Archive for the 'FreeBSD' Category
I blogged the other day about an external harddrive I purchased made by Cavalry Storage. Today I experienced a little something weird happening between the drive and Mac OS X.
I took my laptop to work with me today because I was working on a number of ATMs and you never know when you’re going to need something when you’re at a remote site. As I was unmounting my 120GB drive and my new 500GB drive the 500GB wouldn’t unmount. The OS told me that the drive couldn’t be unmounted and to try closing some applications and repeat the process. Well, there weren’t any applications running, and I don’t even have any data stored on the drive currently. I never could get the drive to unmount cleanly so I just shutdown OS X and was on my way.
When I came home this evening, I plugged all of my nifty little peripherals back into my MacBook and fired it up. It made the cute little bootup sound a number of times but never loaded the OS or presented me with a logon prompt. I had experienced this behavior once before when I booted my laptop up with my iPod connected to the USB port.
To make sure that the issue wasn’t the unclean unmount, I tried unmounting the drive again and rebooting. This time the drive was able to be unmounted with no problems and the machine started the reboot process. Once again, when the machine started to boot back up it made the cute little “I’m Booting” sound and did it over, and over, and over again. I unplugged my USB hub from my laptop and it made the sound one more time and started the boot process normally.
Its strange. My 120GB drive has never done this. I leave it on all the time and plugged up to my Mac and it never hoses up the boot process. This only seems to happen with my iPod and this new drive… I had a similar issue a while back with my FreeBSD laptop and my iPod.
Is it a USB 2.0 thing? No. The USB IDE drive cage that my 120GB drive is in is also USB 2.0… Is the laptop actually trying to boot from these devices or are they just causing problems with the boot process? I’m stumped…
If anyone has any insight into why this may be happening, please post a comment. I would like to find a way around this if at all possible. I don’t want to have to unplug my peripherals each time I reboot my laptop. That’s crazy talk!
Until next time…
When I first started getting in to using FreeBSD I bought a shirt to support my latest habit interest. I quickly got involved with FreeBSD and loved every minute of using the operating system. I figured I liked it enough to purchase a shirt to support my newly found robust and free operating system. I really owe more to the FreeBSD Foundation for turning me on to and causing me to use Mac OS X.
I bought and received this shirt either at the end of 2005 or early 2006. Guess what?! I have never wore it. This past Saturday night I was going to WalMart and figured I would wear it there. I mean, why not?! Freak out all those late evening shoppers with the shirt. They were probably like: “FreeBSD? What’s that?! And why is there a picture of a devil on his shirt?! That boy needs to go to church!”
Well, luckily for me, some friends called me up to join them at El Chico’s for dinner. I got to sport my shirt out in public twice in one day! Nice! I even got a comment from someone who actually knew what FreeBSD was, Troy. So, I sported my new shirt at a mexican restaraunt and had a great time (just ask Troy!).
Anyway, here are some photos of me sporting the FreeBSD shirt. I like it. It looks good. Has a couple of images of the FreeBSD mascot on it, Beastie. I’m going to break out this shirt more often now that it has been initialized!
This evening I decided to install some applications I used on FreeBSD before I got my Apple MacBook. I used to thoroughly enjoy the FreeBSD ports system for maintaining 3rd-party applications like Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) and Nmap. Since moving to Mac I have found a similar ports system named MacPorts, formerly known as DarwinPorts.
I have used the MacPorts system in the past to install the above mentioned applications, Wireshark and Nmap, as well as screen (great tutorial on TechSays, previously posted at averageadmins.com) and Ettercap. I got crazy with the MacPorts tonight and started installing some of the software that I used to use on my FreeBSD laptop as well as some newer applications I wanted to try out. I installed:
dsniff- John the Ripper
wget- Metasploit
- Nikto
tcpdumphping2fping- THC-Hydra
- Scapy
- Ophcrack
p0fngrep- Nemesis
I like messing around with security and network monitoring software, especially when Chris gets involved and we mess around with different tools trying to figure out how they work and how we can use them. I am sure I will think of more applications to install in the near future.
I want to get my MacBook ready for when Chris and I have to go do some network monitoring at a remote branch or something like we did back in the day with his Debian laptop and my FreeBSD laptop. I just need to remember that the MacPorts port system is there for me and always willing to help me install and maintain 3rd-party applications.
Until next time…
2007-02-13 - Correction: I didn’t install Nikto using the MacPorts repository as stated above. I installed it from source. It’s a Perl script with functionality that I already get from Nessus so I removed it from my system and will continue to use Nessus for web site vulnerability testing.
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