November 2010 - admins-discuss@lists.redbrick.dcu.ie

[Admin-discuss] VM Hackery.
by nemo＠redbrick.dcu.ie 12 Feb '11

12 Feb '11

Hi, I was thinking it might be interesting to use one of the Redbrick VMs to make some simple exploit challenges. I've had a few ideas and was told I should drop an email to admin-discuss for comments. So basically we run an OS with a number of services with unpatched vulnerabilities, vulnerable webpages and set a few simple set of challenges on a weekly/monthly basis. Services and OS could be swapped out/patched every few weeks/months. If possible we make a mailing list for people interested in getting some exploit practice and advertise what OS we're currently hosting, what services are currently running, what patches are applied and then encourage people to read up about vulns for the specific os/services etc. In addition to learning about different types of exploits anyone who's interested in using the service will also get some knowledge about common exploits in the wild. There are a number of CTF style games that are run at hacking conferences, including one at HackEire over the next few days, that use a model similar to this and the best teams can make, some, money from them. :) There's clearly a lot of scope for people to just grab premade exploits for the vuln but the idea would be to encourage anyone who was interested to research the vuln and come up with their own exploits/payloads, using the exploits available ITW as a template. That's the basic idea, if we get the go ahead we would start simple and hopefully work up to something similar to the model above. So I'm not sure if this would be possible given CSD's/school of computing's network policy and there's a few other details I haven't gone into, but that should hopefully be enough information to let me know if it's a runner or not. Any comments or feedback would be appreciated. :) Kind Regards, nemo

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[Admin-discuss] blacklisting modules
by Cian Brennan 09 Nov '10

09 Nov '10

Hi, This came up today : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=647416. It's the second vulnerability in the RDS (some crazy Oracle network protocol) code. As such, the admins have blacklisted the RDS module (since there's no patch for ubuntu yet, and Linus' comment was that the code is likely full of further holes). I'd like to suggest that in future when we find a bug in any of the kernel modules we have no reason to ever use (and there are almost certainly lots of these), we blacklist the module from then on. Someone should add a page to docs with a list of the modules we have blacklisted, and what they do then, so as to make it easier to keep the list across new installs, and so that people can figure out what's wrong when we do decide we need one of them. Thanks Cian

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[Admin-discuss] So many tickets so little time!
by kat farrell 04 Nov '10

04 Nov '10

Hey! As a lot of you know, there is a huge amount of weird and wonderful stuff that we want / need done. Due to the large amount I think it could be a good idea to create a priority list of what needs to be done first. Some may thing well obvously we do X before Y, but we can all at times act like squirrels and get detracted by shiny things. So let's create a list docs saying what we want to get done first maybe? Thoughts? -- sigless :( - 2010

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[Admin-discuss] Fwd: Installing lucid on carbon
by kat farrell 03 Nov '10

03 Nov '10

We should maybe wait for awhile longer, most of the vulnerabilities that our friend kees like to mail us about are for 10.10 . I know carbon is not a machine we aim for constant uptime, it's just a security update here and there is fine, but there seems to be a lot of them lately. On 27 October 2010 11:37, Sonic <sonic(a)redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:25, Andrew Harford > <andrew.harford(a)redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote: > > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:20:27AM +0100, Cian Brennan wrote: > >> On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:16:48AM +0100, Andrew Harford wrote: > >> > On Sun, Feb 07, 2010 at 03:26:50AM +0000, Andrew Martin wrote: > >> > > Yeah, sounds great, we should do it ..... > >> > > >> > Are we moving carbon to 10.10? If so, how quickly? > >> > > >> I was certainly under the impression that carbon was going to always be > on the > >> most recent ubuntu release, and that users could just put up with it (or > use > >> one of the 8.04 machines) if it was less stable. > > > > Aye, that was the plan. > > > > There's still a question of how quickly we move between releases. I'd be > > in favour of waiting at least one/two weeks after release until the usual > > collection of post-release fixes come out. Dunno if other people would > > like to see us wait longer. > > > > Regardless, these things still should happen on a case by case basis, > > there's no point in installing a new release just because it's out if we > > know there are still bugs that would affect us. > > ^^ This sounds like a very sensible way of handling it. No need to jump > the gun but move to the newest release as soon as we have a general > idea that it wont cause more harm than good. > > It seems to be generally better than 9.10 or so the lack of people bitching > about it would indicate. I've only used the server version on a redbrick > VM, > upgraded from 10.04, no issue during or since installation. > > > > > -- > > Andrew Harford > > > > You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to > > you? Or my boy to me? --Don Vito Corleone > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Admin-discuss mailing list > > Admin-discuss(a)lists.redbrick.dcu.ie > > http://lists.redbrick.dcu.ie/mailman/listinfo/admin-discuss > > > > -Alan > > _______________________________________________ > Admin-discuss mailing list > Admin-discuss(a)lists.redbrick.dcu.ie > http://lists.redbrick.dcu.ie/mailman/listinfo/admin-discuss >

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