[Cialug] Introduction

[Sean McClanahan]

./firewalk - that did it.  See, something stupid that I was just not
accustomed to yet!

OK, now about your question / my intentions and goals.

I am tasked with the InfoSec operations for my company.  I have seen,
and been told, that many of the more "functional" tools are based on
Linux, with ports to the Win32 world not as common.  So, I decided that
it was time to learn Linux and see what the hype is about.  Plus, I want
to work with some of the tools that the "bad-guys" use, so I can start
to see my network the way they see it.

So far, I have to say I am impressed.  It is taking a little while to
teach this old dog new tricks, but I am starting to pick it up little by
little.

Smoothwall was an interesting product.  I played with it some a couple
of years ago when I was running my own biz back in VA.  In fact, it was
my firewall for many months.  But at the time, I didn't feel like I
could devote the time to really trying to learn about Linux, so it fell
by the wayside.

Not so anymore.  It is important to me that I start at least getting a
basic understanding of Linux and how it works.  Stupid things like ./
are the things that drive me nuts.

I appreciate all of the help everyone has given.  I hope someday I can
return that favor.

Sean



-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On
Behalf Of Matthew Nuzum
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 9:00 PM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] Introduction

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
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