Copying drumkits into Hydrogen Drum Machine - Mac OSX

Recently I needed to move import some old drumkits that I had created from an old backup to my new installation on OSX.  I did not have prepackaged Hydrogen drumkit files, but rather had a directory with wav samples and a drumkit.xml.

It took a little digging, but here's the process I followed:

1. Locate drumkit audio files and drumkit.xml
2. Locate the drumkit name in drumkit.xml
3. Create a directory in /Applications/Hydrogen.app/Contents/Resources/data/drumkits using the name found above
4. From the directory where the drumkit.xml and audio files are located, execute the following cp * /Applications/Hydrogen.app/Contents/Resources/data/drumkits/GregsKit (but of course, instead of using "GregsKit" use whatever the drumkit name is)
5. Restart Hydrogen and find your imported kit in the Sound Library under "System Kits"
6. For ease next time, export your kit so that it is formatted properly as an .h2drumkit file

This was much faster than loading each instrument individually.  I think it took less time, even with the searching I needed to do to find the location of the system kits.  It was worth the hour, and I hope this makes things easier for me or someone else if I ever need to do this again.

Getting Things Done

I've been struggling to stay organized. That is affecting my stress level and my productivity. It seems I just can't keep together all the things I need to do/remember/think/call/email/buy/ignore on a daily basis, and it's becoming more burdensome as I get older and my family gets more involved with activities.

I have subscribed to Stephen Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" method of "Quadrant II organizing" for many years. I know that it's important to get the important stuff in the calendar before anything else, and that clear identification of priorities help make decisions in the moment on what to do or not do. The problem I have with this is the sheer number of incoming requests for my time and attention that slip through the cracks of my mind and how to process them. From a philosophical perspective, Q2 organizing is where it's at. I've been looking for methods and means to handle the daily work.

Enter David Allen's "Getting Things Done."

Here is a process for managing tasks, with the focus being on managing activities. The essence is that you have a single system of your choice where you keep all your "stuff" and from where you make decisions on what the next action on each is. You are managing lists of things to do in the context in which they are done. For instance, you have a list for "home" and "work" and any other logical grouping of items.

I'm in the process of identifying and setting up my GTD system. I want to use products that I'm already using to manage my tasks, calendar and reference info. My requirements are that I need to be able to sync task lists with my Windows Mobile phone and have them available offline (I can't justify buying a data plan yet), it needs to be technology-agnostic (at work I use Windows and at home I use Linux), and it has to be easy to get information in and out.

This morning I couldn't get back to sleep after being rousted from sleep by the sound of my work on-call phone going off, so I reviewed Evernote, Remember the Milk, Google and SimpleGTD.

I like the storage of information at Evernote and the simplicity of keeping reference material in one place. Setting up GTD appears to be a bit complex, requiring tags for contexts and searching data. For simplicity, I like SimpleGTD. There are no bells and whistles, just a good online app for keeping your lists. There is no mobile app, though, and no way to sync tasks with my phone. I guess I can't use that.

I have come to rest on Remember the Milk for task management due to the flexibility of their task lists, smart lists (more on this later) and their Windows Mobile sync application that allows me to sync via WiFi and not require a constant data connection. I'm also planning to use Google calendar and most likely Google Docs for reference material, although Evernote is strong in the running for information archival and storage. I'm leaning toward Google Docs at the moment because I already use it and the interface is simple and elegant. Besides, I like what I know, I don't always know what I like.

The beauty of GTD is that the tools are not specific to the process, and you can use anything you are already using. I'm planning to blog as I set up my system and hopefully it will clarify my thoughts as well as assist future users of GTD. I'm planning to be dedicated over the next 90 days to implementing GTD in full and making it my habit, at which point we'll see if it makes a difference.

