Administration
USB Toolkit v.1 (Hiren’s Boot USB)
by F-Estrada on Feb.16, 2010, under Administration, General, PC Maintenance, Pro Tips, Tutorials, Windows
Have you ever been in a bind where your pc crashed and you need it to get in to get a file, or a virus got into a friends computer and it was so bad that you couldn’t get into to it to run a virus scanner.(shouldn’t be surfing that N0Rp, lol) Well today my friend I’m going to show you how to build a bootable usb tool kit and be able to boot into any pc and be able to extract files as well as to run a virus scanner and an antispyware scanner from a miniature version of Windows XP, and run many other tools. Our baseline for our toolkit will be Hiren’s Boot CD. Lets go ahead and get our hands dirty. (no not like that, god get your head out of the gutter, lol)
What You Need
You will need a USB flash drive, 2Gb should be more than enough
A copy of USBFormat (available here)
A copy of grub4dos (available here)
A copy of AnytoISO to extract ISO’s (available here)
and finally a copy of Hiren’s Boot CD (available here)
Formatting the USB Flash Drive
ok lets start off by preparing our USB flash drive.
- Open up USBFormat.exe
- Make sure under device your flash drive is selected.
- for the file system select FAT32
- go ahead and give it a volume name if you wish (I named mine USBTLKIT)
- click on start to go ahead and format the USB flash drive (Warning: this will erase everything on your flash drive, please back up any important information that you may have on it)
(Reference to the picture below for guidance)
Setting up grub4dos on your flash drive
Sweet, now that we have our flash drive formatted we can continue on to installing grub4dos on our flash drive.
- Open up grub4dos.exe
- click on the radio button for disk, select your flash drive from the drop down menu
- once you have selected your flash drive, click on the refresh button located under the Part List section
- once refreshed select Whole Disk (MBR) under the part list drop down menu
- Click on install and you are set, woot, woot!
(Reference to the picture below for guidance)
grub4dos will go ahead and edit the grldr file and the menu.lst file located in the directory of grub4dos
- go ahead and copy these files over to your flash drives root directory
Extracting Hiren’s ISO with AnytoISO
Now that we have configured grub4dos to be compatible for our flash drive, we are now going to extract our toolkit on to the flash drive to make it work.
- Install AnytoISO on your system and follow the steps that it has to install
- once AnytoISO is installed, go ahead and open AnytoISO.exe
- click on Open Image (browse to the directory where you have Hiren’s boot CD downloaded)
- Select the Hiren’s ISO and click open
- Click on select folder and browse over to the root of your flash drive and click ok
- Click on Extract (at this point, the files on the ISO will be extracted to the flash drive)
- Exit out of the AnytoISO application.
We are done!!!!!
Wow, we have finished our creation, you know have a bootable USB Flash Drive loaded with tools to do some serious work. Go ahead and test out your creation. Start up a computer and make sure you your Bios is set up to boot from USB devices. (refer to your computers documentation on how to set this up) With this USB toolkit you will be able to change passwords, clone hard drives, boot into a miniature version of Windows XP to extract files run virus scans on a system and many, many other things, the tasks are limitless.
Enjoy your creation and let me know what you think of it in the comments.
Screenshots provided by:
How to Tunnel your Traffic and Smash Through Firewalls at School and Work with freeSSHD and Plink
by F-Estrada on Feb.16, 2010, under Administration, Pro Tips, Tutorials, Windows
Have you ever wanted to go to Facebook, Myspace or play that game that your addicted to only to find out that it is being blocked by your company or school. What if I told you that you could evade ‘em easily with your own private web proxy and as well be able to securely tunnel your traffic through an SSH session?
How proxies work
In a nutshell, what you’re doing with a proxy is setting up a middle-person between you and the internet. Using the proxy, your browser hands off web page requests to the proxy server, which handles the request and fetches the page for you from the internet. The web site actually thinks the request is coming from the proxy server, not your computer, which is a good way to obscure your originating IP address.
Additionally, the connection between your computer and the proxy happens over SSH, an encrypted protocol. This prevents wifi sniffers from seeing what you’re doing online.
What you’ll need
An SSH server to act as your proxy.
Simple enough really! If you’re using windows I highly recommend freeSSHD (available here). If you’re on a mac check out this page for instructions on how to enable remote logon. Linux users, you should know how to do this.
An SSH client on the computer you’re using.
Mac and linux machines have SSH built right in at the command line. Windows users you can download plink (available here).
How to set up freeSSHd
Double click the freeSSHd installer that you have downloaded to get started.
Click Next -> Click Next (or you can change the default installation directory) -> Click Next (Full Installation) -> Click Next (Start Menu Folder) -> Click Next (Create a desktop icon) -> Click Install (ready to install) -> Wait until installation has been finished -> Click Close
Do you want to run freeSSHd as a system service?” I choose “No” so I can start freeSSHd manually. This is a good security practice because you don’t want to have running applications in the background if you are not using it. Only turn freeSSHd on when the need for remote connections arise!
Click Finish to complete freeSSHd installation. (Duh simple enough even a caveman can do it)
Double click the freeSSHd icon on the desktop to load your SSH server. You can see the freeSSHd icon on your system tray.
