tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-337321632011-11-27T18:58:38.740-05:00Ramblings on information technology... Programming, Security, IT Architecture, and Integration by Aaron Bush. <br> "Any fool can know. The point is to understand."abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.comBlogger19125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-4714814003692850522008-04-09T14:34:00.014-04:002008-04-09T15:01:00.687-04:002008-04-09T15:01:00.687-04:00

So it has been quite a while since the last post (and I promise to get back into the EC2 soon). I had to quickly post this because it really got to me...I am on vacation for the next few days and about a 1/2 day into the first day the voice mail light goes on the phone; it is work. It is a message from one of team members stating that the password I set to authenticate access for a 3rd party to

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-75016685388028672482008-02-11T22:27:00.000-05:002008-02-11T22:45:59.477-05:002008-02-11T22:45:59.477-05:00

This is the first in a series of posts which will cover my experiences with the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) services. I had first read about EC2 a few months back and tagged in my del.icio.us account but for some reason never visited it again (I can tell why: too busy working on the wrong things, i.e. legacy application support). Then, I attended the February Columbus Ruby Brigade

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-75866066625746418692007-12-31T15:11:00.000-05:002007-12-31T21:17:52.047-05:002007-12-31T21:17:52.047-05:00

A recent problem at work resulted in the degradation of three distinct ISP links down to one. This post will explain how the great expect tool assisted with reprogramming a router's ACL when copy paste was too fast.First some background... (Stick with me and I'll eventually get to the simulating human keystrokes).The design of the network was that a pair of load balancing devices would use

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-47201777288238025432007-12-06T19:28:00.000-05:002007-12-10T21:51:23.088-05:002007-12-10T21:51:23.088-05:00

I came across this article and feel that this is some amazing research into how future technologies will make it easier for us to generate more secure 'passwords'. Dr. Yan has taken Draw a Secret (DAS) technology and improved upon it in a great way...I had not seen DAS technology before reading this article and my first thoughts were: "OK, if you ask people to draw something that will become

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-32122020006871988232007-11-27T22:10:00.002-05:002007-11-27T23:06:09.367-05:002007-11-27T23:06:09.367-05:00

At work were recently brought a new site online and connected it to HQ via our MPLS WAN. Almost immediately we began to notice odd behavior out of this site related to the WAN connection. At times we were seeing ping times from our HQ to the sites router go over 1 sec!The serial interface at the remote site was clean and there were no errors on any interfaces. The problem appeared to be with

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-43111158915475632342007-10-22T23:17:00.000-04:002007-10-22T23:31:41.824-04:002007-10-22T23:31:41.824-04:00

I have started to develop a few pet projects using Ruby on Rails now that I have my head around the Ruby language a little more. One thing that impressed me was the ability to maintain your database schema via the db:migrate Rake tasks. Here is my two minute example of how this worked wonderfully for me...I grabbed a very old P4 with 256MB of RAM out of the basement and cobbled together a

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-32714046239511688312007-09-29T21:39:00.001-04:002007-09-29T22:04:39.598-04:002007-09-29T22:04:39.598-04:00

I have started to use TWiki at work to develop a more dynamic documentation store for my team and it beats the pants off of editing heavy MS Word docs. My problem in general with creating documents is that I spend a fair amount of my time in vi (on HPUX, Linux, Windows, everywhere; sometimes I wish I could use it everywhere) and then It happens... I switch to an application like Outlook of Word

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-15056334072341730392007-09-14T21:41:00.000-04:002007-09-17T21:27:06.720-04:002007-09-17T21:27:06.720-04:00

A recent project at work opened my eyes as to why you really have no good business designing your own low-level interprocess protocol. Given that there are so many good protocols already available, HTTP, SOAP, etc. why would a person be compelled to want to write their own? I should clarify what I mean by low-level in this context. In this case I am referring to a protocol which is implemented

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-39892284417365460502007-08-10T10:29:00.001-04:002007-09-17T21:27:41.997-04:002007-09-17T21:27:41.997-04:00

The ASLEAP tool was written by Joshua Wright and is designed to crack passwords used by wireless networks being secured with proprietary Cisco LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol). I had a chance to see a BOF session at SANS San Diego 2007 that was presented by Joshua and it was amazing. He went non-stop for at least an hour on many problems with Bluetooth and even 'toyed' with

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-25291490635938120682007-08-10T10:07:00.000-04:002007-08-10T10:21:29.613-04:002007-08-10T10:21:29.613-04:00

Continuing my studying for my GCIH I will move on to the next Rootkit: AFX RootKit (2003 & 2005). My review of this little gem will not be as detailed as the adore-ng rootkit as I do not have a separate Windows system to trash as a full test. What I will note are the details of the rootkit that are posted on many places already.The rootkit hides the following:Processes Handles Modules Files &

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-33774090444914757162007-07-30T21:21:00.000-04:002007-08-10T10:28:42.433-04:002007-08-10T10:28:42.433-04:00

As part of my studying for the SANS GCIH certification I thought I would take some time to really get to know several of the tools mentioned on the Certifications Bulletin. The first item is the adore rootkit. I will be studying adore-ng-0.56 on a RedHat 9 install. What I hope to understand better through this process:How to compile and 'install' the adore-ng rootkit (read the README, very

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-80689502109857682122007-07-15T08:26:00.001-04:002007-07-16T09:36:17.346-04:002007-07-16T09:36:17.346-04:00

Building on my previous post where I explored ways to get a legacy Progress application system to talk to a modern .NET based back-end, the next possible solution will involve communicating to a JMS system called AtiveMQ.ActiveMQI actually came across the Apache Foundation's ActiveMQ project while searching for a message queuing back-end for a Ruby project. I was in search of a scalable message

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-10891109264883974612007-06-27T22:39:00.000-04:002007-07-14T21:37:28.141-04:002007-07-14T21:37:28.141-04:00

In my previous post I hinted that I would next write about how to get several legacy systems to send data to a modern .Net based application when the legacy systems only know how to talk to each other. This problem is based once again on the aged Progress applications that company A uses.The Problem: The native language lacks the ability to make any network based connections, unless it is to a

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-2601991945327515072007-06-27T20:37:00.000-04:002007-06-27T23:07:48.149-04:002007-06-27T23:07:48.149-04:00

So I have been a little side tracked from my Ruby ISO8583 work for the past couple of weeks. But never fear I have been getting familiar with a really amazing API for the GPG project known as GPGME (GPG Made Easy). So why would a person be interested in this? Glad you asked.Problem: Company A has a very, very old POS application that was written entirely in-house. The programming language/

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-9292892265378885022007-06-09T12:11:00.000-04:002007-07-13T19:48:54.201-04:002007-07-13T19:48:54.201-04:00

Ruby is beauty,Without Ruby what to do,Programming is dead.-abOK, so that may be a Haiku if I counted correctly?Anyway... About a year ago I was in a Barnes and Noble and saw an issue of Linux Journal which had a cover story about Ruby. I hadn't read Linux Journal for quite a while and thought that this looked like a good issue to pickup. And that was my initial exposure to the what Ruby was

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-60569889499536026472007-05-07T21:35:00.000-04:002008-11-13T04:20:25.087-05:002008-11-13T04:20:25.087-05:00

Alright...The Jeep is back in business. As promised I took some photos of the old parts and will post the details of the replacement process. First off here is the broken A/C Compressor still installed in the Jeep. You can see the bad pulley on the front of the Compressor which is facing the fan shroud.To remove the compressor I had to first remove the bolt attaching the A/C hoses. Here is

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-87018978500939025142007-05-06T08:11:00.000-04:002007-07-11T21:04:38.212-04:002007-07-11T21:04:38.212-04:00

I have a 1999 Jeep Cherokee that has served me very well (has about 150,000 miles). About two weeks ago the serpentine belt began to make a very loud noise and a small amount of smoke would come out from under the hood. This was a problem that I could not ignore and the thought of looking for another car made my stomach turn. I had borrowed my wife's car to get back and forth to work and that

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-85360004475828971492007-04-09T22:33:00.000-04:002007-06-09T12:11:09.826-04:002007-06-09T12:11:09.826-04:00

First a little professional background information and what I do for a living...I work in the IT department for a medium size retail chain who specializes in computers and electronics. My responsibilities include managing a team of system and network administrators. This also includes managing the IT security for my organization. Security is my true passion. Unfortunately, like most mid-sized

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33732163.post-1157156397112673452006-09-01T20:18:00.000-04:002007-07-11T21:02:06.109-04:002007-07-11T21:02:06.109-04:00

Welcome to my Blog. Many exciting things will begin to appear here.

abhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02144144906877008461noreply@blogger.com0