Table of contents for July 2017 in Linux Format

Jonni Bidwell Oddly enough I realised the other day my PC wouldn’t wake from sleep. Turn off. Turn on. Root filesystem corrupted. Repair attempted. Turns out when the btrfs devs say don’t use btrfsck --repair, they mean it. My Arch install was hosed. So I spent a very enjoyable five hours re-installing... Nate Drake I fear a reversal in Linux adoption. The French Parliament switched to Ubuntu in 2007 but in 2012 MPs were given the choice to go back to Windows. The city of Munich also seems to be seriously considering going from LiMux back to Windows 10 too. Nick Peers Ubuntu’s decision to end development of Unity highlights one fear: that Linux becomes less diverse and more homogenised. You might not like Unity, but at least it was…

“With the beginning of May came GStreamer 1.12, the latest major release of the cross-platform, Open Source multimedia framework. Noteworthy enhancements include waylandsink DMABuf importation, and access to the Fraunhofer FDK AAC encoder and decoder. However, one of the highlights is the integration for Intel’s Media SDK, the cross-platform API to access Intel’s hardware accelerated video encoder and decoder functions on Windows and Embedded Linux. One key new features is videoconvert and videoscale using multiple threads for scaling and conversion, a big plus for real-time software manipulation of 4K and 8K streams. The RTP stack can now receive bundled streams which make it possible to send audio and video over the same port, making network traversal easier, a requirement for full WebRTC compatibility. Python programmers will also rejoice as more…

Find and join a LUG Alpinux, le LUG de Savoie Meet on the first and third Thursday of the month at the Maison des Associations de Chambéry, France. www.alpinux.org Bristol Hackspace Studio G11, 37 Philip Street, Bedminster, Bristol, BS3 4EA. http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk SurreyEARS University of Surrey Makerspace, 18AB04, 7pm Fridays. www.surreyears.co.uk Leeds Hackspace Every Tuesday 7pm-late, Open day second Saturday of the month, 11am-4pm. www.leedshackspace.org.uk Hull Raspberry Jam Malet Lambert School, Hull. Every other month. See its Twitter account. www.twitter.com/hullraspjam Plymouth LUG (part of DCLUG) Hush coffee, 1 Old Town St, Plymouth. Fourth Saturday of the month (except December), noon. www.dcglug.org.uk/calendar Huddersfield Raspberry Jam Meet every month at Huddersfield Library, typically the fourth Saturday of each month. www.huddersfieldraspberryjam.co.uk Medway Makers 12 Dunlin Drive, St Mary’s Island, Chatham, ME2 3JE. www.medwaymakers.com Cheltenham…

Animation is just an extension of drawing or other visually creative techniques, so start by looking into these disciplines. If you’re already good at drawing then you’re well placed to take things further. Great programs for drawing are Inkscape and newly open-sourced Krita, which can also be used for animation. Consider using Clara.io, a web-based tool that animates directly in your browser. A free membership comes with a lot of pre-made scenes and you have an hour of rendering included. It resembles Blenderin many ways. If you want to learn the basics about animation, start with Khan academy’s Pixar in a Box course. This shows you both the theory and practical aspects of animation that makes it a great starting point for learning about the discipline. The people teaching the…

1 Select your protocol Make sure to check the other tabs in Sparta first to see if any default passwords have already been found, because this will save you the trouble of accessing the Services tab in Sparta to select a service to attack. Hydra supports a range of services. Right-click your chosen service and choose Send to Brute. 2 Configure your attack Click the Brute tab in Sparta. The default options such as checking for a blank password, or one identical to the username (as is the case with Metasploitable2) are already selected. Check Password List and click Browse to select one of Kali’s preinstalled lists such as the rockyou.txt file or /usr/share/john/password.lst. 3 Launch your attack Click Run to launch the attack of your chosen service. The bottom…

WHO IT’S AIMED AT “You can have a high level of fluency and a low level of proficiency.” Katrina Owen accidentally became a programmer while studying molecular biology. Since then she’s helped countless others become programmers through her website exercism.io . She’s also an open source advocate at GitHub and has co-written (with Sandi Metz) 99 bottles of OOP, a book that’s dedicated to writing efficient and beautiful object-oriented code. We caught up with her at OSCON Europe back in October 2016 to discuss painful memories of Gentoo, friendly code-reviewing robots and what people really want in a coding tutorial… Linux Format: Tell me about your history. Your bio says you have a background in molecular biology. Katrina Owen: Well, I was actually a secretary until I…

