I switched my ubuntu Oneiric to bactrack 5 Gnome and try out the new tools I wanted to use. Lately I thought everything will be fine out of the box but noticed that some of the tools I use and explored are not working well. I am using Aspire 4736 and installed backtrack 5 Gnome 64bit. After the installation I had a lot of things to fix and would want to fix them one by one. The first thing I encountered was after installing I just see a black screen and nothing displays or even sometimes this happens after seeing the grub menu. Its a good thing that the grub menu is still there. When you are on the grub menu press e and replace nomodeset to;

After that you should now be able to login and use startx. After that we need to update grub so that we will not keep on typing the line every time we turn on the machine. To make the changes open the grub file found at /usr/share/grub/default/grub using your favorite editor.

Here is the lines found on my grub file;

As seen on the highlighted line I added i915.nomodeset=0 to the line to fix the black screen. You should now update grub using the command below;

Below are some of the errors you can do to fix your problems;

Ettercap

Fast-Track Update

This tool is one of my favorite. There are some changes needed to be done on the scripts.

Open /pentest/exploits/fasttrack/bin/menu/updatemenu.py and make the changes on line 62;

and line 67;

Open the file /pentest/exploits/fasttrack/config/fasttrack_config and on line 9 add;

You can start update fast-track; -> http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/showthread.php?t=44086

WICD Network Manager

After setting up a wireless AP, the annoying error of WICD always pops out. To fix this problem we can solve the problem on BT’s wiki -> http://www.backtrack-linux.org/wiki/index.php/Basic_Usage#WICD_Network_Manager

The fixes above are just few of the bugs. I will be updating this post once in a while after testing every fix I see on the forum

My girlfriend and I have the same ISP and they are providing us with their private IP without any control on their devices.  We are 4-5 kilometers apart and we need to share files for our work though we have alternatives like CLOUD services (e.g. dropbox) but there are some stuff that the cloud cannot do for us.  I also need to provide technical support and some other stuff that she wants help.  Our ISP is not that fast and they just started the business and I am not that confident yet with their services.

Previously, we are using teamviewer so that I can remotely control her computer from home.  But, I find it slow maybe because of our internet connection.  I scanned our ISP’s network and the image below is how the network looks:

This is the basic concept of their network.  Our computers are assigned with a specific IP and MAC Address are filtered so that only 1 computer can be used per client.  The concept they have is the same with SmartBro, Globe Telecom and Sun Cellular’s internet services.  We need to have more than one connection because we have several wireless devices that we want to use anywhere in the house.  I installed 2 wireless routers in our house and my girlfriends house and just cloned the MAC Address of the registered devices, the image below is how the network looks:

Wireless Router A: Netgear JWRN2000
Wireless Router B: Nethear  GR614v9

The problem now is how will I be able to access 191.168.1.4 when it is on another network.  What I did was installed TightVNC on my girlfriend’s computer with the following configurations:

After installing tightVNC Server I configured the portforwarding of  NETGEAR GR614v9.  The configuration can be found below:

After configuring her router, I can now access her PC by using the IP our ISP gave her.  See the image below:

I hope this post helped you with your problem especially in giving technical assistance to WAN’s.

I am a great fan and a user of mozilla thunderbird. I have used different mail clients like microsoft outlook, opera mail, zimbra mail client, etc. I tested them all for 2 weeks or more and ended up with thunderbird. One think I like about thunderbird is that you can add new features to it for free through their add-ons. Aside from the add-ons mozilla is active and updates are always there for free.

Part of my work is to provide support to our clients world wide through email or chat. Currently I have 5 emails, 3 gmail accounts are used for work and 2 gmail accounts are for my personal use. I consolidate them all in a mail client which is thunderbird. It’s not an easy thing to do when you are using the browser because its quite confusing when you want to switch from one browser to the other or switch to different accounts when you use Gmail. But with thunderbird, it gives me a lot of help and I can save a lot of time with it. The top 4 add-ons I use to speed up things are:

• AdBlock Plus – Helps me block those ads I don’t want to see and I never want to see.
• Lightning – Helps me organize stuff through a calendar.
• MinimizeToTray Revive – It stays on the tray and prompts an alert when a new email arrives.
• Quicktext – Allows me to create email templates and allows me to add shortcut to it like alt+1, alt+2, alt+3, …

Those are some of the add-ons I use for my thunderbird mail client. I hope it will help you speed up things.

