Cocoa Crusty

Last night, while working at a client site, I started messing around with my Nokia E61 and my MacBook so I could get Internet access while working at the client’s office without having to jack in to their local network. My phone and laptop are both Bluetooth® enabled so I figured why not give it a shot.

I did some quick research and found that it would be extremely easy to set this up within Mac OS X. When I first paired my phone with my MacBook I remembered it asking me if i wanted to use my phone for Internet access. At the time I said no but last night I kind of changed my mind.

The first and last site I stumbled upon was Ross Barkman’s home page. This site has a number of mobile phone scripts available for use within the Internet Connect software but I was unable to get any of those to work in my situation. I used the built-in Nokia Infared script and it worked like a champ. I did use a section of Ross’ site, located here, that has a lot of information for different carriers in multiple countries for the connection settings to use when logging on to the Internet through my cell phone’s GPRS connection.

If you’re using a newer Bluetooth® enabled phone and want to set it up as a modem for your Mac laptop or other machine, I say just give it a try. Find your carrier’s information in the link provided above, or here, and go for it! I think you’ll be impressed with how easy and painless the setup is within Mac OS X.

Until next time…

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
• tcpdump
• hping2
• fping
• THC-Hydra
• Scapy
• Ophcrack
• p0f
• ngrep
• 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.