be started from the context menu of a folder or drive and shows you the size of this folder, including its subfolders. You can expand this folder in Explorer-like style and you will see the size of every subfolder. Scanning is done in a thread, so you can already see results while TreeSize Free is working. The space, which is wasted by the file system, can be displayed and the results can be printed in a report. TreeSize Free is freeware for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Download TreeSize Free (here you can find the more powerful TreeSize Professional as well)