I have been playing around with some of the bluetooth tools within Backtrack recently and btscanner is one of the main tools I have bene using. The btscanner application in Backtrack Linux provides two bluetooth scanning functions it calls inquiry scanning and brute force scanning. Unfortunately the package installed with Backtrack 5 release 3 will crash when attempting to use it for brute force scanning however I was able to create a fix that isn’t too messy to accomplish. Below we describe the btscanner crash in more detail and provide a way to get btscanner bluetooth brute forcing operating properly.

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Some tools in Backtrack Linux version 5 R3 were written for older versions of Python so if you are interested in using some of these tools in can be beneficial to install older versions of Python such as Python 2.4. Below I describe how to easily install Python 2.4 without causing issues with the Python 2.6 that is installed by default on Backtrack Linux 5 R3 or Ubuntu 10.04.

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Have a long running Linux process open in a SSH terminal window and need to shutdown your computer without killing it? I run into this on a regular basis and never spent the time looking into a solution but this past weekend I actually decided to look and came up with a cool solution called reptyr. The reptyr application allows you to open screen and migrate the process to the screen terminal and away from the terminal connection opened without screen. This allows you to detach from the window without killing the process. Below is a quick overview of installing reptyr and how to use it.

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Yesterday I needed to upgrade a single application on CentOS Linux. First I figured out that the application was part of the coreutils RPM package which is currently only available up to version coreutils 5.97-23 on CentOS. The current coreutils package is already up to coreutils 8.5 and upgrading coreutils is near impossible on CentOS because of other package requirements that it needs. Below are instructions on how to download the coreutils source, build the coreutils applications in a new directory, and then upgrade one application.

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Earlier this evening I needed to install a newer version of libpcap on a CentOS Linux server. The current version available via the yum package manager is libpcap version 0.9.4-15 and I needed something newer than libpcap version 0.9.7. I ended up not being able to find a yum repository or RPM package that included a version newer than 0.9.4-15 so I decided to upgrade to the latest stable version of libpcap currently available which is libpcap version 1.1.1. Below are directions on downloading libpcap, installing it, and then verifying it is installed.

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