If you are a system administrator you probably manage one or more email servers so things eventually will go wrong and need to be resolved as quickly as possible. It is beneficial to know how to troubleshoot email servers using telnet via a shell so you don’t have to rely on a GUI mail client. Below I describe how to login to an Exim email server using telnet, authenticate via SMTP authentication, and then send test emails. The below examples will be run from a terminal window on Linux however they should be very similar too running the commands from a Command Prompt on Windows 7 or any other operating systems using a terminal window or similar.

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The final tool in the DNS Section is called fierce. It is a perl script written by rsnake. Fierce tries multiple techniques to find all the IP addresses and hostnames used by a target. These include – trying to dump the SOA records, do a zone transfer, searching for commonly used domain names with a dictionary attack, adjacency scan and a few more. Fierce is meant specifically to locate likely targets both inside and outside a corporate network. Only those targets are listed (unless the -nopattern switch is used). No exploitation is performed (unless you do something intentionally malicious with the -connect switch). Fierce is a reconnaissance tool. Fierce is a PERL script that quickly scans domains using several tactics.

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In going through all the tools with Alex on Backtrack I have discovered a few bugs and missing modules or libs. I will be writting posts on how to fix them but I will also be adding the fix’s to Backtrack svn as well. This morning I was writting the article on Dnsenum by my buddy Barbsie and I ran into a missing perl module.

root@666:/pentest/enumeration/dnsenum# ./dnsenum.pl --enum -f dns.txt --update a -r cnn.com
dnsenum.pl VERSION:1.2
Warning: can't load Net::Whois::IP module, whois queries desabled.

Below I will show to to download and install the needed module:

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The error detailed below is from the Apache error logs. The error displayed in the Apache error log after the first attempt to visit monarch.cgi for the first time. I had already installed the JavaScript::DataFormValidator Perl module but after initially installing the JavaScript::DataFormValidator Perl module I also installed Perl 5.10 in a different location than the Perl 5.8.8 that was already installed on the CentOS Linux server. Below I describe the error, how to install the JavaScript::DataFormValidator Perl module using the CPAN shell, and some minor modifications I made to the Monarch CGI scripts to use Perl 5.10 instead of Perl 5.8.8.

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The below is part of the output when receiving an error attempting to install the Perl DBD::mysql module using the CPAN shell. I rarely use the Perl CPAN shell since most of the packages are available on CentOS, my typical Linux distribution choice for servers, using the yum package manager. In this case I was working on installing Monarch on a server at work to assist with Nagios file management. Monarch allows you to backup the entire Nagios configuration files with the click of a button. Monarch will also provide a visual view of any Nagios build errors, Nagios configuration files (including users, user groups, services, check commands, etc.,), and more. So when attempting to build the Perl DBD:mysql module via the CPAN shell I received some errors which I initially did not understand because they did not explain the specific issue however I eventually located the problem which ended up being easy to resolve. Below I describe the error in detail as well as information on how to resolve.

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