Saturday, 5. December 2015 Week 48
Friday, 4. December 2015 Week 48

DNS packet sniffing with NFLOG and Perl/Python

The nflog-bindings from Pierre Chifflier make it trivially easy to write a passive packet sniffer which can be controlled via iptables and listens to traffic on multiple interfaces at the same time.

As a little exercise I have written a simple DNS packet sniffer, once in Perl and once in Python:

To use the sniffer, first create an iptables rule like this: iptables -I INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j NFLOG --nflog-group 123

Then start one of the sniffer scripts and observe the extracted DNS queries :-)

For a more convenient download I've also put the scripts in a proper Github repository: nflog_sniff

Tuesday, 3. November 2015 Week 44
Wednesday, 23. September 2015 Week 38

Homebrew Tap for Mutt 1.5.24 with trash_folder patch

At work I'm a quite avid user of Mutt. Unfortunately the upgrade to the recently released version 1.5.24 did not go over as smooth as expected.

I'm using Homebrew to install Mutt on Mac OS X, and even though there is an updated version in the official Homebrew repository, it no longer comes with the trash_folder patch (it fails to apply against the 1.5.24 source tree and was thus removed).

In order to build the new Mutt version with the trash_folder support, I updated the patch for version 1.5.24: mutt-1.5.24-trash_folder.diff.

The official Homebrew repository prefers unpatched packages and encourages the creation of independent "Taps" (package repositories) for patched packages. Thus I also created my own Homebrew Tap which contains the 1.5.24 version of Mutt with the updated trash_folder patch: x-way/homebrew-mutt.

To use this Tap just type brew tap x-way/mutt followed by brew install x-way/mutt/mutt --with-trash-patch to install Mutt 1.5.24 with trash_folder support. Cheers!

Saturday, 15. August 2015 Week 32
Wednesday, 12. August 2015 Week 32

Downgrade Quagga on Debian 8

The Quagga version in Debian 8 (v0.99.23.1) suffers from a bug in ospf6d, which causes that no IPv6 routes are exchanged via point-to-point interfaces.

In order to workaround this problem (and re-establish IPv6 connectivity), a downgrade of the quagga package can be done.
For this we add the 'oldstable' entry to sources.list and pin the quagga package to the old version.

Entry to add to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/debian/ oldstable main

Entry to add to /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: quagga
Pin: version 0.99.22.*
Pin-Priority: 1001

After the entries have been added, run apt-get update followed by apt-get install quagga to downgrade to the old quagga package.

Sunday, 19. July 2015 Week 28
Sunday, 12. July 2015 Week 27

Scapy and IP Options

Create packets with custom IPv4 IP Option fields using Scapy:

>>> packet=IP(src="203.0.113.1",dst="203.0.113.2",options=[IPOption('%s%s'%('\x86\x28','a'*38))])
>>> ls(packet)
version    : BitField             = 4               (4)
ihl        : BitField             = None            (None)
tos        : XByteField           = 0               (0)
len        : ShortField           = None            (None)
id         : ShortField           = 1               (1)
flags      : FlagsField           = 0               (0)
frag       : BitField             = 0               (0)
ttl        : ByteField            = 64              (64)
proto      : ByteEnumField        = 0               (0)
chksum     : XShortField          = None            (None)
src        : Emph                 = '203.0.113.1'   (None)
dst        : Emph                 = '203.0.113.2'   ('127.0.0.1')
options    : PacketListField      = [<IPOption  copy_flag=1L optclass=control option=commercial_security length=40 value='aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' |>] ([])
>>> sr1(packet)

The above code results in the following packet (as seen by Wireshark):

Wireshark showing the packet with the custom IP Option

Saturday, 11. July 2015 Week 27

Upgrade to Debian 8 without systemd

To avoid the automatic installation/switch to systemd during the upgrade to Debian 8, it is enough to prevent the installation of the systemd-sysv package.

This can be done by creating a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-systemd-sysv with the following content:

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1

(via)

Sunday, 5. July 2015 Week 26
Tuesday, 24. February 2015 Week 8
Sunday, 11. January 2015 Week 1