Since yesterday I’ve been making changes to an application running on an Access Database. Its not my code so its going to take a lot more time to figure out what I need to change than to make the actual changes.

With no process documentation and conflicting feedback from the users, its turning into one of those crazy challenges. And if that wasn’t enough, the application manages military travel so there are a host of military acronyms popping up everywhere. Why do they need to use the term”bird” instead of “aircraft” or “plane”?

And if anything goes wrong with these changes, I’ll probably have a bunch of angry soldiers armed to their teeth, knocking down my door in the middle of the night. Come to think of it, my neighborhood could use a little action!!!

This is a very nice tutorial on WEP cracking using Backtrack. I’ve used the Auditor live cd  previously and it was an amazing collection of tools! Maybe i’ll give it a try this weekend!

So, now your thinking, is that a Mac or is this some kind of Photoshop trick!!! 

Yes, its a Mac, its OSX 10.4 and that is MySabre working perfectly in FireFox! It does look shitty especailly that big urgly yellow area that chops off the right side of your terminal! 

I decided it was time for some more hacking so I quickly designed a Sabre POS app that basically got rid of all the crap html that you get with MySabre! I will be adding this to AgentTools app on TravTools.com. Looks great doesn’t it!

If you are looking for the VPN installer, click here. There is a README file in there if you get lost!

After a recent query on running MySabre on a Mac I decided to give it a try. There are two basic steps to get Sabre running on any machine. Step one is the VPN connection. Step 2 is to get MySabre running.

First I got a copy of the OSX version of Sabre’s VPN software. Not the easiest thing to find mind you. The install went smoothly and created a desktop shortcut to launch the VPN client.

After login, the VPN status appears in the task bar above. Yes its the same green S you find on MS Windows. I ran a quick test to make sure the VPN was working by selecting the Status option and clicking the Test button in there. Notice the successful response from localhost (127.0.0.1). I’m gonna put up another post on how this so-called VPN seems to work!

The VPN setup was way easier than I anticipated. Onto step 2. The web-interface for MySabre has never worked well on any browser other than IE. In Safari, beyond the login screen, nothing seemed to work at all. I’m going to keep at this and will post an update pretty soon. Now I’m determined to get a functional Sabre running on an Apple Mac under OSX.

The sad part about all this is that there is no documentation on this anywhere. If you do find a link, post it in the comments. Part 2 of this experiment would be a successful query for air availability in OSX.

At the RSA Conference last month in San Francisco, Taher Elgamal [link] was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award–only the third recipient of the award since its inception in 2004.

The chief security officer of Axway has more than 25 years of experience in the security industry, starting out as a cryptographic expert. Egypt-born Elgamal has been credited as an inventor of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), having joined Netscape in early 1995 to release the protocol, which later came under the oversight of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Here is a quick workaround to get your VM Express player up and running. Seems it tries to connect to the Internet for updates every time you open it. Now if there is a problem downloading that update, you will see the error above.

Just disable your network card before you open the player and enable it once again after the player loads. Go to Start->Control Panel->Network settings.

I think Prowess should put a “Skip Update” option as well on that update form.

Recently I got the chance to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics. The demo toolkit however was delivered using the VM Express technology from Prowess [link].

In short, VM Express provides the framework and mechanism for deploying virtual machines. It also has options to deliver other content including documentation, videos, etc. Its a pretty neat concept. A nice feature is that Items updated after the initial DVD was created are downloaded in the background.

From the product website:

• Super-efficient web delivery of VMs.
• Dramatically lower storage size saves money on duplication and reduces frustration from failed downloads.
• Smaller delta image files can be downloaded and deployed to a running state in minutes.
• Less downtime because VM fixes and updates can be distributed quickly.
• VM Express image architecture allows VMs to survive infinite updates

The toolkit for Dynamics comes on 3 dual-layer DVD’s (so that’s about 24gb on 3 dvd’s). It requires quite a bit of free space on the hard drive to install. For me it was time to delete my large pile of downloads. Guess I can re-download the latest Linux versions another day. The content of all 3 dvd’s gets dumped on your hard-drive. So at this stage all the virtualy machines are on your hard drive in the VMexpress folder. 

Once installed, it pops up a navigation panel. Its a fairly simple interface. You can filter content by the program and product. There is a neat search feature to quickly lookup any item. The search results too can be sorted and moving the mouse over the description column will pop-up a quick preview of the item description. Clicking on any item will display the install box on the right side. You can change the install location and it will reflect the space required, available, etc.

Depending on what you are trying to install you will be prompted to accept the usual terms and conditions of  blah blah blah. The crazy thing is that it will always create a folder for the item you install, create another folder withint that called docs and install the virtual machine or videos or documentation in that docs folder. This gets irritating once you begin to navigate the extracted files and have to keep going into the docs folder.

Another issue I have with the whole format is that it doesn’t give you the option to run the toolkit off the DVD’s. This would allow people to save a ton of space on the hard drive. 

The initial install too can be trouble some. I first tried to install the demo toolkit on my desktop. By the time VMExpress was done, there was no space left to extract the 30GB odd virtual machines. So I tried to install it on one of the spare IBM servers and use SAN storage but the dynamics toolkit itself wouldn’t install. Not sure why yet!

Overall I like the concept a lot. However it could use a lot of improvements.

Time for ratings:

• User Interface: ****½ (4.5/5) (clean layout)
• Documentation: **½~~ (2.5/5) 
• Installation: **~~~ (2/5) (you need to be real techie to get this installed and running)
• Usability: ***~~ (3/5) (the installation of virtual machines and document could be improved)

Overall: ***~~ (3/5)

Ray mentioned previously that he had timeout issues with the blog. He also brought to my attention yesterday that my Genealogy site Goan.name was having issues. Now that’s a site with a lot of hits so I decided to take a look into the matter on priority and figure out why there were issues.

I used to use DNSStuff a lot previously but since they went paid I thought I’d try to find a free alternative. I landed on DNSsy [link]. I would recommend this highly to anyone running a website. All you need to do is enter your domain name and read the report it generates. Its very informative.

Basically DNSsy runs a series of test on your domain name and its name servers and flags each of the results. You need to pay attention to the line entires which are flagged as “Fail” and “Security”. The others are mostly informative. You should be able to safely ignore the “Performance” and “Warning” flags in most cases.

I had some mixed up dns entries. This was since I moved servers and didn’t check all the settings on my name servers. I spent about an hour re-configuring the DNS settings on all my domains both at the registrar and on the server. It looks good now. I’ll know for sure in 24-48 hours once the changes have propagated across the globe.

This is interesting…

“Be careful who you give your mobile phone number out to. An attacker with the right toolkits and skill could hijack your phone remotely just by sending SMS messages to it, according to mobile security firm Trust Digital.

In what it calls a ‘Midnight Raid Attack’ because it would be most effective when a victim is asleep, an attacker could send a text message to a phone that would automatically start up a Web browser and direct the phone to a malicious Web site, said Dan Dearing, vice president of marketing at Trust Digital. The Web site could then download an executable file on the mobile phone that steals data off the phone, he said.”

I love my ancient cell phone. No browser and no getting hacked!

I love the concept. Its a great desktop hack. But I’m struggling to download the beta version. Its been stuck at 97% since last night.