Here, we’re focusing on the Explorer HAT Pro, which is the top-of-the-line board. It comes with eight capacitive touch pads, four analog inputs, four digital inputs and four outputs. We have a DRV8833 motor controller and pins for I2C/SPI and Serial connections. And we get a breadboard to prototype with. The capacitive inputs 1-4 are best used with your hands, but for those of you who wish to test the conductivity of a banana, or use either tin foil or copper tape to create larger circuits, then you can use 5-8 with crocodile clips and turn anything into a fun form of input. This is in much the same manner as the Makey Makey, a device that emulates a keyboard/mouse and can turn conductive objects into forms of input. The…

This tutorial explains how to set up Minecrafton your local network, meaning anyone who wants to play will need to be connected to it. However, you may wish to allow others to join your server over the internet. First, you’ll need to assign your Pi a permanent IP address on your network by editing /etc/network/interfaces . Next, use a feature known as port forwarding on your router to forward incoming traffic from the outside internet to the Pi itself. Because each router is different, it’s best to check the specific steps to do this with your router manufacturer, or enlist a more technically able friend. In either case, say that you need to open port 25565 for both TCP and UDP. You also need your router’s external IP address, which…

Our expert Nick Peers has been playing around with computers for over 30 years, and has been dabbling with Linux for the best part of a decade. Why on earth would you want to access the web or read email in the Terminal when there are so many desktop-friendly tools out there? The answer may not be obvious when you’re in the comfortable surroundings of your desktop, but the tools in this project could all prove their worth the next time you’re unable to get further than the shell (or don’t want to log in to the desktop just to check your email or browse a web page). Browse with Links Let’s start with giving you access to the web. One option is Links – we’ve picked the Links2 variant,…

Our expert Sean D Conway has been delving into data security since the criminal Kevin Mitnick was exposed. A recent change in his daytime employment has him living his dream, playing in a job titled Network Security Specialist. The boss came out of his office the other day, looking rather stressed. “Drop everything, worker bee, I need you to prepare some talking points for a presentation on securing video cameras at company buildings. The meeting with the executives is in 15 minutes!” Rush-order requests, without the Dilbert cartoon tone, are not uncommon working in an information technology security department. They usually occur when there is an immediate need. If you’re the only player in the bull pen and the coach (your boss) calls for relief, you take the ball and…

To run a server on TAILS, you need to save your software, web pages and client keys so they can be restored if necessary. These are saved in the encrypted Persistent section of the USB stick. Open Terminal in TAILS, then create a folder to store backups, with mkdir /home/amnesia/Persistent/tails-server . Next run sudo nano /home/Amnesia/Persistent/backup.sh and paste: Save and exit. Make it executable: Run the backup: Press Ctrl+X, Y, then Enter to save and exit. Make the script executable with sudo chmod a+x /home/amnesia/Persistent/backup.sh . Use cd /home/amnesia/Persistent to switch to the Persistent directory, then run a backup with sudo ./backup.sh . To create the restore script, run the command sudo nano /home/amnesia/Persistent/restore.sh then paste in the following: Save and exit. Make the script executable with sudo chmod a+x…

Our expert Stuart Burns is a systems administrator for a Fortune 500 company. When not stuck fixing quirky issues he can be found getting nerdy with Linux and all manner of interesting items Much has been mentioned recently about system security and effective system management. Putting into practice a two-factor authentication (2FA) capable device helps increase that security stance. Using devices such as the Yubikey has many advantages including helping keep local disks encrypted, login details secure and SSH keys safe from hackers. These devices are designed to keep data secure and only expose the information from the device when it’s required. The Yubikey can be used as a standalone device or it can also be registered with Yubikey and the company’s password service to provide secure password management and…

Our expert Nick Peers is taking a more active interest in privacy and security, given the world he finds himself inhabiting. Does anyone know if you can reset back to 2000 from the shell? Public-key cryptography has long been one of the most secure ways to identify yourself and ensure your conversations and data are kept private, but it’s not exactly user-friendly. Keybase aims to change all that by providing a convenient tool that makes it easy to identify yourself to others, plus chat and share files through a secure tunnel that employs end-to-end encryption. Keybase won’t appeal to those who want to hide their true identity – as the ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ box (opposite) reveals, a key part of it is advertising yourself to provide good faith that…

