After removing the faulty hard disk that I was using to boot from, I decided to try installing using just the two 40GBs that were in RAID. It seems you can’t use GRUB when booting from an LVM partition, so the Debian installer gives you LILO, and insists that the Master Boot Record is located on /dev/hdb. The problem of course being that this motherboard only allows you to boot from the first HDD in the system, which is /dev/hda.

So I tried forcing LILO to install to hda, ahah, success. I’m no longer getting INSERT BOOT DISK, but after decompressing the kernel, the system just reboots. No warnings, no errors, just reboots. Bugger. Then I read that it was possible to have an LVM partition along side normal disk partitions, so I created two normal partitions on the first disk (one for the system, one for swap), and left the rest as LVM. Because it’s only RAID 0, it makes no difference that the whole second hard disk is one LVM partition. So, I’ve got three partitions now, one for the system (active flag, bootable), one swap, and one big data partition. Base system copied over fine, GRUB installed OK, time to reboot in to the new system.

GRUB gives me a boot menu, decompressing the kernel, and bam! Crash, same error I got when the old boot HDD failed. Have I lost another hard disk? Is it the mainboard controller? Does Etch simply not like this hardware configuration? Do I care enough to continue trying to fix this damn thing?

With some of the recent exploits discovered affecting Mac OSX, I’ve found myself wondering where all the shellcode for Intel Macs is. I last looked in to this over twelve months ago, and found nothing but PPC payloads, and a few patched BSD x86 ones.

So what’s changed in the past twelve months? Err, not a lot. Remote 0days are few and far between for Mac OSX (well, compared to Win32 anyway), but when they do come along – it’s all proof of concept stuff with no practical application, which makes pen testing near impossible. Whilst Apple are usually pretty quick to plug this sort of stuff, automatic updates in OSX aren’t nearly as in-your-face as Microsoft Windows’ for example. Just last week I had a client using 10.3.7! Perhaps Leopard will improve on this, as long as they don’t take too many pages out of Microsoft’s book.

Finally had a play with Photoshop CS3 (Mac obviously) today. Performance wise it seems very responsive on my 1.83GHz MacBook, filters render in a reasonable amount of time, and image load times are pretty good too. Feature wise, I’m not seeing a whole lot of new stuff, but the interface has changed a bit. I’m sure I’ll start discovering new features as I continue using the program. It’s great to not have to reboot in to Windows just to use what is essentially the app for Macs. If you’re having trouble finding a key/crack – contact me by any of the usual methods.

I’m very seriously considering teaching the Leechbox how to fly. A little over a week ago, I wasted three precious days setting up Etch so I could have a working torrent box again. BTW, if you want to run a webserver or Etch, use Apache 2, it will save you a lot of screwing around.

So I got everything setup – Apache, MySQL, PHP, I even got Samba working after some ‘encouragement’. So I go to shut the machine down, and relocate it to its’ usual home in the kitchen (err, long story). Now the machine is usually headless, so I’m relying on a terminal window running PING to let me know when the machine is up. Three minutes pass and I’m still getting ‘host is down’. Five minutes, ten… Fuck.

Unplug the machine, move it back to my work bay only to discover that the machine is kernel panicking upon boot. Had I rebooted it at all before I moved it you ask? Yes, of course. Anyway, I put the machine under the table and forgot about it, until today. I decided just to blow it all away and start fresh, and on the first boot – same error.

Those familiar with this saga will recall that I replaced a failed HDD about a month ago, one of the 40GB disks which makes up the array. So naturally I tested all the drives again, and sure enough, this time, the boot hard disk is failing. Two drives in less than 8 weeks in the same box. I think it’s time for those flying lessons.

Just watch the video:

Then, if you’re game, click the link below. Your browser should crash (FF, IE whatever) and calc.exe magically opens. You can browse the directory structure if you want the files to play with.

Exploit me
Now give me a copy

Greetz to milw0rm