Cracking WPA Passwords with HP Proliant DL380 Server, SLOW

[Trent0r]

Hello all, this is mainly a question regarding hardware compatibility, but I wanted to see if anyone had this issue before, or a similar issue and can help me.

I have a HP Proliant DL380 Server that is quite powerful. It has two quad core Xeon 3.2GHz processors and 4GB of ECC RAM. No hard drives are installed.

I am attempting to use john the ripper to bruteforce passwords from the .cap file. I know the commands, the password crunching begins as expected. However I am noticing that the number of keys tested per second hovers in a rance between 600-660 k/s. This concerns me greatly, as my IBM Thinkpad T61, with a dual core Intel Centrino processor (2.2GHz I think), and 2GB of non ECC ram crunches keys with the same command at roughly 1,400 k/s.

This seems very bizarre to me! I was hoping that the HP blade would be crunching at a much higher rate, like 5k-6k k/s. Is this a Linux issue, backtrack issue, hardware issue? I would think that with two quad core processors this blade would be processing keys at a much higher speed. I am hoping to use it as a drone for WPA and WPA2 bruteforcing.

Can anyone assist me?

Thanks ahead of time, Trent0r.

P.S. Using Backtrack 5 R1 on live CD boot

[scottm99]

I have an install of BT in a virtual machine. When I run john, I get more than 600 k/s (don't recall the exact number). My guess is that it's because you're running BackTrack from CD, and not installed on a hard drive. JtR has some pretty good documentation...have a look & see what it can tell you.

[tonyITa]

I have laptop Core 2 duo, and reading about the kernel I found there is a update to the microcode and applies to XENON processors.
Quote from the description "...The microcode_ctl utility is a companion to the IA32 microcode
driver:
- it decodes and sends new microcode to the kernel driver for Intel IA32
family (Pentium Pro, PII, Celeron, PIII, Xeon, Pentium 4, etc.) and
Intel x86_64 family processors;
- it signals the kernel driver to release any buffers it may hold..."

You can find the package in synaptic look for microcode_ctl and intel microcode.