Tim's Computer Science Blog

Sometimes there are good old things that we just can't get away from. Something about the continued functionality inspite of the "newer better" hype cycles in technology. I digress though, so onto the meat of this post. There is an issue that has plagued an old laptop of mine for a while. It happened when I would change the HardDrive in the machine. (Think cycling through Windows 7, 8, 10, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc) Each time the HD was switched up the bootloader would cease to work. Worse yet a fresh install wouldn't work. DunDunDun! Hardware Issues! Turns out the nvram was having issues. Luckily Linux has this handy command line tool efibootmgr  to save the day. Grab a Live Cd/USB and Extra entries can be deleted by command like    sudo efibootmgr -b entry_in_nvram -B    . You might also want to remove excessive dump files using a command such as    sudo rm /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/dump-*   If needed check your OS for how to regenerate y...

Recently I was invited to conduct a leadership workshop at California State University of Monterey Bay for the Networking and Security Team. They wanted the training to focus in on getting things done, so I put together a few fun training activities that help with communication, self-direction, teamwork, and having more effective meetings. Activities build leaders faster than lectures in my experience. Check out the slides and try a few of the activities for yourself! When talking about leadership a general discussion about what a leader is, is in order. When asked many of the participants shared ideas such as "A leader is someone who gets things done", "Someone who steps up", "An active listener", "Leaders are people that others follow". We didn't get too deep into what a leader was in this training and focused more on a few of the skills. If you are interested in diving a little deeper into some of the details of leadership i've foun...

Here is a quick presentation about VPN's

I recently put on a leadership workshop. There are multiple styles of and theories of leadership, but here are a few that i've found useful. The better part of this workshop though were the activities that followed it. You see training people to be leaders isn't as straight forward a task like training a manager might be, so rather than just lecturing all day the real goal was to have a series of activities that help develop leadership skill by doing them. It also helps that it's fun to do it this way! The slides have more than the video It's interesting that my post on Leadership Training seems to consistently get views vs this one on Leadership Development. I'm guessing it's because of the topic title & the fact that i've written a description. (So let's update this post and see what happens). Might as well add my Officer Management slides developed for the Network Security Team (Club at CSUMB) after this. All three of the presentations have rel...

Hi there. I've put together a presentation on password cracking with Hashcat. Fair warning I made a small mistake in one of the slides where I switched the labels for the dictionary and the file containing the password hashes. The video is pretty comprehensive and should be enough information to compete in the National Cyber League password category.

Here is a slide by slide guide on how to setup and create virtual machines, and even network them together. This is really useful to know about if you want to simulate setting up servers, networks, and various technologies and then test them. For those who are into cyber security you can safely practice your skills! You don't even need to spend money on a bunch of additional hardware!

Command Injection is a technique for gaining access, or getting a system to perform unauthorized actions. I've written up a tutorial/walk-through for a step by step lab on how to do this. It involves some setup with two virtual machines. Command Injection Walk Through Document HERE . Knowing a little bit about shells is also useful. Check out the blog post here for some resources on that. Some slides on setting up a virtual machine can be found here  if this topic is new to you. Here is a video that covers what command injection is and how it works. at about the 9:30 minute mark the talk is done and the walk through begins. Slides: