The malicious file found is a PHP script, with alot of hacking tools embedded. One interesting part is, it have a md5 decoder. I’m not really good in data structure, I cannot construct my own bruteforce code. So, I took those bruteforce code to a single file, just to decode a md5 hash string.

This is just a prove of concept that, a strong password should be long, and have some extra character, other than normal alphabets. This give a higher probability of character to choose in bruteforce attack.

This code might not applicable in real life nowadays, as there are other ways users password been exploited, for example, using default password, and common password. Thats why most bruteforce attacked were dictionary based. So, make sure your password is strong enough. One other method, is Rainbow Table. I’m still reading it

Rainbow Table (Wikipedia) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table
Md5decode.txt – http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=md5decode.txt

For our setup, we are utilizing cacti, a web-based host monitoring tool, that can monitor hosts through snmp. Its a php tool, and customizable. Its powerful enough to give you what you want, just the matter of configuration. The first thing, you have to make sure every host you want to monitor is snmp enabled.

syslocation YOUR_LOCATION
syscontact YOUR_EMAIL
sysname SYSNAME


You can verify that your snmpd daemon is responding to snmp request using snmpwalk. For snmp version 1, you can use,
snmpwalk -v 1 -c YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING 127.0.0.1
For snmp version 2,
snmpwalk -v 2c -c YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING 127.0.0.1

This configuration is for the end host you want to monitor. In Cacti, you will need to add the community string, and the IP of the host you want to monitor. Then, cacti will start polling information from these hosts through SNMP with the credential given.

#!/bin/sh
# System + MySQL backup script
# Copyright (c) 2008 Marchost
# This script is licensed under GNU GPL version 2.0 or above
# Modified by Farhan Faisal @ farhanfaisal.com
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------

rm -rf $ARCHIVED

http://www.howtoforge.com/shell-script-to-back-up-all-mysql-databases-each-table-in-an-individual-file-and-upload-to-remote-ftp

Chilling waterfall located in Kuala Kubu Bharu. After reaching there, we park our car, and start tracking to the base site, where there were the management office, campsite, toilets and place to pray. The place is well maintained, as it is a fish sanctuary area. Thats why, fishing is strictly not allowed in Chilling Waterfall. You can see the signboard throughout the path.

After 40 minutes walk, just following the path upriver and 5 river crossing, we reached the fall at around 3.30 pm. The waterfall is just fantastic. I remember last time i went there, we did canyoneering near the fall. We spend around 1 1/2 hours there, and start departing back to campsite. There were some strict rules, like you cannot camping there beyond the hanging bridge, and you have to get back before 5 o’clock. You also cannot swim there if its raining. There have been a few accident there, that involves death.

The next day, the waterfall hunting. Finally I got a friend who would like to go with me. We went to Tanglir Waterfall, based on the guide in WaterfallsOfMalaysia website. I have marked the coordinate in my PDA phone, and we follow the path to the waterfall. I only manage to know the exact point, not exactly the route there. So, we asked the local people there, and they show us where to go. The waterfall is really nice, with high altitude, cold, and privacy. The water is not too shallow and not too deep, just nice for a normal day trip. There is not camping ground, as is surrounded by farms, and private lands. It would be easier to go there again by motorcycle or 4×4.

Right after that, we went for Sungai Dua Waterfall. The access is easy, you can drive straight away to the waterfall, just need around 200 meters walk. If you come with 4×4, you can park by the water. The waterfall was so nice, but its quite popular already for some local people. The time we were there, there’s alot of people there, and we just took pictures and leave. The place is quite nice for family camping, day trip picnic, and also to wash motorbikes

Picasa Album – Chilling waterfall
Picasa Album – Tanglir and Sungai Dua Waterfall

Within last few weeks, I’ve been to Bukit Tabur. Could not find more time for long trip, other than usual rock climbing during weekends, and Bukit Tabur trip. It start with my colleague, who would like to try out some adventures during weekends.

