The big news the past couple weeks has been the announcement that Google is working on a lightweight OS named “Chrome OS” which Google hopes to have widely adopted for NetBook use. Google wants to do to the OS what they did to the browser with Chrome. In their words go back to basics they want the OS to be speedy simple and secure. The idea is that users won’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. Sounds good right?

One of the great advantages of having an Exchange server is that you can use ActiveSync to push emails to your iPhone ( or other ActiveSync enabled device).

This means that emails will show up on your iPhone almost as soon as they arrive in your mail providers Inbox.

TCPDump. If you want to capture traffic you need to be using this tool. TCPDump is small lightweight and really easy to understand once you learn the basic syntax. It’s the perfect tool to gather info off the wired or wireless network. If you’re running it on a computer with dsniff installed you can use dsniff to route traffic through your computer and see everything your target is doing even on a switched network (See the article on How-To spy on other users on the local network from back in August )

For years the de-facto groupware suite was Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Well as someone who prefers to not use Microsoft products if I can avoid it this has been somewhat of a problem. Sure there have been some projects that replaced some of the functionality of Exchange (Like Zimbra)  but there have always been problems. Things just never seemed to work quite right. That is until I tried Zarafa. Zarafa is an Exchange replacement that runs on Linux. Like a lot of recent Open Source projects the company responsible for Zarafa as made available both a Community (Read “free as in beer and speech”) version that has a restriction of 3 connected mapi (Outlook) clients and a paid version that you can pay for per client access license.

The key features of Zarafa are

1. Ajax based web interface (This is as close to Outlook in a web browser as I’ve ever seen)
2. Outlook support (versions 2000 to 2007)
3. Mobile support (Push email to Activesync devices (Windows Mobile or iPhone) via Z-Push
4. Active Directory/LDAP integration
5. POP3/IMAP support
6. MySQL support
7. Single Sign on support
8. Brick Level Backup (not in the community version)

Nmap is one of those essential tools that you find yourself always reaching for after a few years of system administration. It’s an excellent tool for network mapping but more importantly for our purposes it can be used for security auditing. The main ways I use Nmap are as a port scanner and in some cases to identify the OS of the IP being scanned. These are by no means the only uses. Nmap has a ton of option and in addition can be extended with scripts.

Stealth MAC is an absolute necessity if you’re going to be doing anything subversive from your iPod/iPhone every network enabled device has what is known as a MAC address which is a unique identifier that’s assigned to the network adapter by the manufacturer. These are supposed to be globally unique ( but that’s not always the case) and normally the first three pairs of numbers/letters identify the hardware manufacturer. This is terrible if we’re planning on doing something subversive on a network as it’s a digital footprint of our activities.