I put in my paperwork for OSCP over the Thanksgiving holiday and I heard back that Saturday night, I was in the classes. I am pretty excited. Learning how to exploit security to design better security will be great. This will be a great way to distinguish myself from the rest of the computer technicians in the area, and hopefully give me a good promotion to get into some of the local businesses.
Finished National Novel Writing Month this year with 51,099 words. It was a long hard battle to 50,000 words and I am surprised I made it after repeatedly trying to sabotage myself along the way. Hopefully next will be a little easier; I might even attempt one of the other Novel writing months.
I got a dynex pci Wireless card form Bestbuy for the home theater pc I am in the process of building. The first installation when fine, until I removed some ATI video drivers and then it stopped working. I used ndiswrapper and everything to get it to work. It turned out it needed Broadcom firmware to make it run.
So here is the low-down:
Install drivers:
ndiswrapper -i xxx
ndiswrapper -l
ndiswrapper -m
modprobe ndiswrapper
Then basically follow the directions at linuxwireless.org
Download b42-fwcutter
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta_mimo.o
Then the card should work without any major problems.
The differences between clients at Geek Squad and from my freelancing are shocking. At Geek squad, almost every customer is upset about their inability to use and understand their computer; their goal is to take out their frustration on someone who cannot fight back. The clients for freelancing are much more relaxed and understanding, so far; they have been calm and easy to work with. No yelling or screaming coming from them. Some have been stressed about data loss and such, but that is some thing understandable. Coming into or calling Geeksquad just to bitch and moan is not understandable. Just grow up, learn to Google for solutions to the problem, do not do stupid things to the computer to start out with, and be patient — repairs take time, especially if we have to spend days looking for OEM discs for you computer, while dealing with a steady stream of customers demanding free labor and parts.