Finding Your Linux Version with uname and lsb_release

Ever wonder what Linux version is running on your machine? I commonly connect to friend's machines, or to one of my servers and I have no clue. This can make a huge difference, as some distributions use apt, and some use yum. There are two super helpful commands to accomplish figuring this out.

In this article, we're going to cover uname, and lsb_release.

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Undocumented APIs

Because I always love to push the envelope, and love learning how different services work in the background, I find myself running into undocumented APIs fairly regularly. Through writing many random bots, I've come up with a pretty nice workflow for handling, and documenting these APIs.

This article is going to cover how I typically go about the endeavor of documenting unknown APIs.

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Building a Linux Kernel

I find myself fairly regularly hearing about new features in the Linux kernel (the core of Linux operating systems), getting excited, and checking to see if my distribution's repository of packages has the latest kernel built. Unfortunately, Ubuntu's repositories don't have the most recent versions of the kernel available for some time.

Fortunately, the Linux kernel is open source, so we can freely download the kernel's source code, compile it, and install it.

This article details the steps necessary on a fresh install of Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine).

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OverTheWire Bandit Part 2

OverTheWire Returns

In my last post, I walked us through connecting to OverTheWire's Bandit server, and completing level 0 and level 1. Following along with the previous article is a prerequisite to following this article, as you'll need to get the password from the file in level 1 first.

You can view my last post about this by following this link.

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OverTheWire Bandit Part 1

What is OverTheWire?

OverTheWire is a website with two games. One is "Wargames", which is a level based game, the other game is "Warzone", which is more of a free-for-all hacking game.

In this series of articles, I'm going to give a walkthrough of how to complete the "Bandit" series of levels on their website.

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Hack The Box Intro

Hack The Box

Hack The Box is a website that gives people a great place to test their penetration testing (hacking) skills. They have a selection of different machines available that are vulnerable to different types of attacks. This site uses the capture the flag scoring mechanism, where you hack machines, get a "flag" from them, and submit it to their site for points.

In this article, I'll cover how to make an account on HTB.

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