Kolibri : Just 3MB size for this OS!

I am a fan of small operating systems, because, I really suffered the problems of bulky operating systems. I used puppy Linux (It's something great), Damn small Linux etc. Damn small Linux is only 50MB in size and works much fine. Some floppy Linux comes in 1.44MB but it has no GUI at all. A normal user need GUI with some office applications, media player, internet browser, email client, need some programming, and games. But all of the listed above is not included in the floppy linux at all, but almost all are covered by Puppy Linux and DSL. Average of 50MB is happy for me, but for some users, it is too high!. This is what the reason of development of ultra small OS with a size of only 3MB.
The 3MB sized OS is named 'Kolibri' which means humming bird- world's smallest bird. Kolibri is moderately fare OS for eyes with very high performance. In order to increase efficiency of code, OS itself is written is assembly language. I installed Kolibri in my pen drive. The boot up time is less than 3 seconds. I really shocked while seeing the stuff included in just a 3MB. About 30 classic games, text editor, image viewer, text based internet browser, hex editor, assembler,music player, of course a shell and many more. kolibri argues that, it is not windows, linux or anything. It's shell which can accept only 20 commands. But I found all are linux/unix cmmands. There is a bunch of 3D demoes which are excellent.
Go to Kolibri official wesite.
How to install?
You can download iso image and write it to a CD. But I felt ashamed to write 3MB sized iso image to CD. So I opted my pen drive. Installed it using windows XP. It can be installed using linux also. Download image for floppy/hardware first and unzip it. You probably need 7zip for that. Then copy Kolibri.img into thumb drive. Before copy, you need to fromat your thumb drive/pen drive to FAT32. After copying, go to HD_load->USB_Boot directory and run inst.exe then, run setmbr.exe. You need to reboot now and boot from usb. If you don't know how to boot from usb port, you need to read my old post: Booting from CR-ROM or USB devices
Sometimes, you need bulk operating systems to get your job properly done. But this type of efforts of developers seems really appreciable.

How to hack passwords in windows XP?

Warning!
Things here explained can be used in extremely nasty things. They are not recommended by Opentechlab. Use everything in your own risk. Also Opentechlab suggest some tips to avoid password hacking.

Here I am going to say something cumbersome to somebody. Here is a guide to hack the login passwords in windows XP. Also given how to avoid such hacking and keep your PC maximum protected from crackers. Opentechlab does not crack, it will hack only!

Password hacking using Backtrack
You first download the following file

Backtrack 3 Final (BT4 is also available, but I suggest BT3)

BT3 is an opensource Linux OS. BT3 consists of just a slax and the hacking and network security software. Since Slax uses lzm module mechanism, it is easy to install and remove the modules we need to. You ca download it as a bootable iso image or as USB pen drive installation file. I downloaded iso and write it to a CD and everything going perfect. Once you installed BT3, you just need to boot up from CD-ROM. Within minutes, linux kernel loads and backtrack desktop appears. Now you need to do the following things:

bkhive /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/SYSTEM key

(result is the boot key)

samdump2 /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/SAM key
samdump2 /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/system32/config/SAM key >~/Desktop/password.txt
john ~/Desktop/password.txt -users=Administrator

now the hashed password will be showing below

Here, it is assumed that hda1 is C: drive (where MS windows XP is intalled). If not, that should be repaced with the actual one. The password.txt is file which contain passwords of all users, but they are no readable, they are hashed. To remove hash, you need to call a program called john.
john ~/Desktop/password.txt -users=Administrator
only gives the password of Administrator. If you want to know the password of another user, type:
john ~/Desktop/password.txt -users=username
You can simply do this:
john ~/Desktop/password.txt
to get passwords of all users, but it is time consuming. Knowing what you want is ponentially advantageus than knowing everything. And it will not eat much of your time. Somethimes if the password to be hacked is much complex, you get a leisure time to drink a cup of coffee!

How to use rainbow tables in backtrack?
You can use rainbow tables while hacking passwords. You can download lot of rainbow tables from freerainbowtables. I think downloading all rainbow tables in your hard disk is frustrainting (more than 1000GB!). Download some simple tables to experiment with. To use rainbow tables, BT3 provides a program called 'rainbowcrack'. It can be accessed from:

Main menu -> Backtrack -> privilege escalation ->All -> Rainbow crack

But rainbow crack only supports tables of type *.rt. But rainbow tables with type *.rti is abundant over internet to free download. Solution is to download *.rti tables and conver it to *.rt using rti2rto.exe. Here you are able to use rainbow crack instead of john. All other steps are same.

