mikesown

So are you part of the MD5 team that was interviewed in Season1 Episode 1? you know the EC2 cloud computer at Amazon might be something of interest... 10 cents an hour for some beafy server time use as many boxes as you need. The EC2 cloud comptuer looks interesting, but I'd like to know how much power their cluster REALLY has. Even a cluster of 1000 computers would take quite a bit of time to compute all the NTLM tables(relatively speaking), probably like a week or two. Amazon charges by the CPU-hour, which would get VERY expensive as you add up all those hours. All that being said, if the community was somehow able to amass a large sum of money($1,000? $10,000?), the tables could be generated on this service. Realistically, I don't think it will happen, but it would be cool if it did.

I dobut this is the issue. I burned(wasted) about 6 DVDs burning both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista. My XP install still throws bluescreens while running every few days even though it completed the install fine. I haven't got too much time on my hands, but during the weekend I'll swap out the cables and see if it works. Thanks for the advice!

LinuxBIOS would probably do this, but it has extremly limited support now, so I dobut you'd find much luck there.

My computer exhibited some strange symptoms when I was trying to install vista. My computer would ALWAYS bluescreen when it was copying files. It showed a non-helpful machine check error message. Whenever I reboot(pressing the reboot button, never 'turning off' the power totally), my BIOS freezes up where it should be detecting IDE drives. This can be fixed by completly power cycling the system(i.e. press the power button until the power is off, then turn the computer on). The computer then boots again. I managed to get a nLite XP install going, but it throws bluescreens every few days with the same symptom of the BIOS 'freeze' and the same machine check error. Luckily, this deposits an error log in my event viewer. The log says the source was 'disk' and the error message reads Event Type: Error Event Source: Disk Event Category: None Event ID: 11 Date: 10/23/2006 Time: 3:54:39 PM User: N/A Computer: MIKE Description: The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk0D. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Data: 0000: 03 00 68 00 01 00 b6 00 ..h...¶. 0008: 00 00 00 00 0b 00 04 c0 .......À 0010: 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0020: 00 6e c1 06 00 00 00 00 .nÃ..... 0028: d7 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 ×....... 0030: ff ff ff ff 03 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ.... 0038: 40 00 00 8f 02 00 00 00 @..Â.... 0040: 00 20 0a 12 40 03 20 40 . ..@. @ 0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........ 0050: 00 00 02 00 c0 69 13 85 ....Ài.… 0058: 00 00 00 00 90 67 13 85 ....Âg.… 0060: 02 00 00 00 b7 60 03 00 ....·`.. 0068: 28 00 00 03 60 b7 00 00 (...`·.. 0070: 58 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 X....... 0078: f0 00 04 00 00 00 00 0b ð....... 0080: 00 00 00 00 08 03 00 00 ........ 0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ I'm not sure as to whether this is a controller error or a disk failure. One thing that is important to note is that when I launch iTunes, SOMETIMES I will get an error saying "wmidx.dll cannot be found," but I can relaunch it and it will work. The data is clearly not gone, but this is a problematic issue. Windows occasionally freezes up when booting up when the progress bar is going across the screen and simply reboots and runs fine the next time. This brings me to the question, Is my disk failing, or is my controller failing. Obviously disks have moving parts, whereas controllers do not, but is it likely that a sector could read most of the time but not all of the time? I ran maxtor's hard drive diagnostics test, and it turned out fine after some 13 or so passes. Prime95 also has run fine overnight with the stress test. Memtest86 also shows no problems. What's my best action at this point? Should I buy a controller or hard drive from newegg? Is there anything I can do to further diagnose my problem? I'm using a Biostar NF4ST socket 939 motherboard with an AMD 3200+ 64-bit processor. Thanks, Mike EDIT: Just found out another interesting tibit of information: the logs for the disk error all have the exact same data(in terms of the numbers and charactars). I don't know if this refers to a specific portion of the disk, or is just a general error message. I also found something interesting about the ATAPI port 1. This occurs aswell, but just less frequently, and is the same exact error: Event Type: Error Event Source: atapi Event Category: None Event ID: 5 Date: 10/10/2006 Time: 11:31:20 PM User: N/A Computer: MIKE Description: A parity error was detected on DeviceIdeIdePort1. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Data: 0000: 0f 00 50 00 01 00 a4 00 ..P...¤. 0008: 00 00 00 00 05 00 04 c0 .......À 0010: 03 00 00 80 00 00 00 00 ...?.... 0018: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0028: 06 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........ 0030: 00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00 ........ 0038: 40 00 00 8f 02 00 00 00 @..Â.... 0040: 00 20 0a 12 80 03 20 40 . ..?. @ 0048: 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 ........ 0050: 00 00 00 00 e8 e3 31 86 ....èã1? 0058: 00 00 00 00 70 1e 31 86 ....p.1? 0060: 02 00 00 00 f7 c1 23 00 ....÷Ã#. 0068: 2a 00 00 23 c1 f7 00 00 *..#Ã÷.. 0070: 80 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ?....... I'm starting to REALLY suspect a controller flaw now... what do you guys think?

Unfortuantely, the bad news is that NTLM is about the same as MD5. The differences that make NTLM much harder to generate than LM are: - Password length. LM hashes are a maximum of 7 charactars, NTLM can be up to 100 or more. Generating from 1-9 or 1-10 takes up exponentially more space than 1-7.- Hashing algorithm. LM uses a DES hash which takes a LOT less time to generate than the AES? hash of NTLM. Around 10x the time it takes to generate LM. MD5 takes about the same amount of time and space to generate as NTLM does. As for the problem of disk space, yes, most of us don't have 1.5TB lying around. The solution to this is using a distributed rainbow cracker. Give, say, 150gb to each person. If divided evenly among 30 people, the tables would provide complete access to the tables with 3x redundency. In addition, if someone was willing to volunteer a fast computer with fast drives(doesn't need to be high bandwidth, could be dialup) to host a webcracker, this would also solve the issue. I believe that NTLM is the best choise by far simply because of the prevelance it will have in 1-2 years from now. If we start generating 1-10 all NTLM tables now, we could probably have them done within 6 months or so.

If you REALLY want to get past this, tunnel an SSH connection to a dedicated server. This will cost you $50-$100/month, but if you need it, it's your only option. You could also run something like torrentflux on the server to manage the torrents for you.

I think that NTLM is by far the way to go. Vista won't have LM hashes, just NTLM. While MD5 might be more practical now, in less than a year NTLM will probably be more useful.