Windows Server 2008 Telnet Client

Windows Server 2008 does not install a telnet client by default. Apparently, Microsoft has considered this a "feature" and to enable it you must install the client by:

1. Open Server Manager

2. Click on Features > Add new features

3. Scroll down to Telnet Client, check the box

4. Install and voila!

A lot of work to telnet to a switch...

GSEC exercises: tcpdump

Tonight I'm doing some lab work for the GSEC recertification. I started this morning by compiling a cram sheet for module 401.1, mostly consisting of info on TCP/IP header decoding and things to make my life easier.

I started out to build a little diagram of a TCP/IP packet in hex with each header a different color so that my ADD brain could decipher quickly and easily what fields are what protocols. Then at this site I found what I was looking for:

4510 0068 7e87 4000 4006 3862 c0a8 011e
c0a8 0128 0016 0479 b6c8 a8de 621e 87db
5018 4470 1813 0000 e492 152f 23c3 8a2b
4ee7 dbf8 0d48 88e8 0110 2b01 4295 39f4
52c9 a05b 31d7 e3ae 1c62 2dbd d955 d604
b5d2 63d1 8fbc 4ab7 1615 b382 571c 70e0
a368 a03f 425b 6211

I changed the colors to work with a white background, but here in red you see the IP header (20 bytes), and in cyan you see the TCP header (another 20 bytes).

Each 4 hex numbers is 2 bytes. Then just remember that they start counting at zero for the "offset," or rather how far from the first bit/byte each field is found.

The first option we take is the "-i" which instructs tcpdump which interface to listen on. This is useful if you have multiple NICs or perhaps if you are using VMWare to run your lab. I did notice that traffic coming out of the VM will be captured by the host on lo, but not on eth0. Packets from host to VM can be captured on eth0, however. I'm assuming that is because the network card is actually bridged through the physical interface, so traffic coming from the VM never touches the wire. That's good to know, actually, as I prepare to take this into the real world.

Next I use "-x" which dumps the packet in hex. Hex is a bugger for me, personally, to work with, but it really gives you a good feel for what fields are where in the frame. I find that, as I do this more I pick up a field here and there, starting with the first byte of an IP header, which indicates protocol type. A "4" indicates that this is IPv4 (so, if it were IPv6 it would ovbviously be a 6) and the second byte (at bit offset 4) is a 5, indicating that the IP header is in 32-bit words (4 bytes == one 32-bit "word", 5*4=20 bytes)

Other important options are "-X" which gives you the ASCII output as well and "-s" which allows you to determine how much of the packet you want to capture. (-s is for "snaplen, or snapshot length). Using -s0 means "capture the whole packet." Remember that one when you are ready to mount your attack on the local FTP server...

I have been using tcpdump for many years now, and for some reason I have never noted the "host" or "and()" parameters. Using these you can specify a hostname or IP address to filter your capture on (handy if you are trying to watch an attack). Syntax would be:

tcpdump -i eth0 'host 192.168.1.1 and (192.168.1.5 or 4.2.2.2)'

This allows you to capture any traffic between host 1 (192.168.1.1) and either host 2 (192.168.1.5) or host 3(4.2.2.2). Using these parameters you can really fine-tune your capture, and I now use this quite a lot. It shuts down much of the noise a normal LAN has these days. Oh, you can also use "and not" to keep traffic from any given host from being captured. Nice when you work remotely like I do often and don't want to capture all the VNC traffic between your workstation and the remote host.

There you have it, folks. Tcpdump. There are a boatload of great tutorials out there, and quite honestly I'd rather use Wireshark. But sometimes for a quick 'n' dirty capture it's nice to run a quick tcpdumpa nd see who's communicating with whom. Not to mention you get to feel like you're in the Matrix as you watch all that hex fly by...

Ctl+Alt+Del to RDP

I seem to search for this once a month, you'd think I'd remember. I think I may just end up making this blog a place for me to store my geeky notes.

To send a Ctl+Alt+Del to a computer through a terminal (RDP) session, use:

Ctl+Alt+End

Easy...