Thursday, July 29, 2004

A Taste of Computer Security

A Taste of Computer Security

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/29/1243200

This is supposed to be a good article on security that can be read from beginning to end.

Removing MS Internet Explorer

Crackbaby.com - For The Twisted Little Kid in You!

My only question with the methods described is knowing how to update your computer from Microsoft's . I don't think that Firefox can run ActiveX scripts which is necessary.

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Creating a serial port for an internal modem

I went to the trouble of finding an internal 'hardware' modem that has all of the modem parts available to Linux without needing a special driver, however Debian and Knoppix did not discover it correctly. Here is how to correct that.

(This is all from memory from what I did last night. I have correctly done this with two systems but I had forgotten during the months between.)

First make sure that you need to do all of these steps. Run 'pppconfig' and create a new connection allow the computer to auto-detect the modem. If the only option is /dev/ttyS0 (the first external serial port) or if you try the other serial ports with no success (ttyS0-4) then you will need to add a new serial port. Look at 'man ttyS' for a mknod line that will start you off. I ran 'mknod -m 660 /dev/ttyS4 c 4 68'. Then 'chown root:tty /dev/ttyS4' to give the port the correct permissions.

Run 'ls /dev/ttyS*' to see what serial devices are installed on your computer. You can remove a serial device and recreate it but be careful. On Knoppix, I saw that ttyS0-3 was different thatn ttyS4-9. I ended up choosing to install the modem under the /dev/ttyS4 port.

Run 'lspci -v' to see what I/O address your computer gave to your internal modem. Find the modem in the list (You can use this command to narrow in on the port 'lspci -v | grep -A 10 -i modem') and look for 'I/O ports at'. Also note the irq listed under the Flags section (mine was irq 11). The serial connection will always start with 0x and have 4 hexidecimal digits after. Mine lcpci line was 'I/O ports at ccf0', therefore use 0xccf0 for the port address.

You can see how the other serial ports are described by running 'setserial /dev/ttyS[0-4]'. This will not change anything and will only show you what settings you want to emulate. Now run 'setserial /dev/ttyS4 uart 16550A port 0xccf0 irq 11'. If you read the 'man setserial' page, you will find out that UART has something to do with the serial protocol -- an infrared port is different than a modem port.

Now the computer should be able to recognize the modem also at /dev/ttyS4 when you run pppconfig and pon. Setserial should remember the settings the next time you reboot because it will save all ports that do not have a uart of unused or none listed. If it didn't work you need to run 'dpkg-reconfigure setserial' to set the setserial to remember after every reboot.