NegativeSpace

I'm still waiting on my email. I actually misspoke about how long it had been in my previous post. I forgot that I had already registered once before a looooong time ago, and then forgot, and then registered again like a month or more ago. I still have not got the first email. I've been keeping up with the foundations blog, and this is seriously starting to feel like another CherryPal fiasco all over again. If I don't get my email within the next 6 or 8 weeks, I will probably just give up on the idea that I will ever get one for less than $150, in which case, I will not be buying one. It's pretty strange how everytime something, similar to Raspberry Pi, that seems too good to be true comes around, there is this ambiguous release and ship date, and no one can ever really confirm waether or not the date is actually genuine, and the product ends up costing twice it's promised price, and once the ship date comes and goes, no one can really prove that they are actually shipping more than a few review units. I'm not saying that's the case with the Raspberry Pi 2 but it sorta seems to be shaping up that way to me. I know that it's a non profit group of enthusiasts with limited resources who have created the RPi project, so I guess I can understand why it's going down this way but I still think they should have enough of the things ready in their hands to immediately meet at least 20% or 30% of initial release demand. It just doesn't help anyone when they go saying it's gonna be this long if this and this happens and this doesnt happen, but if those things do and don't happen it may or may not add 43 more days to the ship date for the initial 12% of registrars. Alternately it may be this long, provided that the second suppliers trucking company gets approval from the department of transportation blah blah blah blah. I know I'm exagerating but I just don't understand why they choose handle these matters with this type of vague ambiguous conduct.

So did you get your RPi's?

Are you using WiFi provided to you by the college, or is it another student who is sharing their WiFi with you? It seems safe to assume it's not a friend, since you can not get admin access to the AP's OS (unless it's a friend who doesn't trust you). In that case, I have some ideas, which may or may not be completely far fetched and unrealistic, so we will need some genuine experts to weigh in on their pheasability. Before that, though, can you tell me the results of a bandwidth/speed test? Are your speeds the same, higher, or lower than others who live in your building? Also, what do you know about the network infrastructure that serves you? If you are using WiFi provided by the school, then I would imagine each student/dorm room has his/her/its own VPS, or some other sort of seperation of network client devices. Do oyu know if that is true or not? Does the local infrastructure serve 25 clients, or 2,500? Is everyone using a single WiFi radio for internet access, and if not, how many radios do you think might serve your building? What is the intended bandwidth of your connection? Do you want to increase your network speed only so that you will have some advantage over your friends in the building (say, for LAN gaming), or do you just want your internet downloads to be faster? The first idea would be to inspect your own DNS record entries in order to find the time of day/date when your DHCP server assigns you an IP address on the network. If you could pinpoint a time and day when your old lease will expire, and when you will definitely get a new IP address if you ask for one, maybe you can use that to your advantage. Maybe if you were first in line to get your brand new IP address and DHCP lease, maybe that would put you first in line for packet routing? This is where more info about your network equipment/infrastructure might be useful. Definitely need a real experts opinion here either way. The second idea would be to ask the person who administers the buildings network infrastructure to be your friend, and to then ask that new friend to give you a little bit of a bandwidth priority. It probably wouldn't take a drastic change in priority to get your connection speed up to a better level. A third, albeit less than favorable, idea would be to just prioritize the bandwidth you already have so that the things you want to download faster, have a chance at getting a greater portion of your available bandwidth. There are countless ways to do this, and here is another time when a software market expert could really help. I know there are some very easy to use and free software programs out there that will tell you what software has a current TCP/IP connection, each of which will use bandwidth. Then you could just kill some of those in order to give the more important connections their needed speed increase. TCPEye should do the trick. If not, there are untold numbers of other similar software, and probably even a tool built in to Windows that would do the trick. Fourth idea; couldn't you maybe just use a long CAT5e cable? I of course do understand that there are plenty of times that, if you have to plug into something, then you woudl rahter just not be using the internet. There are also other times when you just sit there in front of the computer at your desk, and there is no need for any mobility. Of course, there's the possibility that there are no network wall jacks in the building, which is another reason we will need to know more about the buildings network infrastructure.

