Since I am working on getting Reasonably Secure Builds together and will be walking through a Debian build with an encrypted filesystem, and since I needed to upgrade vmware, I decided to do the full upgrade on lexington and get it up to scratch. I actually used the latest Lenny daily build of the Netinst CD, and it was nice. It is basically the same as I have always done, except for the fact that they have replaced the lilo command line prompt on the burst page with a dialog-like menu to give you your options.

I really want to get it running again, so that I can play with Untangle. It looks like a very cool product, and lexington has enough filesystem space for me to evaluate it.

More on my progress with Untangle. In fact, if things work out with it, expect an AP episode on it, somewhere in the firewalling eposodes.

Day 2 saw the takedown of the OSX machine with a Safari bug, which was previously unknown. Today, the final day of the contest, the Vista box was compromised with an unknown Flash exploit. Another term for an unknown exploit is a zero-day.

Zero-day exploits are almost indefensible. This is why I preach the sermon of defense in depth. Always have defenses in place that allow you to detect intrusions, and these defenses be layered. This gives you options to thwart the attack, even if it is only to start by pulling the ethernet cable.

As for the competition, I am somewhat surprised that the OSX box, which is Unix/BSD based fell first. However, it was an application-based attack versus a core OS level compromise…

Does this make Linux invincible? Absolutely not. It does say something about closed-source versus open source  development, but there are also vulnerabilities in open source software, but there are more eyes available to look at it. We should never let our guard down, even running open source.

Expression ‘ret’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1034
Expression ‘AlsaOpen( hostApi, parameters, streamDir, &pcm )’ failed in ’src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c’, line: 1066

I tried every combination of input and output devices available, and none worked. Hitting google, I found that killing jackd was the workaround, because jack and audacity apparently don’t play together nicely. This is on a Debian/sid system with audacity 1.3.4-1.2, in case anyone is having similar problems.

I have the theme completed, and will probably start recording in the next day or two. I had hoped to have the first episode out by the end of March, but now it looks like the first week or so of April. I have a lot on my plate right now, including a job change.

Got a chance to swap the current drive into the new enclosure, and it actually dropped the temperature of the drive from 35 degC to 20 degC. However, while the errors have dropped from 58 yesterday to 10 today, I believe the damage is already done. So tonight when I get home, I’ll start the rebuild.

The firewall is standing up pretty well as well. Haven’t had any problems with it at all.

Sunday was my youngest’s 18th birthday, and she wanted to go to the Melting Pot, which was a great experience but expensive.

So currently, I am backing the information off of defiant, and will hopefully be able to get the to the task of rebuilding in the next day or so.

As if that is not bad enough, crazyhorse, my firewall, finally gave up the ghost. I found I had no vpn access to my home network from work, and thought it was a problem with Comcast. However, I got home and checked it, and the drive light was on solid, the CDROM drive was flashing and the power supply was hot. So I spent friday night pressing the SPARC I have been building out into service…Until 2am saturday.

Once I get defiant back up and running, I plan to get some recording done.

This will replace my current box, which is a PII/233. I’ve built a minimal Debian installation, then added the tools I need, such as snort, tripwire, iptables and other tools.

And with every device you put on your network, make sure you scan it before you bring it online.