It looks like my bitching about OSX shellcode didn’t fall on deaf ears after all. The H.D. Moore of Metasploit dropped a comment on my drunken ramblings. The Post.
So, somebody remind me to grab the latest M-S and try 0wning the PowerMac. Perhaps I should re-install OSX Server and put it on the DMZ, let all you fools have a crack. Thoughts?
EDIT–
The cracks are already starting to appear in OSX 10.5, let the race for 0day begin 🙂
I now own a PowerMac G3. I needed a machine to replace the Leechbox which I have now totally given up on. Had a hillarious time trying to get it working properly, couldn’t figure out why the optical drive tray kept ejecting when trying to boot from the OSX install disc. I eventually discovered it was a CD-ROM drive and began snapping plastic to replace it with a DVD-RW. After the install, OSX wouldn’t boot from the RAID array I created using the two HDDs salvaged from the old Leechbox. So, had to ditch one of the drives.
A quick search of available BitTorrent clients available for the Mac left me with the same choices I’d always had – TorrentFlux or Azureus with WebUI. TorrentFlux it is. If I had a copy of OSX Server, I would’ve simply compiled PHP support into the in-built version of Apache that comes with OSX, as it already includes MySQL. However since I’m running client which comes with neither, I opted to use Fink, which allows for pre-compiled binary packages to be installed using APT similar to Debian. A few apt-gets later I discovered that PHP and MySQL are part of the unstable tree, and have to be compiled manually, defeating the whole purpose. Finally I remembered MAMP which just includes everything in a nice point and click package.
So, installed MAMP, installed TorrentFlux – great. Set up AFP/SMB shares, fantastic – now to try a download. TORRENT DIED. Turns out there are pretty serious issues with TorrentFlux under Mac OSX. Basically, part of the kernel is killing timed out threads owned by Apache, there are some work arounds with mixed success, unfortunately none of them worked for me. OSX uses sysctl thanks its’ BSD roots, unfortunately one of the variables I need to change to permanently fix this doesn’t exist in the Mach kernel. Many many hours of Googling, and much frustration, I’m left with the client everyone loves to hate.
Mac OSX style font smoothing. I’m sold. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but they have – it looks and feels exactly like the Mac version. For the longest time, I’ve loathed Windows’ subpixel rendering, even Gnome/KDE put ClearType to shame. I’m just pissed that now the rest of Windows looks even more drab than usual.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Firefox – but unless you’re bleeding edge, it’s not W3C compliant, and the Gecko rendering engine is getting a bit long in the tooth. All that being said, I don’t recommend Safari if you’ve got less than 1GB of RAM.
Pretty boring weekend, didn’t bother trying to fix the Leechbox again. It’s in the too-hard basket for now 😛 Had two friends recently come out of long term relationships, which made for an interesting Saturday night. I now have some real poker chips so I don’t have to play with coins anymore.
Didn’t do a lot today, other than driving. Still managed to stall it once during the hour. Man it gets cold early now, I need to go clothes shopping – I have a closet full of t-shirts and only one jumper. Doesn’t look like I’ll be doing much work this week as the shop is closed for stock-take, that’s going to seriously impact my wage.
I’ve added some more header images from StuckInCustoms, that guy really does magic with HDR photography. I downloaded a copy of Photomatix the other day just to see how it all works, not that the SONY point-and-shoot is really up to the task of taking high quality shots in different exposures. You can adjust the exposure but it’s quite rudimentary and the lack of tripod makes getting multiple identical shots extremely difficult. The camera also cannot shoot in RAW mode, so that’s out as well. If anyone has a good DSLR and a tripod, next time you’re shooting something, do me a favor and take three shots (one in -2, one in 0 and one in +2) and send them to me to play with.