Our expert Mihalis Tsoukalos Mihalis is a UNIX administrator, a programmer, a DBA and a mathematician who enjoys writing articles and learning new things. You can reach him at www.mtsoukalos.eu and @mactsouk. We’re looking at the latest version of the Swift programming language. We’re going to begin by explaining how to install Swift 3 on an Ubuntu system and look at the main differences between Swift 2 and Swift 3. Then, we’ll present some handy Swift features before developing two small yet practical Swift 3 programs. Bear in mind that the only way to get the most from this tutorial is by writing your own Swift 3 code! Because Swift 3 doesn’t come as a standard package on any Linux distribution, you’ll need to install it manually using a process…

Our expert Kent Elchuk is an experienced web developer who has built, secured and maintained many web applications for high schools, colleges and web sites. Back in LXF223 we took you through creating and publishing Android apps with Google Play. The apps in that particular tutorial used native Android functions and web views to achieve the goals. This time around, we’ll cover two other methods for building Android applications: Cordova and the Ionic Framework. Creating apps with Cordova and the Ionic Framework has many benefits, especially for those with any background in web design or web development. The reason why these are such good choices is that you can create apps using familiar languages such as HTML, CSS and Javascript. In addition to the convenient language set, both Cordova and…

Companies that market products like to talk about the “threatscape”. Long gone are the days when someone might be coding a virus for fun, as an experiment or to see if they could get it to propagate widely enough to gain some notoriety and online kudos in equal measure. Yet for the majority of Linux users there’s not even a threat of traditional malware, be it spamming toolbars into your browser or trying to monitor what you do. Today, the threatscape is more directed at online systems, which can be attacked directly using any known weakness and then typically hit with ransomware. This, alongside social engineering attacks – in terms of phishing emails – are the biggest threats that most standard users face today. That’s the guiding light for the…

Giving the new version of your operating system or software a number is usually a straightforward affair. Not so with openSUSE, which has got its community in a bit of a tizz thanks to some unorthodox versioning. Its new hybrid distribution, openSUSE Leap, needed to have a new version number. So it started at version 42. The ‘logic’ behind that choice is that openSUSE Leap was based on openSUSE 13.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, so the team decided they would number openSUSE Leap based on SUSE Linux Enterprise’s version plus 30. The current version is openSUSE Leap 42.2 (with Leap 42.3 coming out this July). So the next major version will be openSUSE Leap 43, right? Well, that was the plan, but as a statement by Richard Brown on…

BLACK LAB LINUX 11 A new version of Black Lab Linux has been released. The Ubuntu-based commercial distro now features the Linux kernel 4.8, Skype, Flatpak package support, LibreOffice 5.3 and a lot more. It comes with both GNOME and Xcfe desktop environments depending on the edition you choose. According to the release announcement, which can be read at www.blacklablinux.org/2017/05/black-labenterprise-linux-11-released.html, “Black Lab Enterprise Linux 11 balances cutting-edge performance with the most stable GNOME desktop experience available. There are four versions tailored to the enterprise, educational sector and studio professional.” Download the latest version from www.blacklablinux.org/p/downloads-site-links.html. OPENINDIANA 2017.04 OpenIndiana 2017.04 is the latest release of the open source OS that was created as a continuation of OpenSolaris after Oracle took over Sun Microsystems and discontinued the OS. This new version comes…

You’re wrong! I was reading John Knight’s review of the GamePad Digital XD in the January 2017 issue. The man must be clairvoyant – he already knows how much the Nintendo Switch will cost before Nintendo has even announced it themselves. Les B Labbauf, Harrisburg, USA Neil says: OK, you caught us out! This, however, was nothing to do with John Knight but myself, trying to pin a relative cost to the Digital XD. We’re not gaming experts here, so we genuinely thought the pre-order price of £199 used by a few outlets was the real one – apparently not. However, it’s not a good comparison because the £279 Nintendo Switch is cutting-edge hardware with custom wireless controllers, a docking base and Nintendo software. The GamePad Digital XD offers hardware…

When making an animation you’ll need to create characters, backgrounds and props. These may be photographs that you’ve taken or perhaps you prefer to draw in another program first. Often you can also use real-world photos to change surfaces so they look more realistic. Your software will also render to a number of formats, depending on your requirements. Synfigimports PNG, JPG for cut-out animation and SVG for moulding animation, exports pictures in a range of formats and uses ffmpegto make video – but it uses a plug-in system so you can also use other video programs. There’s also a lip-sync function called Papagayo, which needs a WAV file. Blenderimports most graphics formats, including DXF files from your CAD drawings, and this is achieved by modules that you need to enable.…

