Last Monday, I posted about my plan for preparing for and eventually taking and passing the OSCP (Offensive-Security Certified Professional.)
My prep work for the week has included:
- Finishing my Cornell Style notes on the eLearnSecurity Reports and Methodology information.
- Signing up for PentesterLab PRO.
- Passing the “Introduction” badge on PentesterLab PRO.
- Installing 4 of the 5 lab machines as described in Tony Robinson’s “Building Virtual Machine Labs” book.
- The only lab machine left is the Metasploitable machine, which I intend to work on this week.
- Installed Kali VM on my main gaming laptop for doing further PentesterLab PRO exercises.
Sunday (April 1) Michael W. Lucas announced his “#mwlSecretbook” title. He’s been working on this book for months, but kept the title secret, until now. This is the 13th book in the “Mastery” series, and as a Print Sponsor (and Print Patreon Patron,) I got a copy of the PDF bright an early in my email. I took the morning to read the book.
The title? “Ed Mastery.” That’s right… this book is all about using the “ed” line editor for Unix systems. I think this was an excellent book to release, for multiple reasons.
- There are already excellent books on the “sed” and “awk” commands that give a brief explanations, one-liners, and so on, available on the market.
- The “ed” editor is one of the least utilized editors, yet it is almost guaranteed to exist on any Unix system you may find yourself on. The “ed” command is part of the POSIX definitions, after all. Some newer Linux distributions are beginning to leave this out, but I blame the stupidity that is “systemd” for swaying this kind of thinking.
- The simplicity of the command is staggering, and after you’ve used it for a few days, it seems second nature. It’s worth at least practicing this command to have it in your back pocket.
- It works, even when your TERM settings get jacked up. It works when you’re in a single user session that only mounted “/” because of corrupted filesystem issues, and you need to modify configuration files but don’t have access to “vi” since that usually lives in “/usr” (and isn’t statically compiled.) It just works. Period.
At a previous place of employment, we had to fix some boot issues every now and then. Doing this required booting into single user mode (root) where the filesystem only mounted “/” at first. Sometimes, we could mount “/usr” manually, then use vi to modify our files. The problem was that “vi” wasn’t statically compiled, and thus lived in “/usr” instead of “/bin” where the statically compiled programs were stashed. I always wondered what would happen if “/usr” crapped itself, and thought it would be best to learn “ed” as an alternative.
I first learned ed by forcing myself to use it instead of any other text editor for a whole week. The first couple of days were a little painful, but after that, it became pretty comfortable.
I haven’t been forced to use it, but I’ve always been happy to have it in my back pocket. I have used it (and vi) to demonstrate poorly configured SUDO policy in the past.
After spending my morning reading the PDF version of this book, I’ve decided I need to brush up on it. It’s been a few years since I forced myself to learn it, and this book does include some tricks I never figured out on my own back then. If you’re in the Unix space: User, SysAdmin, or Pentester; get this book.
Plans for this coming week:
- Finish building the Tony Robinson style lab.
- Continue working on the Essentials Badge on PentesterLab PRO.
- Continue improving my workflow and documentation methodology.
- Begin using “ed” regularly, again.
One thought on “Updates – OSCP Prep and New Book”