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Flashback topic

Thanks again to everyone who came out to the Open House @ Philly Secure Shell.  I handed out some stickers with the BlissPC.com address, so I wanted to share a 2014 thread about Bitcoin Miner Malware.  A random note, is to use google and type ‘bitcoin miner site:funtimebliss.com’.  You will get the 1st result, but it looks like there is some redirection poisoning going on there.  It bounces to a URL4SHORT_info page.  I have to explore that some more.

 

A friendly reminder that I do not do the advertisers thing on the site, as I believe in sharing information and not exposing people to advertiser traffic and potential infection by way of poorly moderated advertising networks.  I have had the forums up for about 13 years now and plan to keep doing so.  When I jump into hardware or software reviews, I do so of my own opinion and observations.  No one has, nor ever will send me a free product to view, without that being clearly defined as the scenario.  Even if that were to occur, I would also remain to be critical.

Pardon the blurb, but I really felt this needed to be a front-page post and known reminder.  I have purchased products and services before with known issues, that were never shared at launch, due to review deals and all sorts of other anti-consumer deals.  There is no support for that here, nor will there ever be.  I’m into this for sharing information and learning more from people I chat with and meet.  Now that I shared some of my ethos, allow me to drop a link for our Hackerspace in South Philadelphia, PA.
http://www.secshell.com/

I speak as me, a real person who is occasionally (to often) grumpy.  I do try to be nice though :bunny:

 

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Cisco Noob Guide

Especially on old-school devices, you might find no one logged  any of the network topology and config details.  If you are lucky (depends on your outlook) there is no password for the console connection.  To connect over console, you will need an ethernet cable that plugs into a serial port on your config machine.  If you do have a password on console port, hopefully it’s something from your list of other device passwords.  Probably a Level-15 account.

We will be in the CLI, so all those nice GUI configs you are used to with newer devices, are not at your disposal.  So we have this guide for logging in, going into enable mode, then showing certain configurations.  This can help you map a network out, especially if you inherited it and want to document and know how it really functions.

Starting out: (Run a cable from the console port on said switch, to your machine Serial port.)

  • Use PUTTY or a similar application to connect to COM1
  • Press Enter 2x.  You should then see Console of some sort
  • Login when prompted for a password (or if none)
  • type ‘en‘ without the quotes.  This will take you to config / enable mode.
  • show ? will give you a list of available commands.
  • Start with show version to get an idea what platform and version of iOS (or PiX) you are dealing with.
  • show running-config will show you the currently running device configuration.  Feel free to archive this into a flat file for reference later.
  • show vlan is huge if you need to know the VLANs defined on the network.
    Note: Your core switch will have them defined, then other devices can reference those VLANs and route accordingly.  IF you do not have a VLAN defined somewhere, it will be useless to use as a target.

 
 

That’s my primer on dorking your way though some older cisco devices.  Granted these methods will work or be very similar in current, CLI based cisco sessions.  Happy explorations.

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VMWare ESXi on Gaming PC

Good morning.  I took on an attempt to install ESXi 6.0 onto a hard drive in my gaming PC.  I ran into a few modifications I needed to make, but luckily nothing too intense.

Starting out, I will rattle off my relevant PC specifications:

  • Intel i5-4690k @ 3.5 GHz
  • Asus Maximus Hero VII BIOS (3103)
  • 32 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
  • 500 GB SATA WD Hard Drive (Non-SSD)

 
OK, so we’ll get started with an EXSi Install CD.  Upon boot up, I did not see any drives I could install to.  At first I thought I had to mark the drive active, since I did a 3-pass wipe of it prior, but that was not the case.  Turns out I had to jump into my BIOS and set my Drive Mode to RAID, instead of SATA that I had it set at.
There is no need to build a RAID array (and in my case, I’m using the Intel Z97 chipset that is the onboard SATA controller on my motherboard).  I am running a test build, otherwise a redundant RAID set should be a priority.

Once the RAID mode is set for your SATA Mode Selection (Under: AdvancedPCH Storage Configuration in my BIOS), you should now see a drive you can install ESXi to.  Also in your BIOS, if you have not already turned on Intel VT-x virtualization support, enable that as well.

Now that we have an install going, set your root password and when the install finishes, reboot.  On my 1st boot up without a network cable plugged in, I got the following message as it stuck in the boot process:
 

dvfilter-generic-fastpath: loaded successfully

 
I started to research this and was going to splunk the log files, but I rebooted and it loaded successfully.  As I have experience with supporting and deploying fresh Xen Server installs, this Hypervisor looks nearly identical in ESXi.

Once it boots up, connect to the IP Address by web browser to install the client tools, if you have not done so already.  The tools are sadly, confined to working best in a windows environment for your client software, but there is a web interface as well.  I am currently putting a Kali Linux install on via the Web Interface for EXSi, from my Mac.

That concludes my start to hypervisor online install of EXSi.  My gaming computer picked up another skill as a virtualization server.  I also have a Core 2 Duo refurb I will try the same for, but since that one is an OEM HP Machine, the BIOS features for Hyper-V and RAID support may be absent.