Category: Windows

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Bruter 1.0 – Parallel Brute Force Tool

Bruter is a parallel brute force network login cracker. This tool is intended to demonstrate the importance of choosing strong passwords. The goal of Bruter is to support a variety of services that allow remote authentication.

It currently supports following services:

  • FTP
  • HTTP (Basic)
  • HTTP (Form)
  • IMAP
  • MSSQL
  • MySQL
  • POP3
  • SMB-NT
  • SMTP
  • SNMP
  • SSH2
  • Telnet
  • VNC

Recent Changes

  • Re-licensed to new-BSD license
  • Added proxy support (CONNECT, SOCKS4, SOCKS5)
  • Allowed more delimiter in combo file
  • Added password length filtered in combo and dictionary mode
  • Fixed miscellaneous bugs
  • Updated openssl library to 0.9.8n

You can download Bruter v1.0 Final here or read more here.

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Lost Dell DRAC Password

If you’ve lost (or miss-placed) the password for a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) in a Dell PowerEdge server, you can follow this process to reset the password on the local server.

DRAC 4 Card

1. Check the administrator ID , note that on the DRAC 4, the first index slot is “root” by default.

$racadm getconfig -g cfgUserAdmin -i 1

2. Reset the administrator password:

$racadm config -g cfgUserAdmin -o cfgUserAdminPassword -i 1 “newpasswordhere“

DRAC 5 Card

1. Check the administrator account, note that the DRAC 5 index 1 is “Administrator”, index 2 is “root”.

$racadm getconfig -g cfgUserAdmin -i 2

2. Reset the administrator password:

$racadm config -g cfgUserAdmin -o cfgUserAdminPassword -i 2 “newpasswordhere“

This process will work in Windows or Linux, using the command line.

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EtherChannel between a Cisco switch and a Dell PowerEdge server

Problem: My production Dell PowerEdge file server has a single Broadcom Gigabit connection to a Cisco Catalyst 3750 switch on the internal network. I’m seeing average through put of around 100 MB/sec (~800 mbit) and am concerned about link saturation and performance bottlenecks. How can I increase the bandwidth between my file server and the internal network without complicated layer 3 load balancing or DNS dual homing?

Solution: Using the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite included with Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Cisco’s native EtherChannel capability, I can trunk up to eight (8) LAN connections between my Dell server and Cisco switch. This allows me to have a single LAN connection of up to 8 Gbit (or 80 Gbit if using 10 Gigabit cards) between my server and the network core. All 2 to 8 links will operate as a single pseudo interface with a single MAC address. When an EtherChannel is configured to a Cisco stack (vs. a single switch), I can have link redundancy in that if a single switch fails, my link will continue to operate.

How To: This article is an outline of the configuration requirements for an EtherChannel between a Cisco Catalyst switch and a Dell PowerEdge server. Whilst this configuration can apply to other server platforms (e.g. HP, IBM) this article focuses on the Broadcom Advanced Control Suite which ships with most Dell servers using Broadcom Gigabit network interfaces and Cisco Catalyst switches. First of all, an EtherChannel is a port trunking (link aggregation being the general term) technology used primarily on Cisco switches. It allows grouping several physical Ethernet links to create one logical Ethernet link for the purpose of providing fault-tolerance and high-speed links between switches, routers and servers. An EtherChannel can be created from between two and eight active Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, with an additional one to eight inactive (failover) ports which become active as the other active ports fail. EtherChannel is primarily used in the backbone network, but can also be used to connect end user machines.

Continue reading “EtherChannel between a Cisco switch and a Dell PowerEdge server”

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Windows 7 – Error Code 0x80072F8F

After a clean installation of Windows 7 Ultimate on a new Dell Precision M2400, I was unable to complete an online activation. The specific error “0x80072F8F” provided no information as to the cause of the problem. More information suggested there was a ‘Security Problem’.

After researching the issue I found Microsoft Knowledge Base article 929458 which states that the error is caused by an incorrect time, date or time zone being set on the machine.

The solution is to open the clock properties, select your time zone then select ‘Internet Time’ and update. I recommend selecting “time.nist.gov” as your NTP server as time.windows.com tends to regularly time out.

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BackupExec 12.5 support for Windows Server 2008 R2

Symantec has finally released a hot fix for BackupExec to add support for Windows Server 2008 R2, unfortunately this is only Remote Agent support and not Media Server Support.

The hotfix can be downloaded from:

Symantec BackupExec 12.5 64-Bit  http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/334938.htm
Symantec BackupExec 12.5 32-Bit  http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/331998.htm

Even tough I patched and rebooted my Media Server, I still got an error when pushing out the remote agent, so I had to manually install the agent from the Agent\RAWS64 catalog by using the command setup.exe /aofo .

After the agent was successfully installed, I tried to do a test backup, but encountered the following error message:

V-79-57344-65225 – AOFO: Initialization failure on: “\\MyServerName\System?State”. Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
Snapshot provider error (0xE000FEC9): A failure occurred accessing the Writer metadata

To solve this, I found an article that said that I had to assign a drive-letter to the “System reserved” partition on the Windows Server 2008 R2 server. So I just started Computer Management and assigned the partition the drive-letter b: and then it seems that everything worked out just fine!

Hopefully Symantec will release the delayed BackupExec 2010 Beta soon, I think I got a new invite for the webinar that should be now in October, so in the meantime we’ll just have to wait patently.