I know it’s been a while since I actually posted anything techy here, but today I can catch up, at least a little. Within the last 24 hours I’ve done a few things that one might consider a little geeky, so now I get to share them with you, and hopefully inspire others to get a little geek on too.
Before I get into the geek, check out my shopping page for Black Friday Ad Sites, I just added them tonight. Check them out at http://www.specialbob.com/shopping/index.html . Now on to the Geek!!
The first thing I want to talk about isn’t at all hard to do. I simply burned an ISo image to a recordable cd. In and of itself is a breeze to most, but to others, like a foreign language, and the best part is the cd I created was the Backtrack cd. Before I talk about that, I’ll discuss a few things.
An ISO image is just a file labeled with a .ISO extension, like something.iso . The file contains an image of an optical CD, and using cd burning software capable of burning ISO’s, you can recreate the original CD. SO to begin with i just downloaded the bt2final.iso image file from http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html . Once I downloaded it I used my favorite ISO burning software, which is BurncdCC, available from http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html . BurncdCC is pretty straightforward to use, I usally just select the ISO image by browsing to it (from within BurncdCC) , then select “Finalize Disk” or something like that, and once in a while I check “verify” ( which just verifies the Burn was successful). Thats it, when I got done I had a new Bootable CD, the Backtrack CD.
The backtrack CD is really designed for people way more geeky than myself. I do, however, want to learn how to use the tools on it, at least more than I know how to now. When you boot your Computer to the Backtrack CD, ( Done by leaving it in the CD Drive when you boot up, as long as your BIOS settings are set to boot to your CD drive before it boots your hard drive), you get the use of a ton of great security tools, over 300 according to the website, which allow people to test their security on their networks. Check it out if you’re feeling Geeky.
The next thing I did, just a couple of hours ago, was download Hamachi, and install it on a couple of my computers, including my laptop. For those who don’t know, Hamachi is a program that sets up a VPN, a Virtual Private Network, between computers over the internet. This allows them to share files and basically do anything 2 computers on the same network can do. Hamachi is available at https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en . I simply downloaded the program and followed the directions, at least, until I tried to join theirtest network and was unable to. So I just created my own network, on both computers. Before I knew it, the 2 computers were networked together.
The final thing I did was set up remote desktop. Remote desktop allows you to take over control of the desktop of another computer, from your own computer. I’m no expert at setting up remote desktop, but I just followed the “Help” that my Vista Laptop, and XP pro gave me, and it worked fine. Just a note, Remote Desktop has limitations, like you can’t log in and take control of an XP Home edition computer, but you can use an XP home computer to take control of an XP pro one. Before you try using it, make sure that what you want to do is feasible. I plan on using it only to make an initial connection from my laptop to my Home computer, then run CrossLoop, (Available at www.crossloop.com) to share files and such, because for some reason I can run remote desktop, but can’t seem to browse with windows explorer from my Vista laptop to the xp pro desktop. I can, however, surf the web, and thats exactly what I wanted to do, when I go to Norman, OK for 3 weeks pretty soon. I’ll be surfing from a Hotel, and that’s by nature very insecure, however by using the VPN, logging into my Home PC, and surfing from there, then I can be confident I have a secure connection to the internet. As secure as if I was surfing from home, at least. It works good too, as I am writing this post now from my desktop, but i am clearly typing on my laptop. Sweet.
Well I guess thats it for now, and I am going to finish watching Terminator 3 and hit the hay. Seeyas!