Category: linux

Gettin’ hacked…

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

This server got hacked. It was used as a scanner for a couple days, attempting to break into other servers to test for vulnerabilities. I only discovered this because I attempted to access this server by the .onion domain that I have for it and it didn’t connect.

I’ve had a home server hacked before due to a user account with a I set up for my son with “an easy” password. I thought I learned that lesson. Apparently I did not with the server I have exposed to the interwebs.

Time to forensically breakdown the timeline of events.

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Today I Learned: Storage expensive, Data priceless

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

We have a combination Plex Media/Minecraft/Archive server that we’ve had since we purchased our first 6TB Hard Drive on December 30, 2019 ($99.99 at the time). After some time we upgraded to our massive 14TB Hard Drive ($293.00 at the time) on October 16, 2021. It took a bit over a couple years to fill things up, and now we recently invested into a 16TB Hard Drive ($279.00 at purchase) to continue our storage needs.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3       457G  288G  169G  64% /
/dev/sda1      1014M  202M  813M  20% /boot
/dev/sdd1        13T   12T   52G 100% /mnt/usb14
/dev/sdc1       5.5T  4.3T  962G  82% /mnt/usb03

Now it’s time to get this new drive ready for usage.

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Jack and Coke? How about John and CUDA (w/ Rocky 8.7 Live)

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

In previous writeups such as xmrig with cuda for Rocky Linux 8.5 and nVidia CUDA with the wrong video card I’ve navigated Rocky Linux and Cuda. It’s now time to see if we can get John the Ripper CUDA’s components running on a Rocky 8.7 Live Workstation USB install.

Personally, I love projects like this. I started this on 1 8GB USB stick and quickly realized that not only the space required wasn’t enough but I’d need more to do what I needed. I ended up getting 3 SanDisk 32GB Ultra USB 3.0 Flash Drives from Amazon for $16.96.

The biggest help with the Live USB install is using balenaEtcher to get the 2.1GB ISO to an 32GB USB stick. Once that’s done we can boot directly to the Live OS and start our installs.

I did have some derps with balenaEtcher failing to burn the ISO due to a failure of diskpart not returning a positive result to the clean operation. To resolve this I had to use PowerISO to clean the USB volume before windows would properly do it’s clean operation. Minor note to PowerISO is that it contains bloatware during the install and a wrongly-clicked click can give you headaches.

Live Stuff

  • Booted up Rocky 8.7 Workstation Live Workstation from a USB to install Rocky 8.7 Workstation on a separate USB stick.
  • Root with password, user with password
  • rebooted into USB bootable
  • #win

Now onto the necessities to get to our final goal

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Listening to Skype Voicemail .dat files

Matthew Heick Leave a comment

Continued at Still trying to listen to Skype Voicemails…

Like thousands of other users I religiously used Skype to communicate with many friends and coworkers back in the early 2010s. It was a great platform, with the ability to send messages fluently from computer to phone and vice-versa, as well as make long and drawn out video calls. You could purchase a telephone number from anywhere in the world to have a presence in that country (as I did), and with it you gained voicemail. It did everything perfectly except save voicemails in a reusable format.

I’m not the only person that has a need/want to listen to these types of audio. There are forums of people who have their own needs, such as fathers voices and passed family members. The common solutions proposed are “download VLC”, “use Microsoft Word and run a repair”, or use a “DAT player”, all are non-functional or stupid solutions. There is a ton of common use cases for these old files and the technical solutions are far and none between.

Skype voicemails, once listened to, were downloaded from the Skype servers and stored in the users Skype profile as a dat file. Unfortunately, “dat” files are a general file format and have no immediate player that can open and listen to those files.

Time to dig in. Challenge Accepted!

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