SMTP woes

I've recently enjoyed a holiday in France and frighteningly one of the first questions I asked my Brother who booked the house was about Internet availability. He had already asked and Wifi was available in the house. It meant my hands could stop shaking with the stress of possibly being disconnected for 2 weeks. Well in reality my Vodafone dongle would have taken a hammering.

We rocked up to the house (beautiful place by the way) and 20 minutes after unpacking the cars there were 2 MacBook Pros glowing silently on the dining room table. In fact we had 3 notebooks between us as I had also taken my Asus EEE as mentioned in the previous post. Sad eh, but even my wife doesn't moan anymore as long as emails are answered, blogs are written etc at appropriate times.

In fact the laptops came in useful on a number of occasions, looking up the weather, finding a local Kart track, finding a good restaurant and route finding to a Chateaux. Even the parents and in-laws were on board.

Later that day a number of emails arrived but as I've found with a number of ISP's my normal SMTP details were blocked. There are a bunch of ways around this but for your information I used http://whatismyip.com to get the IP address assigned to the router, next I did a look up on SamSpade to find out who owned the IP. This turned out to be France Telecom i.e. Orange, a quick Google search found the details smtp.orange.fr which then worked perfectly with no authentication.

If you travel alot there is a paid option of www.smtp.com, for about $10 a month for 50 emails a day you can send emails through any ISP without the hassle of changing details.

You can of course just switch to webmail but I like my Mac Mail.

As an aside I cracked the WEP code on the house's router in 4 minutes 37 seconds - AAAAAAAAAAAAAFFFFFFFFFFFFF. I love my EEE!

EEE'up its good

A number of us have been working on the new Asus EEE PC 900. If you haven't heard of it, its a small form PC which is still very useable. The new 900 has a 20 gig solid state HD and larger screen than its predecessor. (I've got the black version which I think looks nicer than the 'ipod'esque white one).

The rather cool element to the EEE is the in-built Atheros WIFI chipset which supports monitor mode and packet injection. I'm not going to write a detailed explanation about why this is a good thing but any user of Aircrack-ng, Kismet or other such tools will be delighted.

The default OS is a Xandros Linux environment which is quite cool for day to day browsing use, however you are able to boot from the internal SD slot. With a little fiddling you can install Backtrack on an SD card, make it bootable (check the readme on the Backtrack download) and just by holding down the ESC key at boot time, fire up a full Backtrack environment. I managed to get up and working in about 10 minutes and even had a USB Railink Wifi adapter up and working too. Its tiny size makes it perfect for Wifi activities when out and about and at around £300 quid it would be rude not to!

Kicking off!

There are lots of computer forensic blogs out on the interweb some superb and others rather less useful. This aspires to be in the latter category. However as I work with, and have the privilege to train some excellent computer forensic professionals both here and abroad, I often hear about some great pieces of research, new tools and other movements within the industry. If appropriate I will try and post them here.

If you tell me about an idea I promise to check with you before I post here and will never name law enforcement persons unless express permission is gained. As you can tell, this is already an exceptionally boring blog.

If you want to contact me (only about computer forensic topics please) please don't hesitate to do so, either via phone, or from the form you can find on the web addresses in the right column.

That'll do for starters