Jason Cooper

Have you considered an SSD as your system disk to go along side the 1TB disk you have in your list?

As it is your garage and I imagine that in the summer you will open the garage door, you will probably want to look at rack cooling rather than room cooling. Effectively putting a tent over the rack and running the air conditioning into the tent instead of the room. That way when you open the door you don't loose your rack's cooling.

I use XEN as my personal choice of hypervisor, nice and effective and I can do most things from the command line over ssh. The latter being a must for me as I don't want to be running GUIs that aren't required on a server.

Depends entirely on your schools network set up. If it lets you plug any device in then you could set it up to work, you would have to play with the settings on it though as you will probably want to either bridge the wireless with the wired network or set up the wireless router to do NAT for devices connected to it. As always make sure you have permission to do this or you may find yourself getting disciplined for attaching unauthorized devices to their network.

Everything is a maths problem in the end though. Is the goal to learn how to program by coding something or can you already code and just want to code something? If the first then pick something small that you can expand on, perhaps a reverse DNS scanner (it does reverse DNS lookups on an IP range).

At work it is Red Hat, their Red Hat Network web interface that lets you keep track of which of your servers hasn't updated yet is great. At home I use Debian, mainly because that is the one I have used for over 10 years. I have tried others at times but always end up coming back to Debian. Personally I don't think that there is any Linux distro that is the best just ones that you know the best. If it doesn't have the software/driver that you want then you can always compile it yourself from the source.

Try anything by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or John Wyndham. For Gibson try reading burning chrome first as it is full of short stories and can get your mind ready for Neuromancer, Countzero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. For John Wyndham try Day of the triffids or Kraken Awakes first but be sure to read The Midwich Cuckoos and the trouble with lichen as well.

Rather than spend your time looking at the hex for ascii, just use strings (standard on linux, but there are versions available for windows). strings will output all strings found in the files passed as parameters, you can redirect this output to a file and work through all the values you see. Other options would to run the program in a debbuger (ollydebug) and look at variables at key points. If there is a strcmp or a strncmp function I would throw a breakpoint on them and see what values are being passed to it.

It all depends on the 1U server you are planning to use a router. Does it have more than 2 network interfaces? Does it have 2 PSUs? Does it have multiple disks for mirroring? If so then it sounds like it could make a good router. Why more than 2 network interfaces? well you will want the option of keeping your wireless separate to your wired LAN, you will probably want at some point an interface to act a feed into a IDS, unless you want it to be an IPS in which case it would have to sit inline. Multiple PSUs mean that if one dies you don't loose your connection to the internet. Same goes for wanting mirrored disks.

check out Irongeek there was plenty of stuff about hacking printers on there.

I should probably have worded the first sentence in my last post a bit better, kill on its own without the -9 will normally be enough. If you don't specify a signal then it defaults to the TERM signal (-15). The -9 signal is the KILL signal. The difference between the two is that the TERM signal is catchable by the process, it can contain it's own signal handler for the TERM signal and when triggered close itself down gracefully. The KILL signal is not catchable by the process, it doesn't get any chance to close down cleanly. In the case of a grep reading from a file a "kill -9" shouldn't cause any problems, in the case of database a "kill -9" has an increased chance of corrupting data.

As already stated you can never be sure that you are completely untraceable. Generally there is a traceability v performance pay off. The more measures you take to be untraceable (tor, proxies, VPNs) the lower the performance you will get. Using someone else's internet connection decreases the chances of you being traced by the people at the end of the chain, but increases you chance of being tracked by the person who's internet connection you are using, "Why is there a guy in car sat outside my house? Lets call the police and get them to investigate."

Don't use kill -9 as the first try. When you use a -9 on the kill the process doesn't get to finish gracefully (i.e. clear up after itself). Save the -9 for when the process ignores a normal kill. After all it only takes a process to be killed with -9 while writing data out to a file for it to corrupt the file (e.g. it has updated the header of a file but gets killed with -9 before it writes out the data, leaving you with either just a header in the file or a new header with the old data).

Assuming Linux, try using ps -elf to list your processes and then use kill with the process id of it. That should get rid of it for you.

