Suramya’s Blog

As promised here are the steps that I followed to get my wireless card working on my Comaq Presario V3000 in Debian:

1. Install ndiswrapper

In my case I allready had the ndis wrapper installed. If thats not the case with your system run the following command as root to install it:

apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils ndisgtk

2. Disable the “bcm43xx” driver on your system

Run the following command at a command prompt as root :

echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

3. Download the Windows driver for your card

My system uses the Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 card and I had to download the Windows driver for it from the Dell site. For some reason the driver I found at the Compaq site refused to work. You can download it from here.

Save this in the /tmp directory cd into the /tmp directory, and unzip the Windows driver package:

cd /tmp
unzip R123456.EXE (or whatever the name of the download is)


4. Install the Windows driver with ndiswrapper

To load the driver you need to run the following command as root:

ndiswrapper -i /tmp/DRIVER/bcmwl5.inf

The you should verify that the driver has been successfully loaded

ndiswrapper -l

The output of this command should look like the following if it is loaded correctly

Installed ndis drivers:
{name of driver} driver present, hardware present

or

{name of driver} : driver installed
device ({Chipset ID}) present

5. Load the ndiswrapper module

You now need to load the ndiswrapper module. Run the following steps at a command prompt as root:

depmod -a
modprobe ndiswrapper

if the above commands don’t give any errors then the drivers have been successfully installed.

6. Configure the wireless card

I have found the ‘netcardconfig’ command the easiest to use when configuring a new card. Run it as root and answer the questions it asks and it will configure the card for you.

7. Set the ndiswrapper module to automatically load at boot

ndiswrapper is not started by default when the system starts up so you must configure your system to load the ndiswrapper module at system startup. To do this, edit /etc/modules file as root to add an entry for ndiswrapper at the end of the file.

vi /etc/modules

Add ‘ndiswrapper’ (without the quotes) to the end of the file in a new line. Save and exit.

Now the module will be loaded when the system next starts up.
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A special thanks to JamesGu from the UbuntuForums for figuring out the solution and posting it there.

Hope you find this useful. I certainly did.

Will post about my sound card next.

- Suramya

The Regular Expressions cheat sheet is designed to be printed on an A4 sheet of paper and live by a designer or developer’s desk, to make life a bit easier.

Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet

Check out this post for a description of what is on the cheat sheet.

- Suramya

Version 1.0 of OpenProj (which is a software that I have talked about before) was released earlier this week. This is a big step for the Open Source world as its the first formal release of one of the few competitors of MS Project (That can match it in features).

According to the information I received OpenProj has had over 25,000 downloads in the first two days after its launch. That means a lot of people are planning to use it or are atleast willing to try it out. Infoworld did a detailed review of the Beta version product last year and they mostly had good things to say about it. Now that new version is out we should be seeing another review from them shortly.

As most of the readers of this blog already know, I prefer using Open Source applications. That way I know what I am installing on my system and I get to install/use software without having to pirate it, or paying through my nose for it. Hence my recommendation that if you use MS project you should give OpenProj a try.

That being said; I haven’t installed OpenProj on my system yet nor am I planning to and no Its not because I don’t like the software but rather because I have no need for a project management software. So I don’t want it taking up disk space on my system. But if I ever need a project management software I know where to look.

You can download OpenProj ver 1.0 from their source forge page. More information on it is available here.

- Suramya

I personally don’t like using PDF files. They are bulky and need extra software for me to view them. Plus they are a pain to export into html (which I like). But they are a necessary evil especially if you are dealing with the corporate world/goverment where most of the forms etc are in PDF format maybe because they allow the creator to choose the layout/content and make it hard for others to modify without spending a lot of money. Atleast that used to be the case, now there are most than 50 alternatives to Adobe Acrobat that you can try out and use for free. The following site has a listing of all the tools with a brief description of each: 50+ open source/free alternatives to Adobe Acrobat.

I regularly use Open Office to create PDF’s that look good. I have also tried using the PDF creator but didn’t keep it as Open Office took care of all my PDF creation needs.

Check out the list. You might find the some tool that will save you a lot of money.

- Suramya

This very interesting application allows you to tunnel TCP traffic over ICMP. Basically if you are behind a firewall that doesn’t allow any TCP data to pass through but allows you to ping systems on the net you can use this to create a tunnel over which you can send any data.

Check it out here: Ping Tunnel - Send TCP traffic over ICMP

Sounds very useful and is something to keep in the toolbox.

- Suramya

In Windows 2000 the ‘Run As’ option was introduced, the premise was that you would login as a regular user and if you needed to run a particular program as a different user or an administrator you would use it. Basically it duplicated the su functionality from the Unix/Linux world.

Now if for some reason you want to disable this feature, follow these steps:

For standalone Windows XP machines in a workgroup environment, you can disable Run As by hacking the Registry. Simply use Regedit.exe to locate the following key on each machine:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer

Then create a new DWORD value named HideRunAsVerb and assign it a value of 1.

In a domain environment, you can disable RunAs using the Software Restriction Policies feature of Group Policy. To do this, open the appropriate GPO in the Group Policy Object Editor and locate the following node in the console tree:

Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Software Restriction Policies

Right-click on this node and select New Software Restriction Policies, then right-click on Additional Rules and select New Path Rule. Now type the path to runas.exe and make sure the policy is set to disallowed.

If you prefer to apply this policy to specific users instead of computers, use a GPO linked to an OU where the user accounts reside and configuring Software Restriction Policies using User Configuration instead of Computer Configuration, such as:

User Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Software Restriction Policies

Source: Disabling the RunAs command

More detailed version: Disable RunAs

- Suramya

In linux if you want to know what files are being used, all you have to do is run the lsof command which shows a list of all open files and the processes that opened them. So if you want to figure out what program is using that insane amount of RAM you can run lsof and grep by the process ID to find it.

In windows however there is no such command so we have to use alternative methods. If you are trying to identify a TCP connection you can try running “netstat -bv” (Without the quotes). It will give you the executable behind process, something like:

TCP fury:2433 imap.perfora.net:imap ESTABLISHED 2724
C:\WINDOWS\system32\mswsock.dll
C:\WINDOWS\system32\WS2_32.dll
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\nspr4.dll
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe
C:\WINDOWS\system32\kernel32.dll
[thunderbird.exe]

For Windows XP and 2000 systems you can also download Fport, which is a free tool that will show you what programs on your system are opening which ports.

Hope this helps.

- Suramya

Here’s a small list of sites that security related news/resources:

• InfoSec News
• CSO Security Feed (rss feed)
• RootSecure.net
• SecGeeks
• Aviv Raff on .net
• Symantec Security Weblog
• Security Garden

This list is not a comprehensive list. I may add more sites as and when I find them.

- Suramya

If you want to know who deleted a particular file in Windows 2003 all you need to do is enable auditing the folder you want to keep track of. Just right click on the folder, go to “sharing and security”, then “security” tab, at the bottom click on “advanced”. Select the auditing tab, click add, select the group or users to track, then pick what actions you want to track.

To track file deletion you would enable:

Create files/Write data Success/Fail
Create folders / append data Success/Fail
Delete Subfolders/Files Success/Fail
Delete Suceess/Fail

Once thats done Windows will log all the information in the security event log.

- Suramya

The following website has a good How-To on how you can Secure Websites Using SSL And Certificates on a system running Apache, Bind and OpenSSL.

- Suramya