In the future, you could try DownForEveryoneOrJustMe. It will tell you if, as the name indicates, a website is down for everyone or just you. Also, if you look in the bottom of the field for the specific individual post that you wish to delete, you should see a button that says delete on it, which should do the trick. Maybe that button appears for topic replys but not original topic posts though.

It actually doesn't bother me at all that the law allows for anyone to listen to unencrypted, not just wifi, but radio anything. No one can expect privacy when they are spreading their own radiation into the personal private spaces of others without even attempting to make it private. As a matter of fact, I don't know if I would be ok with a law that made it a crime to crack someones wifi encryption. I do think it should be illegal, if not a crime, to take without permission any amount of bandwidth from anyone no matter how much radiation of theirs spills into your house or whatever, encrypted or not. I guess that standing, though, might make it imperative that the act of handshake capture requires the theft of bandwidth, even if just a miniscule amount. There's also the redundancy of the law that makes it illegal to steal, or even borrow from a willing neighbor, electricity, and since the radiation coming into our house from your neighbors wifi router uses electricity, you are stealing that as well if you even capture a handshake. Just dealing with the actual matter of google driving by my house and listening to my (were it not encrypted) traffic, it most certainly is wrong, but I just don't see any justification or practical reason to make it illegal.

Great explanation. I understand perfectly.

I had originally planned on using a switch but I found out that the wifi from the main router won't penetrate the 24 inch thick solid wood walls of the theater, so I ended up needing to put a WiFi AP in the theater room for mobile devices. Is "wireless client mode" an official function of all/most/some routers' operating system software? Or does setting the 'client' router up to not function as a DHCP server, giving it it's own gateway address, and using it's 'switch' LAN ports and not using its 'internet' port, all constitute it being in wireless client mode? In my OP I actually mentioned the fact that I did disable the client router from being a DHCP server, so does this mean that I bridged the two routers, and that all devices are on the same subnet? Thanks for replying to my post, but I still don't know why the "internet" port on the back of the 'client' router can't be used for plugging in the network cable that comes from the 'host' router, which was the reason I started the thread.

So I guess the main difference between a router and a network switch is the ability/use of the things like DHCP server software, NAT (a concept which I have not been able to understand yet), and the other things that routers usually do, but things that this one is not doing. Is that correct? I had two reasons for using the second router/switch in this case, one being the fact that all 6 main theater devices are networkable and I wanted to be able to network more than just the single one I would have been able to with the single cable. The other reason was the fact that the theaters walls are 24 inch thick solid wood with a steel roof, so the main routers radio signal does not penetrate into the room even though it's only about 20 feet away, and my friends wife likes to use internet on her tablet, which she was unable to do before in this room. The point to all of this being, I had to use the second router for its switch as well as it's radio, so is it still just a switch or......... While we are on the subject, what are all of the differences between Access Points, Routers, Switches, and Hubs? I, of course, have some ideas of what these thigns mean, but I'm not really the kind of person that is ok with partly understanding anything.

I've been helping a friend set up a new home theater system (very badass one, pictures later), and I had to add a router to the theater room. Everything went fine, but there is this one thing that I don't quite understand, which I will get to in a minute. The network cable that comes from the cable modem is obviously connected to the 'internet' port on the main router in another room. Plugged into one of the LAN ports is a network cable that goes through the house and ends up in the theater. That terminal plugs in to a regular LAN port, instead of the 'internet' port, on the theater room router. The other 3 LAN ports are used for the Logitech Revue, Blu Ray player, and receiver. I don't understand this one thing; Why is it that the network cable coming form the 'host' router in the other room has to be plugged into a regular LAN port on the 'client' router instead of into the "internet" port? When I went to set this up, I knew that I would need to assign the theater room router an address that is different from the address of the 'host' router. I knew I would have to disable it's DHCP server. I didn't know that the LAN cable coming from the'host' router had to be plugged in to regular LAN port on the theater room router.