“Ethical hackers are often hired to break into protected systems and identify any weaknesses.” From watching TV programmes like Mr. Robot, hacking would seem to be the province of pallid nerds who commit fraud and break into other people’s homes to support themselves, as they perform vigilante acts of digital sabotage. In reality, hacking in IT circles is generally considered to be a noble profession. Ethical “white hat” hackers are often hired by corporations to break into protected systems and identify any weaknesses. This activity is commonly known as “penetration testing” or “pen testing”. Your first tool in getting started is to get hold of a penetration distribution of Linux, such as Kali, which you can download from www.kali.org. Pen testing distros usually can be booted from a CD or…

1 Set up a GPS device Open Terminal in Kali and run apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients to download the necessary files. Then connect your GPS device via USB. If you’re running Kali inside VirtualBox, click Devices>USB and enable the GPS device. Run the command dmesg | tail -n 5 to see where it’s mounted, e.g /dev/ttyUSB0. 2 Start the GPS service Start the GPS Daemon: gpsd /dev/ttyUSB0. Next edit your Kismet configuration with nano etc/kismet/kismet.conf. Remove the # in gpstype=serial and gpsdevice=/dev/ rfcomm0. Also replace rfcomm0 with the GPS location. Press Ctrl+X, then Y, then Enter. Run Kismet with kismet -l. 3 Export GPS Data Once Kismet launches you should see the GPS data. Press Ctrl+C to stop the service, then reopen Terminal in Kali. Use the ls command to…

If you’ve saved a capture file from Wireshark and want an easy way to list any binary files such as JPG images, then you can use the command line tool Foremost. The easiest way to do this is to save a capture file in Wiresharkby selecting File…>Save As, then open Kali Terminal and run the command foremost -i -v <filename> . This will create a folder named output, containing every single file shared over the network. However, this isn’t the most precise way to do things, so instead consider opening your capture file in Wiresharkand using the display filter http.content_type contains “jpg” . Substitute “jpg” for the file extension that you need. If you know the name of the file in question, then this will be much easier. Right-click the…

In brief... This is a kit comprising the new Raspberry Pi Zero W, some laser-cut acrylic pieces and the Scroll pHAT HD board. The kit itself is a gentle introduction to the skills needed to build physical projects based around the Raspberry Pi Zero W. All you need to provide are an SD card, power and keyboard/mouse. The raspberry Pi Zero W has now been with us for just a few months, but in this short time it’s caused quite a stir. £10 for a computer with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is hard to resist, but what if you’re new to the scene? Well, fear not because retailers such as Pimoroni have brought out a range of products to introduce you to the world of the Raspberry Pi. The Scroll Bot…

Our expert Jonni Bidwell is this month indebted to Nate Drake, who originally wrote this tutorial. Usually Jonni writes his own stuff, but he’s been too busy this month fighting with plastic cups Besides empowering a new generation of makers, the Raspberry Pi has also established its merits as a gaming platform. Projects like RetroPie, combined with the Pi’s cheapness, mean that it’s great for playing old classics. And even some new ones. Like Minecraft. In case you’ve been living under a rock since 2011 Minecraft is the best-selling computer game of all time. It’s an open-world, sandbox affair in which our hero, Steve, roams around a landscape made of voxels (blocks). Resources can be mined and crafted into other resources, so that Steve can build houses, farm crops, cook…

Our expert Jason Cannon started his career as a Unix and Linux system engineer in 1999. Since then, he’s used his skills at such companies as Xerox, UPS, Hewlett-Packard and Amazon. We are going to cover the basics of shell scripting. A script is a command-line program that contains a series of commands. The commands contained within the script are executed by an interpreter – in the case of shell scripts, the shell (Bash, for example) is the interpreter and it executes the commands contained within the script one after the other. Anything you can run at the command line you can put into a shell script. They’re great for automating tasks, so if you find yourself running a series of commands for a given task, and you need to…

Need to grab a file using BitTorrent? Start by installing rtorrent: Once installed, launch it by typing rtorrent and hitting Enter twice to reveal the load.normal> line. Simply type or paste your torrent URL in here, and hit Enter to load it. Now use the cursor keys to select the torrent file from the list, and press Ctrl+S to start the download. You can stop the download at any time using Ctrl+D, or quit rtorrent using Ctrl+Q. Note: it’s good practice to have uploaded at least half the file (50%) before removing the torrent.…