Facebook has the largest population on the world wide web and it has a viral effect on distributing data. They have a lot of ways to pass data from one user to the other and one is by tagging pictures. When facebook started this feature it was so hard to tag friends because you need to tag them one by one and its a time consuming way of letting your friends know that they exist in a picture and now they have this face recognition feature that automatically detects a face when you upload an image. Though its not that accurate but it helps. Another way of doing this is by using an application that face.com developed. The application is called PhotoTagger, the application collects photos from an album and automatically detects faces and you can automatically tag all faces based on what their application has detected. It’s an amazing tool which I find it useful especially when you are trying to tag your friends on a large pile of photos. A screenshot of the application is found below and you can find the application by going to www.face.com and hit BIG go button and give it permission to start tagging your friends on an album.

Today, a friend and a colleague of mine called me and questioned me why she can’t send emails using her mail client which is Incredimail which is one cool mail client because of the effects and animation.  It really bothered me a lot because I can’t solve the problem without being there in the situation and it is hard to explain things using a phone. So I went over to her place and to find out that PLDT changed their SMTP port to 587 which is not the usual port of SMTP.  But this is not only the solution, outgoing mail server should also be changed to smtpdsl4.pldtdsl.net instead of using your own outgoing mail server(mail.icpep.org).

This has become an issue but still PLDT has no action for this.  This is really one problem especially to those people who are not that techie.  Hope PLDT will change it back to the usual port and find other ways on how to solve the spamming issues.

To summarize it, you can configure your mail clients using the following information:

Outgoing mail server SMTP: smtpdsl4.pldtdsl.net
UNCHECK – My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication
USE Port: 587

Hope this helps in solving your problem.

Filezilla is an FTP Client used for transferring files from one host to the other or is used to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP based network.  It is a free software downloadable on their official website filezilla-project.org.  Filezilla is one secure FTP client and so far the best FTP Client I have used.  I already have tried several software before like SmartFTP.  SmartFTP is easy to use but it is not a free software, you need to buy it so you can use it.

Filezilla has a simple user interface and for the first time I used it,  it feels like I have been using the software for a while.

You can store and manage your Websites using Filezilla with their site manager.  When we have a lot of sites to manage and forget the password we tend to search our mails again and look for the password because as what they say that you can not view your password in filezilla.   We’ll you’re wrong, passwords in filezilla can be viewed. If you have saved the login information on the site manager the here are some simple steps on how to view them .  First open filezilla and on the file menu Click Export and you will be prompted with 3 options, you can click the 3 options if you needed them.  But for now you can check the option Export Site Manager Entries.  Go to the directory where you saved the file FileZilla.xml.  Open the file using notepad or wordpad and there you can view your saved passwords.

I hope I saved your day and always remember not to let anyone access your private files, Stay Secured!

Broadband Internet Connection means a wide range of frequencies that are available to transmit information. This ultimately means that the wider the range of frequencies available, the high the amount of information that can be sent at one given time.   This type of connections is much faster than Dial-up connections which are limited to 56Kbs internet speed which also requires a telephone to work.

Internet is vastly growing and dial up is almost not in use today.  And one good thing about this is that most internet technologies already support Broadband connections.

Before choosing you broadband internet connection here are several tips for you to consider.  First thing is you need to have a broadband speed test so that you will know how fast your Internet Service Provider(ISP) is.  This is the first thing that one should do before deciding which ISP to select.  Failure to check will surely give a lot of pain along the way. 

Another thing to consider is the technical support, make sure technical support is always present.  Like what I have  technical support is always there, they provided me a hotline and I can also contact them on their site for minor problems.  If you are not a techie person I suggest that you should consider this option.

How reliable are they?  Reliability is always in the list when it comes to ISP services.  Reliability should be checked especially when we are use it in business.  They should be consistent with their services and downtime should be almost zero.