Using Ophcrack
Ophcrack is also opensource and is also useful. I personally didn't tried that, however many of my friends work successfully with that.

Download Ophcrack
You need to download rainbow tables also.
Read more about rainbow tables

How to prevent password hacking?
Here again, prevention is better than cure. If you care about how much your data secure to be, you should keep your passwords be secure first. First of all, you do not store your passwords anywhere other than your brain. Every time you enter your passwords at login, is boring, but you should aware of the consequences. I said it generally, but here this is not possible. Use more than 10 characters for your password. For each addition of a new character, you can see that how much extra time BT3 takes to find out the password. Add symbolic characters and numbers. Finding a password with symbolic characters and numbers are very frustrating, and a cracker work hard for hours on such computer until he get a message 'Failed to find password'. Don't enter a password with meaningful words. If your password is a sentence such as 'Mary had a little lamb' and others password is 'asdfiuerh', then it is very easy to find out the former even though it is lengthy in character. Use different passwords for diffenrnt internet accounts. If you feel difficulty to memorise all passwords, you requre a good password manager (I recommend Keepass). Change your passwords periodically. It will save you a lot. If you have a top secret information, and is not to be revealed to the world for any reason, I have a good idea but is not guaranteed. Just copy the thing to any portable device and put it in a Bank locker and through your computer to fire and keep watching until it get into ashes.

Puppy Linux : Give life to your Thumb drive

If you didn't tried Puppy Linux - one of the smallest Linux, core's yet-remember, you have only one life, try Puppy today itself. Puppy Linux - the name is not much inspiring for geeks, but I found it is the most stable and useful OS in the pocket Linux category.
It has the following advantages over other less-sized Linux operating systems.

• Small sized. Ranges between 80MB to 150MB
• Install anywhere - HDD, USB Pen drive, biz. card sized CDs. (You can use ordinary CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs - but it is too big for puppy.)
• Easy to use.
• Official website offers boot time of less than 1 minute. But it is typically less than 15s in my Intel P4 with 2GB RAM.
• Puppy is beautiful than any other pocket OS.
• Smart and crash free. I used more than 10 Linux flavors. Everything crashed, but I haven't experienced Puppy's crash.
• Puppy sessions are saved in *.sfs file. It can be placed everywhere. Puppy search for it at boot time to recover the previous session. There are a number of fundamental advantages for that. I found many of my friend's computers not supporting USB boot. Of course they can boot from a CD-RW but it is not writable. Puppy offers several ways to overcome it. One is that, it can write previous sessions in CD as a multi session write. But it can be used until CD size limits. Another way is to write *.sfs file in HDD (for home usage) or USB pendrive ( for portability) and puppy kernel file in a a CD. So CD can be booted easily and can save sessions.
• You can resize puppy save session file while running.
• Comes with almost all drivers.
• A wide variety of Puppy flavors are officially and unofficially available. These flavors are called 'Pupplets'. Pupplets are intended for a particular task - ie, it supports a task greatly. There are pupplets for painters, gamers, processionals, children, students and so on.
• Brief and understanding tutorials, quick replying forums, community etc.

Once you downloaded Puppy, you have a lot of questions about installation, usage etc. Most of them answered in the official website and associated forums. Otherwise just google for that.

Linux Demo? What's the hell?

One of the reason why I love linux a lot is that it has no barriers at all. Many programs usually comes as a demo version which will not not be as much handy as a proffessional or full version. Demo versions seems sometimes nasty, and is too dry to wet out appetite. So I hate the word 'Demo' itself.
But what's going on there is the arrival of "Demo Linux". I just wondered for a while and navigated to the official website.
But I found there is nothing to afraid and found some good stuff. How many of you felt boring while repeatedly installing and formating to find a suitable distro. Live CD's reduces this problem to a great extend. But now this problem is greatly dealt by Pendrives (Memory stick). Demo Linux is specially built linux distro to be alive!. That means there is no need of a hard disk at all. A 32MB of RAM is enough to work with it. Hope it will be useful for those people who loves to be small.
Also read about Puppy Linux Slax and Kolibri