Https is more secure depending on the standard used. Avoid using any SSL referenced standards for https. SSL is legacy standard and has vulnerabilities. Use only the TLS referenced standards protocol and start with anything greater than TLS 1.2. At the time of writing, even TLS 1.2 security was under question for possible vulnerabilities. You may recall an internet security storm over the heartbleed vulnerability. Those web servers using degraded protocols were open to compromise because of TLS 1.0. A device using >= TLS 1.2 is in the domain of more secure Https.…

This project is designed to boot from the OS Tails, installed on USB. Follow the steps outlined on the TAILS website at https://tails.boum.org/install/index.en.html to do this. The USB stick must be at least 4GB in size. Once installed, restart your machine and boot from USB. You may need to change your BIOS settings to do this. Click Yes on More Options, and type an admin password. By default, anyone monitoring outgoing connections made by TAILS will be able to see you’re using Tor. You can make Tor traffic much harder to detect by visiting https://bridges.torproject.org/options and choosing ‘obfs4’ under Advanced Options to get some bridge addresses. Inside TAILS, click on This Computer’s Connection is Censored, then Configure > Yes > Next. Paste in the bridge addresses. In TAILS, by default…

At first it can be confusing to see how to make the Yubikey work with internet passwords while remaining separate from the Yubikey infrastructure. It’s actually quite easy. The way to do it is to use the Yubikey OTP alongside a local and trusted password management system. For example, you can use MacPass on a Mac (there are alternatives for Linux. One well-regarded example is KeepassXC, https://keepassxc.org) that are based on the local device and don’t communicate with the internet. Then use that OTP as the secure passphrase to enter the device. Doing it this way means that you’ll have the horrible task of changing all the internet passwords that were protected by some online product that got compromised. The nice thing about MacPass and its Linux brethren is that…

Although Keybase is built around privacy and security, one thing it’s not is secretive. Your profile is as public and accessible as it possibly can be, and there’s a very good reason for that. Basically, the Keybase client – whether the app or your browser – is specifically designed not to trust any server, so must prove a person’s identity without relying on the server as proof. This means that while the server tells you who a contact is, the client verifies each of their identity proofs independently, then it’s up to you to review those proofs to confirm they’re who they say they are (and who you’re looking for). A fringe benefit of this approach is that the public-key part of Keybase’s cryptographic key pair requires no effort or…

Our expert Jonni Bidwell is an itinerant Linux hacker, ex-numerologist and Lovecraft fan. His attempts to apt-get install cthulhu on various parts of the infrastructure at Future Towers have so far ended in failure, but he remains persistent… The Linux Foundation’s Essentials of Linux System Administration course, LFS201, is full of knowledge. It consists of 42 chapters, with short knowledge tests and longer lab assignments. In this taster we introduce the topic of package management systems (chapter 27) before skipping to a primer on Debian’s APT (chapter 32). It’s necessary to introduce order into the way software is installed, updated and removed on Linux systems. Package management systems provide a clean way to achieve that goal and can prevent systems from descending into chaos, fossilisation or breakage with time. Furthermore,…

Put simply, Generics enable you to develop types and functions that can work with any type, even with types that aren’t yet developed! Many built-in types such as arrays are implemented using generics in order to be able to work with any type you feed them. Nevertheless, because you don’t know the exact type of the variable you’re going to process, you can’t make any assumptions about the variable or its value. As a result, you can’t always implement generic functions for operations such as sorting, addition or equality checking. On the other hand, writing an add function for each data type that exists is not only time-consuming, but also pretty stupid! So, Generics solve the problem of having to write separate functions for each data type that either exists…

Cordova has a long list of plugins you can add into your app. You can find plugins at https://cordova.apache.org/plugins/?platforms= cordova-android. So, let’s start by adding the geolocation plugin to the Cordova app. Go to the working directory of the app and type in the command as shown below: cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-geolocation Now, go to your editor and open the index.html and index.js files. Add the following code to index.html: <div><button id = “myPosition">My Position</button></div> Add the code shown below to the bottom of the index.js file: function myPosition() { var gedit = navigator.geolocation getCurrentPosition(onSuccess, onError); function onSuccess(position) { alert('Latitude: ' + position.coords. latitude + ‘\n’ + ‘Longitude: ' + position.coords. longitude + ‘\n’ + ‘Altitude: ' + position.coords.altitude + ‘\n’ + ‘Accuracy: ' + position.coords. accuracy + ‘\n’ +…

