I have recently moved from OSX to a linux laptop, and yes I am happy with it. But I wanted to play “World of Warcraft”. Just a strange impulse I have now and again. Anyway, I figure “no biggie”, setup Virtualbox, install Windows and then install WoW and away we go.

Not so much. I installed virtualbox, windows and WoW. I spent a long time downloading patches. But the damn game would not play. Turns out that virtualbox and directx are not good friends. So I installed the extensions and enabled the directx. No go. Ok, bruised but not defeated. I will use wine, the windows virtualization layer to install WoW, there are lots of posts about it on the web.  So I figure “no biggie”, setup wine, install WoW and away we go.

Not so much. Wine worked. The install worked. But the launcher.exe did not. I could fire up the wow.exe binary, but could not login as the latest patches were not there. Ok, more reading showed me you could manually install the patches. So I downloaded and installed, but it did not work quite as advertised. Now it’s personal.

I spent a long time reading posts and fiddling with wine settings, winetricks, upgrading wine, different kernels. Until I said screw it. I started up virtualbox, fired up the windows instance, let WoW update fully. Then I created a shared folder and copied my entire ‘World of Warcraft’ folder to my linux box. Then in linux I started up wow.exe, and all was well. Latest patches, I could login, create a character and all was well with the world.

Not so much. I logged onto the game with my new character and it bombed. Needless to say I was … not silent at this point. Browsing the interwebs told me that having an Intel graphics card as a dead-end. The advice was get another PC. Not so useful. But then I saw a post that mentioned installing ‘driconf’ to make a change, and it worked!!

So, if you are on Linux, want to play World of Warcraft and have an intel graphics card, here is how you do it in a failsafe manner:

1. Install virtualbox
2. Using virtualbox setup a windows guest
3. Setup shared folder between guest and host
4. Download the WoW client for windows
5. Install WoW on your windows machine
6. Startup WoW and let it download all patches
7. Once patching is done, copy your entire game folder to the shared folder
8. On your linux host, copy the shared folder files to your wine folder
9. Change permissions as needed to make sure you own the files
10. Make sure Wow.exe starts by using wine to start it.
11. If you see the login screen with the latest patch, thats enough for now, quit WoW
12. Install ‘driconf’
13. Run ‘driconf’ and a gui window will show up. Go to the ‘Image Quality’ tab
14. On this tab set the ‘Enable S3TC texture Compression’ to ‘Yes’
15. Close that window
16. From a terminal window type ‘regedit’. This will start up a registry editor for the wine environment
17. Find this key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\
18. Highlight the wine folder in the left hand pane by clicking left on it. The icon should change to an open folder
19. Right-click on the wine folder and select [NEW] then [KEY]
20. Replace the text New Key #1 with OpenGL
21. Right-click in the right hand pane and select [NEW] then [String Value]
22. Replace New Value #1 with DisabledExtensions (Notice it’s case sensitive!)
23. Then double click anywhere on the line, a dialog box will open.
24. In the value field type GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object
25. Now you can run wow.exe through wine, login and actually play

If you use Ubuntu, and you use the ‘Pictures Folder’ screensaver, you may want to not have it point at your entire folder of pictures. So if you want it to just display pictures from a specific folder:

• edit the /usr/share/applications/screensavers/personal-slideshow.desktop file
• change the Exec entry to look like: Exec=slideshow –location <path to folder>

If you do not use a apple computer, then your choice for free photo management is pretty much going to be Picasa from google. It is a nice  program, with some cool features. But if you use linux, you may be feeling a bit unloved. You see, the only ‘official’ linux package of Picasa stops at version 3.0. And this is missing some of the nicer features, like facial recognition. But fear not, all it not lost!

You see the official package is pretty much just a wine package anyway, so with a few simple steps we can upgrade. What we are going to do is:

1. download the current windows version of picasa
2. make sure you have wine installed and then install this new windows picasa binary using wine
3. once setup is done head to /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google
4. get rid of the picasa3 folder
5. now create a link to ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Picasa3 to replace the folder you just deleted

Now when you start up picasa,it will load the new version with the new features. Enjoy.

If you want to log the usage of sftp on your linux box you can make a simple edit to your (normally found here) /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

Subsystem sftp internal-sftp -f AUTH -l INFO

The addition of those two switches will greatly increase the details that are logged showing source, what directories accessed and what file actions are taken.

There is a very interesting novel called ‘Sophie’s Choice’. Without giving too much away, the core fact of the book is a choice a Polish mother had to make in the concetration camps during World War 2 and the impact it had. It is a powerful book and the core issue has been identified with so much that it has become an idiom. To quote wikipedia: A “Sophie’s Choice” is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.

So what has this to do with information security you ask? Well recently I was reading an article which put forward that Senior information security staff are not technical staff but sales staff. They need to be able to sell the various intiatives in the best possible way. Now I actually do agree with this, but I do have a problem (or I would not be writing this obviously), and it is this: The predominant way this is put forward to information security people is that if you want to get ahead and effect real change and earn ‘big-boy’ money, you have to become one of these Senior IS staff. And thus you need to give up the technical skills and become a sales person.

This to me is a “Sophie’s Choice”. You can stay technical doing what got you into the field in the first place BUT you never earn greatly and you are limited in effecting business. OR you can give it up, and become a sales person.

My thoughts on IS folk with no skills is well documented in previous posts, and I know this is not the case at all companies, but it is the general rule with a few exceptions. And it is due to this that I lay the fact that we are losing the war on cybercrime. Businesses expect and reward political games, ass-kissing and spin-doctoring. Whereas the bad guys want technical people to do what they do best so they can make money, and they pay them for it.I believe this is why the bad guys are out-doing us across the board.

Yes this may be a whine, but surely our choices are not limited to sales or technical?

Using mysql from the command line is very useful. It allows one to plugin mysql queries and responses into a shell script. This is a good thing. The problem that arises though is the output. When you get the response it is delimited with a tab, and this can make it a bit difficult to work with in shell scripts. So lets use ‘tr’ …

echo “select * from TABLE1′” | mysql -pxxx DBNAME | tr “\011″ “:” 

..and that will quite nicely replace the tabs with semi-colons. And that is easier to use in a script.

I have recently being reminded that putting in a solution is not the same as putting in the right solution. In one company a risk was identified as data leakage, so they wanted a DLP solution. Nothing out of ordinary so far. Except that some people decided to use Safeguard PortProtector / DataExchange to accomplish this.

I have nothing against the product, it does what it is designed to do well. But what it is designed for is an active user-participation encryption mechanism for sharing files on portable media, NOT as a DLP solution. But regardless the solution was rolled out. within the first day, multiple “workarounds” had been discovered;

-Create a truecrypt file container at home (unecrypted), mount it at workplace and copy files in and out without the files or the container being encrypted.

-Use a separate machine without safeguard (like a test bench linux box), transfer files across the network to machine (unencrypted) and transfer there

-Use a vmware player instance since it will mount the usb device before safeguard grabs it and you can transfer files without encryption

Let me repeat, none of these are problems which are the fault of the Safeguard product, it was not designed for this. But because it was implemented poorly, this company now has these gaping holes in what it considers it’s DLP solution.

The blind leading the blind through traffic…