No, good old fashioned single player only :)

My current personal project (i.e. one that I do in my own time) is creating a javascript text adventure engine. I have a working prototype over on my web site https://www.heckrothindustries.co.uk/text-adventures/demo-text-adventure/. The main aim I have is to make sure that the actual text adventure is contained in a number of data files (XML files in this case) so the engine can be reused. The demo adventure is the one that I have been making up as I add new features to it so there is no plot and as I add new features it will grow. As always anyone who plays with it and finds any bugs, please let me know.

Interestingly though the opposite is also true, that data that the OS has deleted is more likely to be destroyed by the SSD via the same process. With the older magnetic technology unless someone went out of their way to securely erase the data it would be around for a long time for forensics to restore and investigate, with SSDs a file that has been deleted just won't be anywhere near as easy to restore/recover. I guess with SDDs when you delete a file it is hard to completely erase it and its hard to recover it. It does suggest that if you want to make sure data isn't recoverable after you have deleted it then you need to be looking at using the drive with encryption on top, so even it blocks are left readable on the drive it is useless without the key.

Instinctive method would be to use one of the many methods to take a screen shot and then process that screen shot looking for the colours you are interested in. It probably isn't the best method and could put a lot of strain on your machine depending on how often it is taking a screen shot and processing it.

Don't worry about the error, tar is just telling you that it is removing the / from the start of the files. So if you have asked tar to store /etc/ it will store the files in the tar as etc/passwd etc/shadow ... This is a good thing or you make it very easy to overwrite things accidentally when extracting the tar file. If you really want to store the / at the start of the filename then use either -P or --absolute-names, but I don't think you will want to do that. If you really want to get rid of the error but keep the relativity of the filenames then try something like # --- BEGIN --- DATA="CVS_Repository/ErikStevensBackUp" TAR_FILE="Backups/ErikStevensBackup-`date +"%d-%m-%Y"`.tar.bz2" # first remove old backup rm -f /Backups/ErikStevensBackup*.*.* # Change to the root directory so we can reach all the files we need relatively. (man pushd and popd for more info) pushd / # create backup with date tar -cjfTP $TARFILE $DATA # Pop us back to where we were popd # --- END ---

There are pro's and con's to starting to learn using any language. I would recommend that you decide what you are wanting to do before learning. Are you wanting to learn how to create web applications, if so then look at Perl or PHP, and JavaScript. If you are wanting to learn how to create games then look at C or C++. If you are wanting to learn how to create an operating system then look at assembler and C. If you are just looking to learn how to program then use something along the lines of Python and after you have the basics of the language down then concentrate on the actual design of your programs. You will find that you can transfer most of the algorithm knowledge from one language to another, and that is what makes the difference.

assuming date("Y-m-d") is generating the current date then try this SQL instead which uses MySQL's NOW() function. SELECT id, Title, Start_date, End_date,Important, Information, Full_information, Price, Image FROM web_deals WHERE Start_date <= NOW() AND End_date >= NOW();

The logic looks correct, do you get any errors? Does it need a semicolon ';' on the end of the line, sometimes languages require that other times they don't depends on the database, language and how they are connected. If you don't get any errors then try outputting the SQL that is generated and putting it manually into mysql, it usually will help you figure out what is wrong.

You on the right tracks with starting by figuring out and documenting the current environment, Devices, cabling, APs, etc. One thing that you should definitely do is wireless survey of the site. This can be quite simple to achieve using kismet and a map of the site. Just walk around the site and every so often mark down on the map the signal strength and noise you are getting for their wireless network. Also list at each point what wireless networks are detected and what channel they are on. Once you have the wireless survey you can use it figure out better locations to put the access points in and also what channel to run on to get the least interference from other wireless networks in the area. Once you have moved the access points you can then do the survey again and see if things have improved. You can repeat this process till you are sure that you have the access points in the best locations. You can do all of the above without spending much money, and afterwards you will also be able to show where the gaps are and why you are buying new access points to fill them. If you are thinking of using POE to the repeater then don't put in a repeater put in an access point instead as it will have an Ethernet cable plugged in anyway.

An inter-library loan is where your local library will borrow the book, journal, etc from another library for you. Very useful for getting access to that book that is out of print.

Yes, but then again so too does signature scanning. It is the difficult case of trying to reduce the number of false negative and false positives, or to put it another way AV that flags up too many files as viruses that aren't are just as bad as those that don't flag up files that are viruses.