[Cialug] Introduction

[Matthew Nuzum]

On 7/6/07, Sean McClanahan <sean.mcclanahan at westecnow.com> wrote:
> I saw it there.  (It was green.)  Typing
> firewalk at the prompt, though, gives a bash error:
>
> bash: firewalk: command not found
>

The traditional method, especially for security related programs, is
to type the full path. so:
    /usr/sbin/firewalk

If the executable is in the current working directory (i.e. cd
/usr/sbin, or if you've just compiled a program in a folder in your
home directory) the path you want is ./program (assuming you want to
run the command 'program'). So, you can also:
    cd /usr/sbin
    ./firewalk

In DOS and Linux, . is a synonym for the current folder, so the
complete path to a file in the current folder is ./filename. DOS has .
in the PATH variable by default, so you never think about it, however
in Linux and Unix, . is rarely in the PATH for security reasons.

By the way, if you have a specific goal in mind, you should mention it
on the list. There is often many ways to accomplish the same task, and
others here may be able to suggest tools to consider. I'm not sure
what "firewalk" is, but looking at DAG's RPM repo seems to hint that
the latest version there goes back to 2004. Security tools have
progressed tremendously since those days.

Also, while I love to advocate Linux, sometimes jumping into a
full-blown distro like Ubuntu or Fedora isn't the best choice. For
security related stuff there are some appliances (smoothwall.net is
first to come to mind) that are Linux based, powerful, affordable and
have nice interfaces that make it easy to get the results you want.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode