I have gotten a chance to play with a few ninja badges in the past week or two. I Started laying out the screens and menus on the Arduino platform.
I also ordered some parts from mouser to make a prototype badge. (without RF) Those should be coming this week. I will have some progress picture up then.
I added a smaller font to the library. I wanted to fit some more text on the screen but didn’t have enough room with the default font.
Here is the font and a comparison.
Here is a start to a game menu. The goal of this project is to have a fully customizable and fully open Arduino board with a mounted LCD and Zigbee wireless. There are a lot of other shields out there that can potentially do the same thing but I personally would like to see it all incorporated onto one board.
If you would like to use the small font in your project you can download it here: ST7565-smallfont
I got another Arduino in the mail yesterday. I am going to look into which GLCD is going to be best for this project. I think I am just going to order the generic 128×64 LCD for now to get started.
I was pretty busy this weekend and didn’t really have a lot of time to work on this. I did however get the lid drilled and countersunk. I also got the two holes in the back drilled for the antennas. I don’t think this will be as sweet as I thought it would be by the time I have to leave tomorrow. I will probably write some Arduino code on the flight and possibly get something cool to done with it. I still have a few things left to do.
Here are the update pics.
I got a chance to get the case mostly finished last friday, thanks to some of the guys at my work. They helped me cut some of the hard cuts with a mill. (some of the small inside cuts) There is one hole in the front cut out for the 2×16 LCD display. One hole cut out for the power to the router board and another for the Ethernet ports. Finally there is a hole cut for the USB cable to plug into the Arduino. I did not cut a hole for the 2.1” power jack. I plan to use some power from the router to power the Arduino. I drilled and countersunk 7 holes on the bottom to mount and hold the two boards to the bottom. I used some copper (brass?) spacers (from pc case) to hold the two boards off the deck.
I decided to go ahead and buy a security+ book around Christmas to study and take the test in early January. I bought the SYBEX Security+ study guide. It was a pretty comprehensive book that covered all the areas for the most part. I also poked around the proprofs.com site which had some decent study materials for the test.
If you are planning on taking this test I would suggest that you read the book cover to cover. I would also suggest you take any practice exams you can get your hands on. I ended up studying for about 2 weeks before taking the test. I had pretty good know of the basic topics that were covered for the exam, but did learn a few things by reading the book. I pass with an 860/900 and 750 being the minimum passing score. I was in there for about 40 minutes and the questions were pretty strait forward.
Here is a good video I found demonstrating classic HTTP Parameter Pollution on yahoo mail. This will work for most web-mail clients out there. This does work and is a nasty way to delete someone’s mail if they aren’t careful.
I haven’t posted up in a while so I figure I’d post up a picture of my file server. I just recently switched motherboards. The “newer” board has two onboard SATA connectors in addition to the two on the PCI SATA card, which the previous one had no onboard SATA connections. The reason for the switch is because I was given a 250GB drive, so rather than letting it sit in my pile of crap I figured I would stick it in my file server.
Not pictured is a new fan in front of the hard drives. A bigger (and louder) 120mm fan.
PS. This site is now hosted on this server.
I got back from DEFCON 17 on Monday. I had a good time but I think we went a day too long. The talks were decent but seemed to be lacking in some areas. It did spark some interest for some more projects, which I hope I will be able to try in the next few months. The badges were really cool this year with a multi-color LED and a mic. I would really like to participate in the badge hacking competition next year so I might start working on some hardware hacking skills.
I think I am going to work on getting a Security+ cert. It seems that employers really only care about certs and experience. It shouldn’t be too hard to get, plus I have been wanting to do it for a while anyways.
First of all this blog is long overdue. I had the chance to play around with an open source project called FreeNAS. I’m sure most of you have heard of. It is based on FreeBSD and Monowall. First let me say this has been the most impressive open source project I have seen in the past year. You can check it out at FreeNAS.org. There are a number of reasons why I love this software. First being it’s light weight, which is awesome. You can run it off of a live CD, a Compact Flash/USB drive, or on a hard drive. Why is the CD / SSD so cool? Because you can cut down on loss of data. All you need to save your configuration to your desktop and upgrade to the newest build or change which format you would like to run it on. I have personally chosen the CF route. I have a CF to IDE converter and I’m running it on a compact flash. Yes I know they have limited write capacity, but that is the beauty of this I just save the config and pop in a new one and I’m back up and running. The OS size is only 128MB for the embedded. It takes about 10 seconds to install, which is super nice.
The other thing that I think is pretty Badass IMHO is the Web GUI. Everything is done though a Web GUI and it’s meant to run as a headless server. It also has a ton of services that it has built-in and run nicely out of the box. To name some: SMB/CIFS, FTP, TFTP, SSH, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, Unision, iSCSI, UPnP, itunes/DAAP, Dynamic DNS, SNMP, UPS, Webserver, BitTorrent. It also has software raid support so for those people who don’t have a hardware raid controller and just have a bunch of disks this is a great option.
I could go on and on about this project but I think it’s best you check it out for yourself. I promise you will not be disappointed. I have recently converted from an Ubuntu install running SMB to FreeNAS without looking back. The switch to FreeNAS has also improved my streaming to my ATV with XBMC over SMB.
On a side note I am getting ready for DEFCON in a month and a half with MSTAFF so hopefully I will be doing some more security projects and blogging them here.