Are you ready for 2038? While that seems a long way off, it’s worth noting that in 21 years’ time, 32-bit time_t values will no longer be able to represent times correctly, which could cause havoc for embedded systems that are designed to have very long life cycles. At the Linaro Connect 2017 event Arnd Bergmann described steps people were taking to prepare the Linux kernel for 2038 by converting 32-bit timestamps to 64-bit. This isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem, which could make those 21 years fly by. For more details see: www.viva64.com/en/b/0505. Thunderbird’s new home has been announced and it’s… Mozilla. While the open source email client is migrating off Mozilla’s infrastructure (many assumed the company was dropping Thunderbird), Mozilla commissioned a report looking into potential…

“Cloud Foundry is one of the most mature container-based application platforms. Its key features enable users to automate, scale and manage cloud apps throughout their lifecycle. Applications can be written in just about any language, and can be deployed in container images on any infrastructure, enabling portability across cloud application platforms in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment. The recent rise of open cloud platforms has created even more demand for pros with expertise in that area. Fifty one per cent of hiring managers say that technologies such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry have the greatest effect on their hiring decisions. Consequently, open source professionals are embracing training and certification developed by industry experts. Cloud Foundry provides an introductory training course on the basics of cloud-native software architecture, and people can register…

Hi. I have been buying your excellent magazine for some time, although much of it goes straight over my head (sorry Jolyon!). My current computer is just over 10-years old (Athlon 64 X2 with 2GB RAM and Ubuntu 14.10) and it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Seeing that LXF219 promised the ‘Fastest Linux PC’, I felt a new build coming on. However, although it is a great description of how to build a machine from scratch, I was disappointed that there is little discussion of the hardware or software. I waited until LXF220 to see if this was addressed, but no, it was not. Can you give us some more on this subject? What compromises were made (processor, RAM, HDD spec and so on) and what do…

To truly learn the tools of the trade, start a project of your own, and keep it small with just enough details to make it interesting. A help file and online tutorials will speed up your learning; however, most programmer hate writing documentation! That is why it’s important to find out how well documented the software is before choosing your tools. Synfighas a good collection of tutorials, although some assume a lot of knowledge about the program from the beginning. Having said that, after you’ve gone through a few tutorials you will know the finer details of the tools. Blenderhas a gigantic set of features and they’re well documented,too. There are also many tutorials, both as videos and as text. To find documentation about Pencil2D you need to dig around…

1 Create your host only Interface In VirtualBox, go to File>Preferences. Click Network in the left-hand pane, then select the Host Only Networks tab. Click the green + button to add a new host only network. By default the name of your new network is vboxnet0. Then click OK. 2 Connect Kali to the host only network Highlight the Kali Linux virtual machine and click Settings>Network. In the Attached to menu choose Host-only adapter. The name of your Host Only network will appear. Click OK, then repeat these steps for the Metasploitable Linux virtual machine. 3 Add a second network interface If you want to update Kali or add new programs you’ll need internet access. To add another network interface, go to Settings> Network for Kali’s virtual machine. Click the…

1 Choose a payload Open the Terminal in Kali and run simple-ducky. The program now will ask you where you to begin. Hopefully, you’ll have some idea of the kind of system that you’re going to be targeting. Choose a numbered option here – for instance, attacks against Linux and MacOS are found under Option 5. You’ll then see a list of available payloads for the target system. 2 Configure your payload Depending on the type of payload chosen, you’ll now be asked to answer a few simple question. In the example here the chosen payload “OS X Reverse Shell” is designed to hack into a Mac by making it accessible later via the internet. The payload asks for a server and port number to transmit to, as well as…

1 Launch Msfconsole Click the Metasploit Framework console icon on the Kali desktop to launch ‘msfconsole’. It will need around 1.5GB of RAM to run, so make sure that this has been assigned to the Kali virtual machine. Once you’ve done this, either repeat the steps in the “Any port in a scan” section, or run the command nmap -v <target-machine’s-ipaddress> to identify vulnerable ports. 2 Prepare your exploit Choose a service you wish to exploit. In this example we’ll try to use a malicious backdoor in Unreal IRCD to gain access to the target system. Run the command nmap -A -p 6667 <target-machine’s-ipaddress> to reveal more information about the daemon running on this port. You can use searchsploit at this stage (see above) to see if there’s an exploit…

