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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 :-)

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: