I have been posting various questions on the Security Focus Penetration Testing mailing list to get some assistance in working towards doing penetration testing. I have been quite impressed with the social skills of the members. What I mean by that is that a lot of times if you go on IRC or another chat channel people are more worried about keeping a old image of “I’m l33t, no time for you” that they are very rude if you ask a stupid question or about something you just didn’t think about or didn’t know about.

An example of this is a blog post I just realized I never published about my experience in a Solaris channel on IRC. I had never installed Solaris before and one dialog asked about DNS, NIS, NIS+ and a few more things. Well I was not familiar with NIS and I thought they might be asking about services so I simply asked if they were asking about setting up services or using someone elses services. In other words if I select DNS will I be setting up the name servers I will be accessing or configuring services on that machine. Well someone jumped in and questioned if I even knew what DNS was and then asked me if I setup DNS servers when I install Windows. Looking at the question after I asked it, maybe it was a little dumb considering everything, but I was new to Solaris and asked a simple question, I didn’t need to be treated like an idiot. I will probably touch on that in another post.

When I used to frequent IRC back in the day that was a common way of treating people, RTFM here and RTFM there. I get annoyed with helping people sometimes, but I wouldn’t know what I know today if some people hadn’t helped me along the way with understanding one thing or another. Sometimes it can be one small thing keeping someone from great things. I remember when I first used any dynamic web language, it was early in 2002 and I just didn’t understand how the backend worked. It was a temporary block, my supervisor spent 10 minutes explaining a couple things to me and 2 weeks later I wrote a functional shopping cart. Of course it wasn’t Amazon.com, but I just needed to be shown that one little thing in person, a hands on example and I shot out of the gate.

If you are hanging out in a channel on IRC or a chat room somewhere you may see a lot of people asking the same question so you might get annoyed more often than someone else, but you should separate yourself from the channel for a little bit if that is happening not take it out on the person needing help. I occasionally get mad at people asking for my help, but the difference is that in a lot of cases the question can easily be found, they are asking a question that is way over their head and want the answer anyway making me explain the birds and the bees of the technology, or I have explained it 5 times and they don’t listen.

There are other communities I belong to on the internet such as Hard Forums, but I don’t frequent any of them very often because the response to questions is limited or non-existent. Most of my questions get answered on [H], which is why I go there. The people on Security Focus are polite and give you real responses, not some two word answer that should be a couple paragraphs. I go by my real name on SF and most replies say hello and give good responses to my questions.

Even instant messaging has gone to shit. Someone told me they think of ICQ, AIM, etc as more of a message leaving than anything else. Well that’s what email is for, instant messaging is just that instant messaging. I am also noticing a lack of politeness more and more in online chat. People I talk with will send me a message asking me a question, which they should know is going to require a question from me to answer their question, but instead of sticking around they disappear for 3 hours. During that 3 hours, they aren’t idle either. That wouldn’t fly in real life, if someone did that to me in person I would leave. BRB is something else abused, one of my good friends got bad about it but he say brb and come back 5 hours later. Different abbreviations and phrases were created for a reason and should be used accordingly. I have said brb before and not known I would really be gone for a few hours, but it was very rare that would happen. Too many people are just plain rude.

Anyone who has really spent time talking to me about computers knows that I collect data like the end of the world is coming. One of the things I collect is various operating systems and the different versions. I do it for a couple reasons, A. I am on dialup, but even when I get back on high speed I will still collect them. B. I enjoy learning as much as I can about as many things so that when a situation arises that I need to do something with that application or operating system I don’t waste time looking for a feature or setting. C. I am looking for a good linux desktop.

If you have learned that I collect a lot then you also know I am a Slackware lover so the last reason may seem a little strange to some. I love Slackware and always will, it was the first distribution I ever tried and always the one I go back to. I do have trouble deciding between Slackware and other distributions. I don’t even know why really, because package management is available in Slackware and RHEL based distributions along with Debian and so on. I used to have a lot to say about Red Hat despite knowing jack about anything they did. Most of my opinions were based on things I heard or the opinions of others. It was unfair to make judgments about Red Hat having never really used it or understanding their way of doing things, but it happened and I have at least been willing to learn more about Red Hat.

For the past few months I have had to work in Red Hat based environments (CentOS, RHEL) and I have enjoyed them very much. I am still a supporter of compiling software, but packages with dependency checking can be a huge help in a number of different scenarios. Compiling from source is fun, and you learn something every time you do it, but when you have a number of servers to update a `yum update` is a much more efficient way of keeping your environment up to date.

This last weekend I downloaded PCLinuxOS, Fedora 7, and OpenBSD. PCLinuxOS has a slogan, “The distro shopper stopper”, well I was not nearly as excited about PCLinuxOS as I was about Fedora. I installed Fedora in a virtual machine and without any involvement on my part the mouse would work between Windows and Fedora without having to escape the virtual machine. I assume Fedora ships with the tools to allow this and enables them based on the hardware it finds. There were just a number of small things that made Fedora enjoyable to work with. Other than Slackware, my use of Fedora was the best experience I have had with a Linux distro in a long time. Actually, that isn’t totally true, I really like SLAX and BackTrack, but they are Slackware based. CentOS was cool, but for a desktop environment Fedora is #2, with Slackware remaining at #1.

I installed OpenBSD this morning and spent a few minutes moving around. My goal was really to just get it installed to the point that I understand the process and feel confident doing that without a guide so that in the future I can spend a little more time with the system itself. The installation process was definitely different from anything I have ever done before. It was similar in many ways to installs involving fdisk, but I encountered processes I had never seen before. I have wanted to use OpenBSD for about 5 years, but never installed it until this morning; who know’s why I waited so long.