The partitioning process differs depending on which version of OS X you have installed on your MacBook. The only thing that’s the same is how you launch Disk Utility, which is done via the Applications > Utilities folder. If you’re running OS X 10.10 or earlier, select your physical hard drive and switch to the Partition tab. Select your Mac partition and reduce its size by all the space you need, using the slider. Click the + button to create a second partition in the space, name it Data and then reduce its size to leave enough free space for Elementary. Click Apply. If you’re running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) or later, things are more complicated, because Disk Utility doesn’t allow you to create free space, merely set up…

“It sports many usability power-ups that used to be present in Opera 12.” Web browser Otter Browser Version: 0.9.91 Web: https://otter-browser.org Although new Firefox and Chromium releases have arrived relatively recently, we decided to skip those already widely known and threadbare browsers in favour of a fresh alternative. The historic roots of the Otter Browser were of utmost importance back in 2012 and related to the decision of Opera Software to give up on its Presto rendering engine. Otter Browser emerged to recreate the ‘feel’ of the original Opera 12.x browser on the basis of WebKit and Qt5. We enjoyed early versions of Otter Browser in LXF191, but it was honestly not ready for daily use at that point in time. Revisiting the project after two and a half years…

Recently, I attended Picademy, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s own training programme for educators. Picademy has just celebrated its third birthday and has taught over 1,000 people in the UK and America to take their first steps into the world of making. At Picademy you’d expect the Raspberry Pi to be pushed as the answer to every possible solution. Well, it isn’t. Listening to James Robinson, the lead for Picademy in the UK, we learnt that there are other boards on the market, and these boards bring something different to the table. The micro:bit has seen great uptake in schools: it has an immediacy that children crave. I can write my project in Python, JavaScript or PXT and see the results quickly. There’s little or no configuration: the micro:bit appears as…

Our expert Les Pounder is a maker and tinkerer who travels with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Picademy, helping educators to take their first steps with the Pi, micro:bit and Arduino. This month we’re going through some 10-minute hacks that you can build using the Explorer HAT Pro. These four projects can be mixed together, and we’ll be using the Analog inputs with potentiometers, digital Input/ Outputs with LEDs and buttons, and the H Bridge controller for operating DC motors with the board. Before we power on the Raspberry Pi we need to attach the Explorer HAT Pro to all 40 of the GPIO pins. The board should sit atop the Raspberry Pi and match the outline of the Pi. Now power on your Raspberry Pi and boot to the Pixel…

Open Terminal on your Raspberry Pi and begin by installing some tools: Next, we’ll need to enable an experimental graphics driver. Run sudo raspi-config and scroll down to Advanced Options. Press Return. Then choose the AB – GL Driver option and enable it. Now download the official Minecraftclient with the following: Launch it by running: Now you need to log in with your username and password. Next, click the Profile Editor tab, then click the box that’s underneath Version to open up a new window. Find the drop-down menu named Use Version and choose 1.8.9. Next click Save Profile. Click the Play button at the bottom to begin downloading the files. When the downloads are finished, you need to close the launcher and re-open Terminal. Run the following commands: Next,…

If you’ve enjoyed this small taste of the Shell Scripting Udemy course, you can gain unrestricted access to the full course at www.udemy.com with this exclusive Linux Format reader discount. You’ll gain a full working knowledge of using the standard sysadmin Terminal tools, setting up a test machine, Linux file permissions, standard text editors, manipulating files, using network transfers, controlling processes and much more. Get the discount, start learning! Visit bit.ly/SHELLSCRIPT10 to enrol in the course at a discounted price of £10* (89% off)! Click the Buy Now button and sign up for an account on Udemy. Once you have signed up for an account, you are asked to confirm your purchase. The discounted course price of £10 is applied automatically with the above provided link. Input your credit card…

While it is possible to download files using Links, wget is actually a better option if you know the URL (FTP, HTTP or HTTPS) of the file you want to download. Type the following to download a file to the current folder: Add the -O flag if you would like to save to a different directory: As the file downloads, wget provides you with a progress bar, including download speed and ETA, but if you’re downloading a large file – an ISO image, say– you may want to keep the Terminal free for other tasks while the download completes. In that case, press Ctrl+C to cancel the download, then use the -b flag to download in the background: Type ls -l –block-size=M and hit Enter every so often to see…

