justinclarke.com

As an O'Reilly author I recently got a preview invite to sign up on the new O'Reilly Connection site. This is a personal networking site where you can provide a whole lot of info about yourself, and then find people with similar interests . One interesting difference is that this one is more professionally focused with features such as a job posting and search functionality.

The little things in Macs and OSX are the ones which end up being the most powerful. In this case, my trusty old G3 iBook has bitten the dust with the dreaded Logic Board failure - leading me to discover the firewire target disk mode.... allowing me to back up my internal hard drive over firewire to my Linux box. I love those little things that Apple puts in! Here's my mini howto.

My first favorite Apple-ism was the "I don't need a cross over cable anymore" NIC. I mean, how convenient is it having an auto sensing NIC so you never need to have both a normal cable and a cross over cable anymore? Firewire target mode is my next favorite.

For those of you who haven't come across it yet, firewire target disk mode allows you to mount your firewire capable Mac's (list of supported systems here) internal drive as a firewire drive on another Mac. You do this by holding down the "T" key after turning on the Mac. Technically, it allows you to mount the internal drive (with some limitations) as a SBP-2 (serial bus protocol) drive on a different machine. Naturally, this works fine on another Mac, but what if you don't have two Mac's? I don't, so I got it working on Linux.

Firstly, your Linux setup is going to have to have a few funny settings, so you may have to recompile your kernel. Also, I'm using Gentoo on a 2.6 kernel, so if you don't have all the options I have, you may have to patch your kernel for some option. In any case, you (I'm guessing here) probably need at least the following options enabled:

• File Systems->Miscellaneous file systems->Apple Extended HFS file system
• File Systems->Partition Types->Macintosh partition map support
• Device drivers->IEEE 1394 (Firewire) support->SBP-2 support
• Device drivers->SCSI device support->SCSI disk support

Assuming everything is working properly you should now be able to connect the two computers together using a firewire cable, boot the Mac in target disk mode (holding down the "T" key), and mount the Mac as a firewire disk like follows (note the parameters are for my Mac):

• sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdb5 /mnt/mac/

One last note - your normal fdisk won't read a mac partition table, so look at your dmesg output to see which partitions are on your Mac :-)

Neither the default builds of ActiveState Python or Perl ship with SSL support. This can lead to some interesting results and errors when attempting to use scripts with SSL servers. As a note to self, and for others who might be interested, SSL support can be added for each - here are some sites giving details:

SSL support for ActiveState Python
SSL support for ActiveState Perl

Personally I am looking forward to the impending Apple switch to Intel chips. Why? Because I think that we will finally end up with Intel based laptops that a useable, well designed and attractive. I am one of the group of people attracted to the OS X platform because not only is hardware sexy, the GUI intuitive, but I can also do something useful since there is a Unix-like operating system hidden under the covers. Maybe this will cause more of the mainstream laptop makers to release more attractive machines like Sony and Toshiba have been doing recently.

In this light, I was kind of excited to see the movie of someone booting OS X on his random laptop.

Note: ettercap-ng 0.7.3 is now in the normal ports list, so you should not need to download my version below.

I have been trying to get ettercap built on my Tiger machine for the last few days with little success. I finally came across an entry in the Darwinports Bugzilla which notes the problem, as well as some patches to both update the port to use ettercap-ng 0.7.3, and to fix the build problems on Tiger. Since the files don't seem to have made it to the active ports yet you can grab the updated portfiles here.

Just extract these to your port files directory for ettercap-ng, and install using the port command. The port files are found on my box at /opt / local / var / db / dports / sources / rsync.rsync.opendarwin.org_dpupdate_dports / net / ettercap-ng /

And, just to show that it works, here is Ettercap 0.7.3 (Curses interface) running on my machine:

And the GTK+ interface (build with the gtk variant):

I have been trying to build Hydra for my iBook using Darwinports. Since the MD5 sums didn't seem to match, I decided to go ahead and just update the port to use Hydra 4.7, as the latest supported was 4.6. One complication is that in order to support SSH v2 testing, Hydra requires libssh 0.11, so I had to update the libssh port at the same time. These patches have been contributed to the maintainers, but in the meantime you can get the port files for them here - Hydra 4.7 and Libssh 0.11.

Just extract these to your port files directory for both apps, and install using the port command. The port files are found on my box at /opt / local / var / db / dports / sources / rsync.rsync.opendarwin.org_dpupdate_dports. Hydra is in security/hydra and libssh is in devel/libssh.

Here is the GTK interface xhydra running on OS X:

I use PGP on most days to send encrypted and digitally signed email to external clients. However, an increasing number of my clients are using the S/MIME standard to encrypt external email instead.

Since my company uses Lotus Notes, I went through the process of figuring out how to get Lotus Notes to send S/MIME encrypted or signed email (supported in recent versions - these screenshots are from Notes 6.5.3).

First of all, you will need to get an X.509 email certificate. You can get these for free from Thawte, or you can pay to get them from Verisign.

The example I am going to use is Thawte. For this example, I am assuming you have already requested the certificate using Internet Explorer, and you have already downloaded the certificate into IE. The guidance on the Thawte site should be able to get you to that point.

Firstly, for those not familiar with exporting certificates, you need to go to Tools -> Internet Options -> Content, and click on the Certificates button in the middle :-

You should then be presented with a screen as below where you can export the certificates installed. If you don't see a certificate issued by Thawte at this point, you haven't got the certificate installed in IE correctly.

At this point we click "Export" to start the export wizard - make sure that we export the private key, and use PKCS #12 format (a .pfx file). You will be required to pick a password - this is used to provide some security over the key, especially useful as we have the private key in the file.

At this point we can import the key into Lotus Notes. This is done using the File -> Security -> User Security menu. In the "Your Identity" section there is a subsection titled "Your Certificates". If you click on this subsection, you should get a screen similar to this one :-

If you click on "Get Certificates", and select "Import Internet Certificates", you should be prompted to select the PKCS #12 file created when the certificates were exported from IE. Select that file, enter the password you specified before, and you should see a screen similar to this :-

Click "Accept All", and you should be finished.

Note that in order to sign or encrypt email you will need to specify this in the delivery options for each message, or change your user options to automatically sign/encrypt all messages.

In order to import X509 certificates from people who have sent you signed messages, you will need to add them to your address book using Tools -> Add Sender to Address Book, making sure that on the Advanced tab, "Include X509 certificates when encountered" is checked.