Lastly, cost is also considered.  There are a lot of  ISP’s who give all this services and cost me low.

When I was searching for the best broadband reviews, I made several choices and and one of the best was for o2 broadband review.  They have excellent performance among the considerations to take before having you Internet connection.  They provide excellent and reliable services.

By Default phpmyadmin can import data on your mysql database up to 2MB of data and beyond that will be an error.  This has been a big problem  by most webmasters and sometimes this can be a barrier to stop improving the sites.  Before I kept on searching what to use to import a large data on my MySQL database and all I can see is BigDump.  It is a software used for large and very large MySQL Dumps which is also an option to import large data on your database.

If you find BigDump a pain in the head then another way to solve the problem is to edit your php.ini file.  All you need to do is open your php.ini file and edit the line

Setting 2M to a larger size will fix the problem.  One problem with this is that it will affect the web server’s runtime limit and could throw an error if you dump a very large data.

Search Engine Optimization is one of the most difficult thing to do to get your site ranked in the top 3 search engines namely Google, Yahoo and MSN. Reaching the top is indeed a very big challenge for all web developers and internet marketers.

One of the strategies being used is article submission. As most of the “optimizers” know that the most important thing in a website/blogsites is the content, as they say “Content is King”. And I would totally agree to that, a site is nothing if we don’t find any good contents in it. But content is not all there is in optimizing your sites, you need also to promote you site by creating good articles and submit them to several Article Submission Sites. I was searching the net and even asked my friends and other web developers on what they think are the best sites for article submission. Well on my survey and based on their rankings, I also agreed in the sites that they suggested. Below are list of sites that worth submitting your articles:

• Ezine Articles – PR6
• GoArticles -  PR6
• A1Articles – PR5
• ArticleDashboard -  PR5
• ArticleBiz -  PR5
• SeachWarp -  PR5

These sites has increased my blog’s and site’s traffic to almost 4O% of what I have currently.  Writing to this sites are extremely effective and helpful.

If you are a web developer and having problems on Installing PHP Curl on Apache with PHP installed on Windows Operating System, below is my version of tonyspecer’s “cURL with PHP and Apache on Windows“.  The steps are simple and direct to the point.

I have windows apache version 2.2.14 and PHP Version 5.2.10 installed on my Laptop using the installers provided on the respective sites.

1.  Install APACHE and PHP (I installed my APACHE on C:\apache and PHP on C:\php directories )
2.  Edit the php.ini file found in the PHP directory.

• Near line  546 set the extension directory extension_dir = “C:\php\ext”.  In my case I have my extensions files inside the ext folder. You can use any folder name as long as you set it in the php.ini file.
• Near line 472 set register_globals = On
• Near line 630 set session.save_path=”C:\WINDOWS\Temp” or you can set any directory

3.  On the PHP folder (in my case C:\php\) copy the php5ts.dll file to the bin folder of your Apache (C:\apache\bin\)
4.  On the PHP folder (C:\php\) copy libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll to ” C:\WINDOWS\system32″  folder
5.  Download CURL for Windows found at http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and put it on the PHP folder (C:\php\curl)
6.  Download OpenSSL for Windows found at http://www.shininglightpro.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html, for me I downloaded 7MB OpenSSL v0.9.8k Installer

• To some Windows Visual c++ Redistributable is recommended before OpenSSL is installed.  The windows Visual c++ Redistributable can be downloaded at Microsoft website in the link:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?familyId=9b2da534-3e03-4391-8a4d-074b9f2bc1bf&displayLang=en

7.  Check to see if you have the following file: c:\windows\system32\msvcr70.dll. If not, search for it in Google and download it to system32.  If you can’t find it in that directory click this link to download the file from www.dllfiles.com.  Extract the zipped file and put it in the “c:\windows\system32\”  folder.
8.  Uncomment the curl line in your php.ini file to enable curl:  extension=php_curl.dll but in my case I just added the line because it is not found in my php.ini file

9.  Edit the Apache httpd.conf file to enable php:

• For newer version of Apache add at the bottom
  • LoadModule php5_module “C:/php/php5apache2_2.dll”
• Then below add Line: AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

10.  Restart Apache and your curl should be working now.