Episode 406 - Packet Sniffing 101, Social Media with Boxee, and multiple Gordon Freemans with Synergy [Discussion]

[mari1ee]

Chris Gerling begins a three part series on Packet Sniffing starting with the fundamentals of packet structure, the OSI model, tools and terminology. Matt harnesses the social power of media with Boxee, a social media center based on XMBC. Shannon demos out Synergy, the Half-Life 2 co-op mod, and Darren check out Cron for Windows.

Watch or download here. (http://revision3.com/hak5/PacketSniffingBoxeeSynergy)

[unhap]

just so everyone knows you can actually get synergy on steam directly now

as for the episode, it seemed really short. you guys couldve gone into a bit more detail on synergy and boxee i thought

[DoXiD]

I'm just curious, what tools were you using in the show (I'd might have missed that part) for the package sniffing.
I know all about nmap and those common applications but i was wondering if you guys had some really neat application that had some extra stuff that others don't. (besides home made applications what are there out there?).

I tend to use sniffer myself on my windows box since it has almost anything about network administration, security and such.

http://erwan.l.free.fr/ a great guy who i talked to for a while back in the days.
Don't know if he's actively developing it but it has a lot of nice stuff.

[Sphinxer]

This episode contained some interesting topics (as usual, I might say), but I'll agree with Unhap that it seemed really short. At 24 minutes it is only half as long as the 3 first episodes this season. The same goes for the previous episode btw, and I hope you're not planning to make them any shorter. It feels a little meh when you see a new episode being downloaded in Miro and think "whee, I'll watch that at once" only to find that it's so short. They don't have to consistently be 40ish minutes, but it would be nice to at least get 30 each week. I think that would also make the content seem less rushed than it did this episode.

I also found the "let's pretend Darren is actually here at the time of shooting" thing a little awkward. It was pretty obvious that the segments with him were prerecorded, and I think it would have worked out better if you had just started out saying that. It's not like there's any shame in using prerecorded segments in a prerecorded show.

In regards to the OSI model, it can be pretty tricky remembering the order and names of all the layers. The phrase "Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away" was originally taught to me years ago by my CS teacher, and has worked well as an aid for me to remember.
For the uninitiated: The first letter of each word is the same as the first letter of a layer in the model (and in the correct order). And the phrase is sufficiently silly to be easy to remember (especially if you have a strong distaste for sausage on pizza).

As far as Free/Open Source LAN games go, I highly recommend OpenArena if you haven't checked it out already. It's basically Q3, and you can't argue with that.

[computoman]

When I was in school I had to learn thje osi model also. I have forgotten most of that stuff. I need to go back and refresh my memory so that it is easy as remembering the color coding on a 4 pair cable.

Packet sniffing is fun, You can really learn about what goes on in a network. but you have to be careful some network admins get nervous and will shut off the port you are using on the switch if you are caught doing it. When I was an admin I like to do sniffing when the network was slow. This was before we heavily used managed switches,. Sometimes you had a screaming nic or someone is intentionally flooding the network. Before tcpip became pretty much the the standand. Old networking games would use what was called ipx that was popular with novell networking. It was really easy to catch the gamers doing it on the school network. We just nicely asked them to do it somewhere else. Apple has it's own protocol but they have gone to tcpip also. It was real easy to see if someone had brought their own apple computer to school to use by seeing those kind of packets. Every nic (network interface card has what is called the mac address or a sort of serial number for the nic. Most of the mac addresses were based on the manufacturer of the card. It was easy to tell when someone had their own computer on the network because you could tell by the mac address was not the kind of nics in the computers that we normally used. Besides we had a database of all the cards in computers on campus. Non standard mac addresses were investigated. Usually it was just a teacher who had brought their personal laptop to work. No big deal. If you like to play detective, you will love packet sniffing. I am just a beginner at it though. I can not wait to see the future episodes about packet sniffing.