Our expert Nate Drake is taking a well-earned sabbatical from treasure hunting and dodging dodgy mercenaries. He now [foolishy-Ed] works as a freelance technology journalist. We have previously explored how to set up a ‘hidden service’ on the darknet using Tor. This involved setting up a server using the software Apache2 and generating a .onion address so that other Tor users could connect. By default, anyone in possession of the address, such as www.facebookcorewwwi.onion, can connect to a Tor hidden service. For big sites such as Facebook there’s no harm in doing things this way, because everyone knows who owns the website, and their business model thrives on people connecting and sharing data. For private citizens in the UK, who are now subject to monitoring of all web traffic, the…

The YubiKey is a hardware authentication device that supports one-time passwords, public key encryption and authentication, and the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) protocol, which is an international standard for a smooth authentication experience (see https://fidoalliance.org). It enables users to securely log into their accounts by emitting onetime passwords or using a FIDO-based public/ private key pair generated by the device. YubiKey also allows for storing static passwords for use at sites that don’t support one-time passwords. A couple of big-name supporters include Facebook that uses YubiKey for employee credentials, and Google that supports it for both employees and users. Some password managers also support YubiKey. The Yubikey implements the HMAC-based one-time password algorithm (HOTP) and the time-based one-time password algorithm (TOTP), and identifies itself as a keyboard that delivers the…

Hate the GUI? Good news: Keybase comes with its own fully functional command-line tool. Here’s the obvious starting point: $ keybase help If you’re new to Keybase, start with keybase signup , or use keybase login to log into an existing account. Use the prove command to add proofs – for example, keybase prove twitter . The search command helps you find others using matching terms, while the id command ( keybase id nick ) enables you to verify a specific account. The follow command is self-explanatory and is particularly valuable as connecting with people through the command line is simpler if you’re following them. The encrypt command provides a series of tools for sending encrypted files and messages. The following examples from the Keybase website (https://keybase.io/docs/command_line) reveal how it…

Sign up for any Linux Foundation training course today and enjoy a 10* per cent discount off the normal price! The experts at the Linux Foundation have created courses that span the entire range of Linux, from classic Sysadmin courses to emerging technologies such as OpenStack and Open Daylight. If you’ve enjoyed this small sample and want to learn more, we’ve take this segment from the highly popular LFS201 Essentials of System Administration course, that comes with the optional Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin qualification. The course is entirely online, is self-paced and contains over 80 expert labs with solutions for you to practise your new skills. To claim your 10 per cent discount on ANY course follow these steps: Go to https://training.linuxfoundation.org/linux-courses and browse the complete range of courses. Select the…

Apart from using command line arguments to obtain user input, there are times that you need to ask the user for some information while a program is still running – the example code can be found in getInput.swift and is the following: var valid:Bool = false print("> ", terminator:"") while valid != true { if let myInput = readLine() { if let number = Int(myInput) { print("Read: ",myInput, separator:"") valid = true } else { print(myInput, “Is not an integer!") print("> ", terminator:"") } } } The readLine() function gets user input that’s stopped by a newline character. The use of terminator property in the print() function enables you to print something without a newline character, whereas a separator property means you can print multiple strings without spaces between them.…

In addition to Cordova, there’s another app building framework you can use called Ionic. It’s very similar in setup and usage as Cordova. Of course, the first step is to install it. So, let’s just do that: sudo npm install -g cordova ionic Now, create the app. For demo purposes, you can create a folder called myIonic located in the home directory. cd myIonic ionic start test sidemenu --v2 At this point, you can test you app in a browser. Just enter the root app directory and run the next, and, after that, open http:// locahost:8100 in a browser to see the app: ionic serve Now, let’s move on to your device. The next two commands can be used to set the app up for Android usage and to run the…

This month’s GNOMEified Ubuntu has got me thinking. I’m not one of Ubuntu’s greatest fans, but I applaud its bravery over Unity. At a time when Ubuntu with the GNOME 2 desktop was arguably the most popular desktop distro out there, they had the strength to throw that desktop away and switch to something new. Okay, so it was basically GNOME 3 under the skin, but even that was a big jump from GNOME 2. GNOME 3 wasn’t considered ready at the time and Ubuntu could have stuck with the old desktop for another release or two, but it didn’t. To say that Unity got a poor reception would be putting it mildly. It looked that Ubuntu would lose much of its userbase to distros like Linux Mint, but it…

Build an Arch distro Beginners? Pah! Follow the arch path and create yourself the perfect custom distro for you. Which VPN provider? With the US and UK governments snooping on everything you do, it’s time to go dark. It’s the LXF puzzle! You asked for it, so here it is! We kick off part one of our programming challenge (it won’t be too hard… honest!) Contents of future issues subject to change – we could be going too install crazy to write anything.…