So samba is the way to share files from windows (host) to Linux (client)? I've never used it before, and from what the people on the BT forum say, it's pretty difficult to even install and configure. Maybe I don't have the skills as of yet. It seems like it woul dbe much easier to just view some LAN files wiht a few commands. Would it not be as simple, in theory, as mounting the remote drive and then issuing the command to view the contents of the target directory and then view the files? Or is this what samba enables us to do? One of the things that I think I have learned in the past week or so is that a person really needs to know certain things in order to complete tasks with commands. Even the step-by-steps assume some kind of previous experience and knowledge of more basic skills, such that you have to read the instructions for the instructions.

I just realized that you thought I was talking about accessing directories on someone elses network. I was actually talking about accessing directories and files on my own network.

That looks like a great book! I'm gonna have to order that, but damn, 44 dollars seems a little steep! Concerning using BT without knowing what I'm doing... I thought you meant that I could corrupt my OS or lose data. I won't be attempting to learn the suite of BackTrack tools until I learn about the more basic Linux functions. When I dig into learning the full array of hacker tools, I will be using a dummy network that I will set up for the task. Just for the record, I'm not interested in hacking for malicious reasons. Curiosity, and nothing else, has always been the thing that compells me to learn.

I found a command on some website that was supposed to be what I was looking for but I'm not sure how to define the "Windows" key to the applet. The command is gconf-editor, then open /apps/metacity/global_keybindings - and this is where the instructions quit being useful, as they didn't tell me what to do once I navigated to the directory. I looked around and tried to figure stuff out for a while and finally tried..... In the directory /apps/metacity/global_keybindings there is a list of functions under the 'Name' column, including one named "run_command_1" whose default value is "disabled". I changed the value to "windows" (for the windows key), and then navigated to the folder "keybinding_commands", and changed the "command_1" value to "gnome-terminal" (I found this command under a list of Linux terminal commands from a website). Didn't work. So then a few minutes ago I remembered that the windows key is called the Super Key in Linux (from watching HAK5). So I went back and changed the keybinding value to Superkey (no success), then Super (same thing), then finally after a serach I learned that the proper usage is "Super_L" so I replaced the value with that, and then after issuing "pkill x" and then "startx", my Windows/Super Key opens a terminal!

I just noticed that I left out the fact that I already went there, and the option doesn't exist. Thanks anyway though.

Thanks for writing up a response to this, but I actually already learned the terminal commands to bring the interface up and down, so that's not a problem. Making it so FN+F3 accomplishes the task is just a fun thing I wanted to do while learning something along the way. I looked for books about BT5 but I wasn't able to find one with that title. Here is a list of the books related to BT5 that Amazon carries Search; BackTrack Linux I actually considered weather or not it was a good idea for me to install BT and just start using it without really knowing what the hell I was doing. This is pretty much all I have ever done where computers and concerned. When I was 8 years old, the librarian at my elementary school told me the commands to issue to play Oregon Trail. For the next 10 years I went around to any computer I could find and used trial and error to learn. I ruined quite a few installations of Windows, and none of them belonged to me. I surely would have preferred to have a mentor/teacher but in those days there were very few people who were in the position to do so. Now I'm older and I can buy my own computers, and I am willing to ruin one once in a while in order to learn. Obviously though I prefer not to ruin my computers, so I have to ask, what is the danger in using BackTrack without already knowing what I'm doing? As long as I am mostly just risking losing the BT OS and other stuff within that partition I'm totally ok with that. Obviously when accessing remote drives and directories there is a risk of losing those as well, but I'm ok with that. I'm careful to not keep anything in the same partition as BT is installed so that if I have to format it and reinstall BT I won't lose anything.

