Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Today is the day...RootWars!

The last 10 days have been a whirlwind of computer power geeking:

1. Crash course on Opensolaris, I chose it for whatever reason and am now glad for it. I had the opportunity to learn the platform and some basic administration for the OS such as installing GCC, adding NICs, managing accounts, adding package repositories, installing TUN/TAP, bridging and tunctl capabilities from source, getting NTP to work correctly as a Stratum 3 server, centralized syslog, getting packet sniffing to work correctly, etc.

2. Getting an ircd-hybrid IRC server up and running in SSL mode with an accompanying Eggdrop bot on Opensolaris.

3. Cloning the Rootwars Virtualbox HD image using VBoxManage and learning a lot about Virtualabox and its networking capabilities (or lack thereof).

4. Writing documentation such as Rules of Conduct (with a manual scoring system), a Survival guide (based on the old Roothack.org materials...R.I.P. epic), instructions how to connect to the IRC server with SSL enabled, etc.

5. Configuring the Rootwars image itself (standing on the shoulders of giants, thanks j0e!), getting NTP, syslog and general networking to function correctly in a Redhat 9 Virtualbox appliance.

6. Being introduced to Securix-NSM, this will be the monitoring platform I will use for a sguil server and connect sguil clients via Mac OSX and Backtrack 4. Securix-NSM will also be running as a Virtualbox appliance. As a standby I also created OSSIM, HeX Live and Honeywall Roo Virtualbox appliances.

There was more...I probably won't be able to recall it in totality until the smoke clears and I have had a chance to review my notes and soak in the entire experience.

I'm very excited about the Rootwars this evening and the hands on experience it will deliver to the students and participants.

May Your Skill Prevail

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