pwnt.be

A lot of people ask me if my nickname ct^ stands for cock tease. The answer is: “Maybe.” But how do you explain the caret, wiseguy?

And now, a quote from fellow student Yannick Verleysen’s paper on hacktivism: Veel mensen betwisten de methodologie van de hackers. Legaal kun je het niet echt noemen. Maar stel je bent een Irakees en je enige wapen is een houten stok. Je komt op een veld en ziet een volledig uitgedoste Amerikaanse soldaat voor je… Dan ga je je ook proberen behelpen met de middelen die je hebt. That has got to be offensive. Even I would never write that.

I just wanted to print out my schedule for the mandatory seminars and workshops we have to attend, but apparently, the web site is only available from within the hogent.be domain—so most of you shouldn’t bother to click. Since Hogeschool Gent’s Thuisstuderen platform is based on VPN technology, getting inside the school intranet using Ubuntu breezy was pretty straightforward, so I’ll just explain it here. You need to do most of this stuff as root, so you’ll want to use sudo.
Basically, what you do is apt-get install vpnc to install the VPN client, then create /etc/vpnc.conf with the following contents:
Interface name vpn0
IPSec gateway vpn-stud.hogent.be
IPSec ID studenten
IPSec secret hogent_vpn_stud
Xauth username your_username
Xauth password your_password
If you’d rather call the interface something else than vpn0, I couldn’t care less. Anyway, once you’ve got that, you can invoke vpnc to establish a connection. If all goes well, it should show up in ifconfig and relevant traffic should be routed through it; there’s a test page to verify that. To bring the connection down, you use vpnc-disconnect. Easy as pie, right?
Incidentally, the only thing different for other VPN connections is the vpnc.conf file. If you need multiple VPN configurations, just specify a configuration file on vpnc’s command line.
Note that I took the liberty of exposing the group password “hogent_vpn_stud” here. They offer a PCF file with that password among other things, so it’s not exactly confidential, seeing as how encrypted passwords contained in those files are easily decoded.

Seems like I’m upgrading my router firmware on a daily basis now. I’ve just switched to DD-WRT, but I might go back to HyperWRT +tofu because, even though DD-WRT is snazzy (among other things, it has a more recent version of iptables, with the mangle table), it doesn’t seem to be as stable as HyperWRT +tofu. In fact, a simple nmap from my laptop crippled it. Plus, their web GUI may look nicer, but tofu’s is better: the added stuff is in the right place and it’s more JavaScripty, so it reloads less.

You don’t know how cool your router really is until you upload a bad firmware image and have to break it apart so you can flash it. Mission accomplished though. Whodaman! Though I should probably study now.