In an earlier post I spoke of different pieces of software I had been using to rip my DVDs to media files, never content to just leave things as they are I took to piecing bits and chunks of various episode clips together. I tried a few different Linux video editors including Kino (a KDE staple), PiTiVi (to be included by default in Ubuntu 10.04), and Cinelerra.

There is no denying the fact that we have become a touch-centric society in regards to our technology. Thanks to the "iPhone standard" every new handheld device better sport at least some form of touch screen if it expects to compete with the competition. Where is our technology headed though? With the idea of "bigger is better" in mind: if a 3.5~ inch touch screen is good a larger screen must better right?

The Metasploit Meterpreter has supported the "hashdump" command (through the Priv extension) since before version 3.0. The "hashdump" command is an in-memory version of the pwdump tool, but instead of loading a DLL into LSASS.exe, it allocates memory inside the process, injects raw assembly code, executes its via CreateRemoteThread, and then reads the captured hashes back out of memory. This avoids writing files to the drive and by the same token avoids being flagged by antivirus (AV) and intrusion prevention (HIPS) products.

On December 1st, Rapid7 announced the Community Edition of the NeXpose vulnerability management product. At the same time, we released version 3.3.1 of the Metasploit Framework, which contains the first step towards full integration between NeXpose and Metasploit.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3 of the Metasploit Framework. This release includes 446 exploits, 216 auxiliary modules, and hundreds of payloads, including an in-memory VNC service and the Meterpreter. In addition, the Windows payloads now support NX, DEP, IPv6, and the Windows 7 platform.

Among the coolest features in metasploit is the ability to pivot through a meterpreter session to the network on the other side. The route command in msfconsole sets this up but requires a bit of typing to get right.

Many database servers helpfully provide version number, platform, and other salient details to just about anyone who asks, authenticated or not, which makes fingerprinting these applications a snap. However, Postgres is a little more coquettish about revealing such personal information about itself to just anyone. The best way to determine Postgres' version is to log in and just ask with a "select version()" query, but what if you don't (yet) have credentials?

Lucky for unauthenticated types, it turns out that Postgres is pretty forthcoming in its authentication failure messages.

Update: This module, just like the original exploit, only works on IE6 at this time. IE7 requires a slightly different method to reuse the object pointer and IE8 enables DEP by default.

story describes installation and configuration of Nagios for remote monitoring using nrpe

How do I monitor a remote linux system using Nagios
Solution / Answer:

Use th NRPE daemon to execute Nagios plugins on the remote server and report back to the monitoring host server.
NRPE Remote Server Installation and Setup

One of the nicest things about Bluefish is that it uses 30 to 45 percent less memory than other editors. This makes quick edits less of a hassle. Sometimes, other editors can be too clunky, and I found myself reverting to a console-based text editor to make a minor change, but Bluefish should stop this from happening. It has built-in project support, so you can easily open multiple files and keep them organized in the right path. It has all the standard stuff, like line-numbers, search and replace, and code highlighting for languages like HTML, Ruby (go Rails!), Python, and PHP.