yaleman.org

I’ve been running Linux on my main laptop for a while now, first Debian (Kali) and now Ubuntu 18.04.1. Since Firefox updated to their “Quantum” rebuild, I haven’t been able to use my work’s VMWare View environment, which is a bit annoying. There was an issue I reported here on the VMWare forums with handling the vmware-view:// URI for some reason.

Since a workmate had recently replaced his Mac with a Ubuntu laptop, I offered him lunch to try his hand at working it out. Thankfully, food is a good motivator for some ;)

A great article from Allen Pike on newly becoming a leader and considering your ability to be “on the tools”

Okay wait, you may say. That’s cool, but I like Doing the Thing. I’m pretty good at it, and if I’m leading a team, will I still get to do it? Will I still get to perform the work that got me to where I am today?

The short answer is: Yes, you can! If it’s important to you to keep doing some “individual contributor” work as a manager, you can make that happen.

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This is pure hand-tooled metalwork porn.

More of his work at SethGould.com.

This article from Sophos’ Naked Security shows some incredible failures of opsec “because it just kept getting used.”

Unfortunately for the US and its agents, it didn’t take long to find the moles. That’s due in large part to what one former official called an “elementary system” of internet-based communications – one that was never meant to stand up to sophisticated counterintelligence efforts such as those of China or Iran, let alone one that should have been entrusted with the extremely sensitive communications between the CIA and its sources.

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A while back I built a small web app to parse one of our system configuration files because the application’s interface doesn’t have a search function (yeah, it’s that bad…). It worked OK, but over time slowed down as the XML file grew to 2.5MB and ~10k lines. The slow part was definitely BeautifulSoup’s parsing step, but it took a little poking to work out why. At this stage it was taking over 20 seconds to handle the file.

The first planned stop for the day was Seljalandsfoss. It was fun to scramble over the rocks and we only got a little wet.

It was annoying to get a shot of these steps without some soggy tourist ass in the way, but here’s me doing my best. They were surprisingly grippy, given they were worn smooth and not flat in the slightest.

Standing behind the falls was truly spectacular. The amount of water coming over them even at this time of year when there’s no snow melt is incredible, and it was impossibly fresh tasting out of the air.

Huawei configuration file decryption turns out to be quite easy. It’s just XML in AES-CBC

CyberChef is super easy for this

Dump the file in, get XML back out!

To encrypt ready for usage, just reverse the step.

Or if you’re stupidly lazy, click here

Tested on

• B593s-22

References

• https://www.elektroda.pl/rtvforum/topic3438655.html#17080290
• https://blog.hqcodeshop.fi/archives/254-First-B593-s-22-exploit-Setup-FTP-to-get-varsshusers.cfg.html

A long time in planning, it’s finally here - EuroTrip 2018!

The rough explanation is 37 days away, nearly two weeks in Iceland, then the rest doing a lap of Eastern Europe. Being from Australia, we can’t just do a merry jaunt to Europe, hence the extended plans.

The flights were… as to be expected. Brisbane to London via Singapore, with a six hour stopover. I sleep on my stomach typically, so I just don’t sleep on flights. Not helpful when you’re in transit for two days! :) The lovely Premier Inn Heathrow Terminal 4 was welcome place to lay our heads for 24 hours or so until the flight to Iceland.

Crass, I know, but it’s part of my charm. We run load balancers for our proxies and we need to monitor they’re working, so we make requests through them out to the internet. I was doing some checking one day on “top utilization by user” and found that the monitoring account had been… rather hungry.

Turns out, we were doing a full GET request to two news sites, for every time a proxy appeared in a load balancing pool, from each of the load balancers.

I really love watching the statistics as one makes a change for the better, and collecting the visualistaions is a bit of a hobby for me.

This is the graph of active connections on one of our edge appliances. It carries all client internet traffic and also load balances DNS resolution for clients. It was an incredible drop in traffic - over half the active connections on the appliance - and the response time went from ~150ms to ~1ms for repeat requests.