Right click on the icon located on the taskbar lower right hand corner and click Settings.
Make sure that the freeSSHd settings page (Server Settings tab) shows that your“SSH server is running”.
Click on the Users tab. You need to create at least one user account that will act as your SSH remote user account.
Click “Add” to create a new user. Fill in the user details, following the example shown below (with your own unique username and password, duh!). Click OK and make sure it appear on the Users tab list
Using the same computer that you install freeSSHd previously, download Putty (available here). Putty is a desktop command line client that you can use to access SSH servers.
Double click the Putty installer to run it. Fill in the details as shown in the diagram below. 127.0.0.1 means that you are testing the SSH access from a local connection.
Press “Yes” on the security alert screen. Insert your SSH username and password that you have created previously.
If you get a Windows command prompt, you have successfully access your SSH server! Congratulations! Woot, Woot!
Start your SSH tunnel
So you’ve got your ssh server setup at your house or workplace. Great! To connect to it we’re going to setup a local proxy server on your client that you’ll be browsing the internet from, which will then “tunnel” web traffic from your local machine to the remote server over SSH. The command to run on your linux / mac client in a terminal window is:
sssh -ND 9999 you@example.comsh
For Windows it’s as simple as browsing to the directory you saved plink to and runningplink.exe
-N -D 9999 you@example.com
Of course, you’re going to replace the you with your username on your SSH server and example.com with your server domain name or IP address. What that command does is accept requests from your local machine on port 9999 and hands that request off to your server at example.com for processing.
When you execute either of those commands, you’ll be prompted for your password. After you authenticate, nothing will happen. The -N tells ssh not to open an interactive prompt, so it will just hang there, waiting. That’s exactly what you want.
Set Firefox to use SOCKS proxy
Once your proxy’s up and running, configure Firefox to use it. From Firefox’s Tools menu, choose Options, and from the Advanced section choose the Network tab. Next to “Configure how Firefox connects to the Internet” hit the “Settings” button and enter the SOCKS information, which is the server name (localhost) and the port you used (in the example above, 9999.)
Save those settings and hit up a web page. When it loads, visit http://www.ipchicken.com to see if it’s using your remote ssh server to tunnel traffic. If you are, you my yell out Woot, Woot! In excitement
Also remember that you’ll need to open your firewall a bit by cracking open port 9999 on your local machine and port 22 on your server for SSH.
Clonezilla – Free Disk Imaging
by amp on Oct.10, 2009, under Administration, File System, General, Linux, PC Maintenance, Tutorials, Windows
There’s been many, many, many times I’ve had to re-image a hard drive. At my first job after I moved to a new city, we used “Zen Image” to pull a disk image over the network for deploying new PC’s at a school. My most recent job we use it to clone a customers hard drive and move it to a new hard drive.
Disk imaging is a quick and easy process with various types of software. Most are made in Linux. I’ve used Acronis, which can be found for free if you get it from Seagate, Maxtor, or Western-Digital. Of course it is re-branded but it’s not that big of a deal.
Anyways, to the point.
Clonezilla is a free disk imaging utility that pretty much anyone can use, assuming you know what disk cloning, imaging, reimaging, etc. even mean.
Consider this more of a resource for all the IT people out there, although they probably already know about it.
Clonezilla has pretty much the same features as many other disk imaging utilities. Save/Restore disk, Save/Restore partitions, etc.
Give it a try. To get it, head to their website which can be found here if you didn’t see the links above.
FileZilla – Your free home FTP Solution.
by amp on Sep.09, 2009, under Administration, Products, Reviews & Previews, Tutorials, Windows
Having an FTP and file server at your home is a very useful thing to have. By having a central point in your home where everything is stored and have the ability to share everything you need across your home network.
Now, if you are going to grab files from your home while you are away there are a few things you should really keep in mind before doing this.
- Having it exposed to the outside world will make you available to brute force attacks (mostly from Russia that I’ve noticed).
- Make sure you have your ports forwarded to the server. You can set this up in your routers administration panel > Port Forwarding.
- Do you have high bandwidth on your connection? I would recommend having at least 2Mb up (~240 kbps upload speed).
Today since we are working with windows we will be talking about FileZilla FTP Server. Why not IIS on Server 2k3? Keep Reading…
(continue reading…)
Set up a Linux Router
by amp on Jun.03, 2009, under Administration, Linux, Tutorials
The Linux Router.
(Note : Click thumbnails for full sized images))
Introduction
Why would you want to make your own router?
Well, mainly because it’s a fun project, and it can handle alot more simultaneous connections then a normal Linksys or Dlink could. You also get complete control over your network and that’s always a plus.
-
A little information.
Welcome to TXLANS. Our ring was created by a group of friends and gamers in San Antonio, TX. While it seems we are restricted to Texas it should be noted that we aren't.
Our group is nothing more than various people from various locations with related interest in gaming, web design and development, and graphic production.
Take a look around and check out our posts. I promise you will find something you like.
You can also subscribe by email by filling the field below:
Referral Links