I'm new to Backtrack Linux. There are a few things that I am trying to figure out how to do that I haven't been able to find instructions for. 1. I would like to map the key combo FN+F3 to run the command to enable and disable my WiFi interface (wlan0). I'm not sure it can even be done but with the beauty of the Linux terminal, there seems to be a good chance that it's not only possible but may even be simple. The desired effect here is to emulate the common windows key combo that enables and disables the WiFi radio. 2. I would like to map the "Windows" key (or "Power" key in Linux) to open a terminal. As it stands now, Ctrl+Alt+T opens terminal, which is fine, but I rather like the idea of using the unused Windows key to do it in one stroke instead of 3. I have looked in the System>Preferences>Keyboard to find a way to accomplish this but there is no way to map individual keys from there as far as I can tell. 3. I will be showing my level of competence here.... I don't know how to associate with my WiFi AP without using the Wicd network manager, and that is lame. What are the exact commands to, uhhhhmmm, initialize? (whats the word again?) my WiFi radio, authenticate with WPA2, and associate with the AP? I've seen Darren K. use the command "ifconfig wlan0 up" before, but that command alone doesn't seem to do the trick, which makes sense. 4. When a person wants to use the terminal in order to access files or directories on a Windows machine across the LAN, what are the commands to do so? Also along the same lines, what is the standard or best way to get an RDP session going, where host is a Windows box, already set up to host RDP sessions, and client is Linux terminal, when both machines are on the same LAN, as well as when using an outside network/over the internet? I've been a little surprised at the lack of a website with a database of instructions on how to do this stuff. Otherwise, how is a person supposed to learn this stuff? Backtrack-linux.org has some instructions for some, but not nearly enough, functions of the OS but they seem to assume a certain level of experience that I do not have.

Still need a hacker mentor!

I just got Track Down in the mail! I'm still having trouble finding most of the other ones though for watching and not buying on dvd. I'm happy to buy the dvds after I've seen the movies if they are any good but I can't find anywhere to watch most of these suggestions.

It looks pretty good, exactly what I'm looking for but damn, 30 dollars for the DVD and I don't think that includes shipping. I loved Kevin Mitnicks latest book "Ghost in the Wires" but it would be nice to get another persons point of view, as most of the book is an autobiography. I do like supporting the good content makers but I don't know if I want to pay over 30 dollars for a movie that might not be very good so maybe I'll watch it first (don't know where though) and then buy it if I like it. If I should see Take Down before Freedom Downtime it might be a while because I don't know where to go to see Take Down, since Netflix doesn't have it and I don't do torrents.

HAHA! I had no idea there was sequel to War Games. I bet it's pretty stupid. War Games didn't have the kind of story that begs for one.

I haven't heard of any new hacker movie! Is it called "Hacker"? The only hacking related movie I've been able to find by Google that's coming out soon is something called Reboot. That the one?

I am huge itno movies so I'm up for watching any movie that is good but I'm hoping to find more documentaries than hollywood entertainment. I can't find Hackers Wanted, Hackers Freedom Downtime, BBS The Documentary, or Hackers Are People Too on Netflix, which really sucks! I've seen all of the Hollywood ones except for Sneakers and Track Down, though the Steig Larsson ones aren't really products of hollywood I guess. I have Trackdown at the top of my Netflix DVD Q, but Snekares doesn't look that interesting, even though it does have Robert redford, so it's closer to the "someday" end of my Q. I guess I will have to just search the internet to find a place to watch the documentaries I haven't seen yet. If that doesn't work I'll have to buy them on DVD/BluRay. That hackvids site will help a lot. Hopefully most or all of the links are still working.

I'm trying to find any documentary type movies which have Hacking and/or Information Technology as their subject matters. I've already seen Revolution OS, which I liked pretty well. I, so far, haven't been able to find any others that seem to have specific subject matter that is not related to facebook and similar money machine websites/services. The main goal is to learn about the most important software, community groups, ideas, people, etc. If you know of any movies, good or bad, with this kind of subject matter I would like to know about them so I can check them out! Here's a link to the website for the documentary "Revolution OS". If you haven't seen it, I recommend giving it a look. It's about the creation of the Linux Kernel and the GNU community. Revolution OS

So everything went well. Now the question is, who wants to be my BackTrack Linux mentor?

Have a question. I have chosen to slightly resize and format my one EXT4 partition, but I don't know how to choose the mount point. I assume that it should be / but that's really an educated guess. Also, should I format the swap partition, and if so, am I correct in assuming that its mount point should be swap?