On 20th December, we start hiking the hill at 6.30, just 4 of us, because 5 others were late. We dont waste the opportunity to see the sunrise. Within 25 minutes, we arrive there. Its still dark, and we still have to use our headlights to walk. Then I returned back, and wait for the other 5 of us to arrive. We managed to reach the others around 7.30. Its not so hot yet, and we can still enjoy the sunrise that time.

The trip was planned for only to enjoy the sunrise, but we could not hold ourself seeing other trackers moving with the passion to the top. I never reach the peak, the real peak, and neither all of us. We just follow some other trackers that time.

Following few weeks, there comes another trip, for my other friends. They missed the 1st trip, because of health condition. Well, I keep my promise to bring them there Its not as early as the previous trip, but we enjoy the trip, enjoy the sunrise, and enjoy the view from there. For last few trip to Bukit Tabur, I really want to just enjoy the view, and the cold winds. Its just feels like at the top of mountains, just with 20-30 minutes walk.

Its a long time since my last mountain hiking, and I’m not sure whether I will join some other mountain trip or not. I also lost count how many mountain trip that I missed, purposely thank you for inviting anyway.. As for now, I’m doing rock climbing, and I love it.

For me, I would just want to use google mail, as inside google apps package. Google mail really a good thing we have in the internet world nowadays, as the email interface, emailing experience is different, and really useful. Just a few cons like no folder management. But you can still use labelling to categorize your email.

There are 2 ways you can use google mail on your own domain. Either registering for google apps at http://www.google.com/a/ or using your current gmail email account.

Using google apps.

Go to http://www.google.com/a/, and register for google apps account with your domain name. With google apps, you can have google docs, google chat, google site, calendar and a few more. But this example, google site will be ignored, as I’m using my current hosting account for site, I’m just using Google Mail in my google apps.

After the registration process, you will have to verify domain ownership. You can choose either 1 of 2 method, either configuring your MX record, your html verification. I think HTML verification will be easier, as you can simply create the file, with specific filename and content provided by Google, on your hosting account, and Google with check the file later.

After your google apps have been created, you need to modify your DNS record of your domain, specifically your MX record to tell where emails of your domain to be sent to. Please check it here, http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33352. You can just refer below, the list of MX record to be changed.

MX Server address Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30


Google also suggest you to add this additional SPF (Sender Policy Framework) in your DNS. This is additional record to tell which server is supposed to send email at this domain name. As we are using google apps for our email service, we should tell google server is the only server which suppose to send email @ourdomain.com.

"v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all"
* note the ~all, not -all.

Once finished, you can wait for the DNS record to propogate, and usable. You can check your MX record changes through DNSStuff.com, from here, http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=116393

You can manage your account using your admin account, and login to your inbox through http://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com. This is how control panel looks like.

Start creating email account for your domain users!!

Using your existing gmail account

This options is only for a specific email account of a domain. For example, you have a email account from your organization, and you dont like the web-based email client. You can use your gmail account to check all your emails to yourname@yourorganization.com in your current Gmail account.

Basically, you will forward all your email that were for yourname@yourorganization.com to YourGmailAccount@gmail.com. How to do it, it depend on your current email service. You might be able to change in your own web-based email access, or you might need to ask your domain administrator to do it for you. If you manage your domain yourself, please refer to your hosting control panel on how to accomplish this.

In your gmail account, you can go to Setting -> Accounts and click Add another email address. Enter yourname@yourorganization.com and Google will send a confirmation code to yourname@yourorganization.com. You might just need to check your Gmail account inbox, if you have done the email forwarding part. After you have confirmed the code, you can see yourname@yourorganization in your list of accounts, inside your Gmail account.

You may want to put your mail in mannerly order, by creating a email filters. Click Setting -> Filters, and Create new filter. You can create filter for all email sent to yourname@yourorganization.com, label it as MyOrganization, or skip inbox. You can just click the link to your label, and you will just reading your emails yourname@yourorganization.com.

This tips is available in Hacking Gmail by Ben Hammersley. This is a great book if you really rely on Gmail for your daily email. I really think Gmail is the best email service at this time.

