Information Security

capinfos : Backtrack 5: Non Menu Items: CLI Commands: capinfos

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Ever located an old capture file and you weren’t sure what was in it or needed to grab some quick statistics about another capture file? What about needed to run statistics on multiple capture files and present them via a database or a spreadsheet? Well if you have ever run into any of these scenarios then capinfos is worth a look. The capinfos command is available via the Backtrack CLI and provides statistic information about cap files. This is one of the gems located on Backtrack that nobody ever hears about.

Technology Errors

last: btmp: File too large, Read Large btmp Files

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Earlier today while investigating the logs on a CentOS Linux server I noticed the btmp file had grown to over 5GB. I was curious to look into the log and when attempting to read the 5GB file using last I received an error since last will only handle files that are 2GB in size or less. So what needs to happen is to split the file into multiple pieces so they can be read via the last command. Below I describe the error in detail, how to resolve it by splitting the btmp file into multiple files, and then how to join them together if you need to read logs older than the last split file.

Technology Errors

Windows: File Is To Big To Be Opened By NotePad++, Use Wordpad As Alternative

Errors10 Comments

In the process of troubleshooting a problem with mysqldump I was viewing MySQL backups using Notepad++. I typically view and edit large files using Linux with vi however in this scenario it was more convenient to view the files quickly from a Windows laptop using Notepad++. The first couple of backups were between 50MB and 100MB and while they were a bit slow to open with Notepad++ they did open without further issue and provided an easy method to search through the files.

Eventually I backed up a database file that ended up being 195MB of pure SQL such as mydatabase.sql. When attempting to open this file with Notepad++ I received the below error.