Short url to full url

Most of the Social sites will shorten the links. There are a lot of ways to check the url before you go to the url and get phished :)

For example, for bitly you can just add a ‘+’ at the end of the url. For example, you can enter the following in url bar https://bit.ly/2KEOXNx+ and see the details of the where the url takes you. This is just a example url that I got from google but you get the idea.

Bash script performance issue and remediation

I was looking at writing some output to files. The output did not vary much but the number of lines was huge. It was long time back so I dont remember the context of the requirement but I needed to write few million lines of text. The quickest way to do this was bash so I wrote a simple script that could do this. To my astonishment, I could see the script much more time than expected, so here is how I debugged the issue and fixed it.

Preparation and Review of eMAPT (INE security FKA eLearnSecurity Mobile Application Penetration Tester

I started thinking about Mobile pentesting sometime back. Finally in Feb/2024, I paid for the yearly subscription for INE and added eMAPT to my cart. If you dont know about eMAPT cert, then head over to eMAPT certification. And as per their home page

The Mobile Application Penetration Tester (eMAPT) certification is issued to cyber security experts that display advanced mobile application security knowledge through a scenario-based exam.

And on Apr/05/2024, I got My Certificate.

Run X11 applications on docker or podman

Found x11docker project in github. This is a very nice project if you are trying to run GUI applications in dockers. It takes the hassle out and helps you run the GUI applications very easily in docker.

Whats more, if you are on Fedora, you are in luck. You can install this tool with

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sudo dnf install x11docker

and if you are not on Fedora, then head over to their github. Some other distributions also have it packaged but otherwise also it is very simple to install.

Show Local IP

Show local IP

You can see the local IP of the machine with the command - ip a. However if you have to use the address in some variable in a scrit. It becomes little tricky, something like

• Show the interfaces in one line with ‘-o’
• Show only IPv4 address’s with ‘-4’

and the command looks like

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ip -4 -o a show dev eth0|awk '{gsub(/\/.*/,"",$4);print $4}'

Replace eth0 with then correct interface name.

Openvpn files to nmcli connection

Openvpn files to nmcli connection

Many times you get openvpn file and when you want to connect to the VPN server, you have to start the vpn client from the cli. How you wish that this was added to NetworkManager so that you could connect to it with one click. If this is the case, then you can use these commands to do the same ane enjoy :)

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nmcli connection import type openvpn file test.ovpn
nmcli connection modify test vpn.secrets 'password=mypass' vpn.user-name 'username'

You will need to modify few things in above command

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

VMWare workstation - ova import not working

When importing ova and/or ovf files, if Workstation does not give any error but does not import the file as well, try importing the file in VMWare Player. When you do that, you will see that if the import fails, player will show a dialogue with log file name similar to /tmp/vmaware-<amitag>/.

From there, I was able to find out that, it was running ovftool.bin. Try to run that in a terminal and immediately I could see that libnsl was missing so, I just installed the same with