Backtrack Series Commentary

[daedlanth]

Hello, This is my first post to the BT forums. A little background first; I am into network administration as a course of study and I have Linux experience at the college level. That said, I will mention the unmentionable trove of M$ exp as well. I love hacking. I have been poking around BT for a quite awhile, played with it before college even, broke some WEP, WooHoo.

During my education I learned about proper documentation. I already knew how to be helpful and I endeavor to be a nice guy. The level of flames and irrelevant posts in this forum and BT material around the internet generally is appalling. The gross lack of respect that I have witnessed is reproachable. The organization (at the internet level) sucks. I have never participated in an environment as scattered as this. I WASTE time wading through all of this crap. I don't want to keep blowing time parsing cruft. Is there somewhere else!? hehe.

I notice that a lot of the commands that I learned in the CentOS style Bash are irrelevant here. Is there a concise list concerning this OS's syntax? It is irritating when makewhatis turns into mandb -c GRRRRR!!!!!! I understand that BT subjects are offered as courses. Do I really need to blow another 6 grand? or 30? or 40? Whatever it may be, I have already buried a lot into my IT addiction. Is that how it is? I hope not. The courses are expensive for a week of training IMHO, or I would already be there.

There are certain things that I think the community should think about. One really stupid thing , IMHO, is the fact that a stock BT5 r3 can't take a screen shot. I know linux is the configuration wizard's dream but really!? I have to grab software to make a screen shot in a distro as maniacally fleshed out as this!? I swore and swore I did.

So anyhow, I'll hang out. I'm looking for some new comrades. I have some really cool comrades as well, great people, great hackers, not much trouble. Can't wait to hear from the community with some road signs showing the way...

daed lanth
gmail

[Amphet]

I'm a physical science major and im still in college. I started using Linux barely 6 months ago but I'v tryed most major distro's and some not so major. I'v seen a few other distro's based loosely on this same basis. Those being Backbox, Pentoo, Backtrack: (as far as i know) the most popular out there atm. I cant say that I'v tryed pentoo as its based on gentoo and if I wanted a gentoo pentesting distro I would just (I'm assuming) add the overlay and build the tools. That said I run Gentoo as my main OS on my desktop and rotate other distro's in and out of my extended partition. And I do more compiling on my desktop then I care to admit rite now trying to build a stage 3 that i'm happy with. I'v learned most of what I know about linux from this process (its very practical hands on learning for me). My laptop normally run's backtrack, I dont remember what it was, but I had some issue with backbox and havent toutched it since.. so. Anyway backtrack is extremely stable, and why not, its based on Ubuntu 10.04, and this is fine. The only thing i would say about backtrack is their comunity's lack of actual programming discussion. I'm fine with the fact that any 10 year old can download a copy, ask how to crack wep/wpa passwords etc and thats fine and good. Yet when I asked about programming i was told it was irrelevant and my post was blocked. This makes no sense to me as a distro geared towards pentesting you would think they would be all about this? I get the feeling that this isnt the case, and thats really kinda weird because if someone was into programming and knew Linux/Unix bash scripting / programming they would understand much more of how the programs worked, and therefore tweak them to their needs. As for Bash commands being different, i would say, and correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to vary slightly from distro to distro. From what you've said I doubt you would need this but it might help someone else out who stumbles across this thread i think.( web.physics.ucsb.edu/~pcs/apps/bash/intro-bash.html ) and.. correct me if im wrong but CentOS is more of a networking OS where backtrack is more Debian/Ubuntu like so i would assume small changes at least. As for paying for an education all over again? If you already have a computer science degree or something similar i think you know the answer to that. Just go with whatever you like the most, if you can program, get good and learn. Youll be a hundred times more valuable then someone who can click buttons on a pre compiled binary distro of Linux i would think. After i have bash scripting and programing down i figure ill get into either c or python, I'm not sure yet. From there I guess ill see where that takes me. Vi / Vim / Gvim Im sure would be good to know as well. Anyway good luck with that, just my thoughts.

[aerokid240]

Either you "blow the 6 grand", as you put it, or take the time to learn it (this can be years).