I've finally decided to wipe the drive of my Toshiba Satellite and install a full (and only) install of Linux. It previously had WinXP and Slackware 10.2 dual-booting. It is now a blank drive. My intention is to put Hakin9.live on it. This is a live security distro, but I wanted to give it a spin in a non-live environment by installing it on my laptop.

I created an 11GB partition initially and attempted to install the distro on it, but I had to kill the install, as disk space was at 96%! I was still able to boot the distro up but by the time I got around to creating a regular user, disk space usage was at 100%...the system wouldn't let me make any changes, because it had to track the changes in logs and such and since the drive space was gone, it couldn't perform seemingly simple tasks.

I ended up wiping the partition scheme and giving this install the whole hard disk. I'm about ready for the install to begin.

One thing of note: when installing this distro yesterday, the system began to complain that the CPU temp was extremely high and that it was going to shut itself down. It reported 91C, which equates to 195.8F. The laptop's CPU is a Pentium III 1.1GHz, which is a desktop CPU. I've propped it up so air can get under the unit during the install. Hopefully I won't run into that problem today.

I'll keep you posted.

I found this link from a colleague's site at http://blog.vodun.org/

It's a good read. It would be better if they'd left out the political slant, as it's VERY obvious that the author doesn't agree with what's happening in Iraq. It's only assumptions and it IS his research, but I think authors should take that into account when writing papers, as it lends more credibility to their work. I myself try to write without a chip on my shoulder.

I needed an extra box but don't really have the money to go out and get the items I need, such as a system case, a CPU, or memory. I've many odds and ends to make a system but the mix of parts span a generation or two in components, such as, I've a few AT motherboards but no AT cases (well, I have one), yet those systems need SIMM memory, which I have but not in abundance...those motherboards only accept the Pentium I generation of CPUs. I've two Pentium II CPUs but the motherboards I have are burned out (I'm in the process of throwing them away), which means I have to buy motherboards to use these CPUs. I've no cases that will hold those CPUs and motherboards either. I've RAM for them though, as they all use P100-P133 RAM. I've one CPU that is an Athlon XP2000+ but no motherboard to use with it. I've a motherboard that has a Pentium 1.4Ghz CPU and 128MB of RAM but that RAM is RAMBUS, which means that it'll be expensive to get more RAM for it...this system also lacks a case and a retention clip for its heatsink.

What's a fellow to do? I could sell all of this on ebay.com, but it may not be worth my time and effort to catalog these items for selling. I could just catalog them and put them on craigslist.com so that someone locally could come and get whatever they need. I could also just put everything in a box and take the stuff to a local LUG, but I know some of this stuff I may need or want.

Hell, I've already pieced together a functional P200 box and threw OpenBSD on it (it flies, BTW). The motherboard had 64MB of SIMM RAM in it and was working fine, but I also had 192MB of DRAM in my bin, so I swapped out the SIMMs for DRAM...the box didn't complain. I was thinking of using this box as a router and retiring my Linksys unit for a while but I've only one PCI port left on the box and I need at least one more NIC in this system (there's already one NIC in one PCI slot already). The mobo does have 3 unused ISA slots though, but I don't have an ISA NIC. I may have to evaluate what cards are in the box and what one(s) I don't need. I suppose I could (and should) pull the PCI graphics card (an old 4MB S3 Virge), as I'll be shelling into that box and plan on running everything via CLI.

I also plan on going to CompUSA or Microcenter and finding a good but cheap case for that 1.4GHz/RAMBUS system. If I can get that running, I can use that as a router instead, or use it as my exploit box.

Decisions, decisions.

I'm very happy with OpenBSD though. I spent a night after work installing the mobo into the AT case and trying to scrounge for old hardware...I didn't get to sleep until 12AM that night. The next night (last night), I powered up the system to check to see if I got the hardware installed right (I did). I then proceeded to install OpenBSD 3.8, which was totally CLI-oriented. I had to access the OpenBSD install docs on OpenBSD.org to understand WTF I was doing but by 1AM, I had a functional system. I was so excited, I couldn't sleep! What's really cool about this system is that it is very quiet (it has no CPU fan and the power supply doesn't sound like a vacuum cleaner). The lack of CPU power showed though, as when installing OpenBSD and creating user accounts, the install forces SSH key pairs to be generated. It took forever for the system to generate a key pair, which made me wonder what size of crypto keys it had generated (which I'll report as soon as I find the answer myself).

Anyways, the last few nights were fascinating for me. I shall have to make more attempts to build fresh systems from my mix of parts.

test

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3644733.stm

Hrmmmm...looks like insurgents instead of Americans killing Iraqis to me. I'm betting half or more of those insurgents were Iraqis themselves, and if they aren't they're of middle-eastern descent. Children were killed also. I wonder if I'll find this article or an mention of that article's attacks at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/? Probably not, as that's a purely biased site, a site meant to point fingers at Americans without offering much of anything else (but blame).

Looks like I could start making this site a counterpoint to http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/. I dunno if I want to waste my time with a muslim zealot, though.

Peace out.