Apache and mysql need a higher priority to serve the web faster, as fast as it could. I found a tutorial on renice, where we can change the process priority of process, and also for any process that belong to any particular user. The value varies from -20 until 19. The negative value only can be assigned by a superuser. The lower the value, higher the priority. For example, process with value -19, have a higher priority than a process with nice value -18.

to change the nice value, it could be as simple as :

nice -5 httpd
* this will change process httpd priority to 5.

You can also change the priority by user.

renice -5 -u mysql
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql to -5

renice -5 -u mysql -p 8918
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql and with PID 8918 to -5.

http://www.newlinuxuser.com/howto-change-a-running-processes-priority-with-renice/
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Renice – Linux man page http://linux.die.net/man/8/renice

Yesterday I spent some time to play around with Monowall. Monowall is an embedded firewall package, thats built from bare-bone version of FreeBSD. The whole package is really small, smaller than 12MB, it can fit into your CF card for your embedded project. I start to have a look into Monowall when my boss bring this machine into our office, an embedded box, Axiomtek NA-0042B. I couldn’t find any technical spec in detail of the product, even from the official Axiomtek website.

So, in my case, I’m using a generic-pc image, from one of the monowall mirrors. I load the image into another vmware virtual machine, load the image into a secondary image of the machine.

The disk is available for download here Monowall Disk for VMware. I’ve also prepared a complete vmware machine with monowall. Please download it here, Monowall VMware Image.. This machine have been configured with IP 192.168.1.254. Username & password are the same as default, admin and mono respectively.

I’ll have a look into IpCop and pfSense later. Never get my hands tired with them yet. Maybe some other Monowall derivative as well

http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall Disk for VMware (5.4MB), 54 downloads.
http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall VMware Image. (5.4MB), 49 downloads.

While figuring out how to manage my pics, and easy insert into my blog post, I found this plugin. Picasa LigthBox 2. This plugin will retrieve our public pictures from picasa gallery, and have an easy interface to include them into our blog post. Besides, it provides a overlay preview to our users, using Wordpress Lightbox Plugin.

Just put the Wordpress Lightbox2 plugin into your wp-content/plugins/, activate it in Wordpress Admin page. Do the same thing for Picasa Lightbox 2 plugin. Put into your plugin folder and activate it. After that, you can see a small button to add new picasa photo.

http://bogde.ro/computers/picasa-ligthbox-2-preview.htm
http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

Last few month I have bought a electronic prototyping platform, which contains a mictrocontroller Atmega168. The board I bought was iDuino, a derivative from another electronic platform, that is Arduino. They are open source hardware and software platform, where you can customize the microcontroller to do almost anything. But right now, I just can blink the light

This is the iDuino board, a similar version of Arduino Diecimila. I just use the Arduino programming software, Arduino tutorial to start with the board. The only reason I bought iDuino instead of Arduino because its cheaper

iDuino is a breadboardable version. So, you can test your own circuit directly on a breadboard. There are a few version of Arduino you can choose from, according to your project need. This iDuino is a good start, and surely I will learn alot from it. It took me almost 4 month to get started, because of busy work. From beginning, i start buying tools, completing my toolbox, and now i have the time to play around with it.

I bought a unsoldered board iDuino, it took me almost one hour to solder them, and test it the other day. The board is connected to PC using USB, utilizing FT232RL, the same as in Arduino. So, I need to install USB Serial Converted driver, provided in Arduino programming software package. Arduino software provided with some sample code, and sample wiring to get started. At first when I try to load up a “blink” code, it gives me an error,

[code]avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51[/code]

I search around, and found the solutions in Arduino forum. i just need to go to Device Manager –> Ports, there is a USB serial port. At first it was mapped to Port 15. Go to its properties, Port Setting, Advance, change the port number to something below 10. Then change the port in Arduino software to what you have change, through Tools –> Serial Port. Now I can start the coding and projects.

There is one guy who already proposing for a sumo challenge, in Ittutor forum. I dont know when I can get involve. I’m a newbie. huhuh.. Tunggu Bro Rizal, bagi saya blaja dulu