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7 useful Linux Live CDs

May 6th, 2009

Darik’s Boot and Nuke (“DBAN”)

The program is designed to securely erase a hard disk until data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with random numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC (a PRNG). The Gutmann method is included with DBAN.

DBAN can be booted from a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive and it is based on Linux. It supports IDE, SCSI and SATA hard drives. DBAN can be configured to automatically wipe every hard disk on a system that it sees, making it very useful for unattended data destruction scenarios.

Inquisitor

Inquisitor is a software suite used for hardware diagnostics, stress testing, certification and benchmarking platform.

Minimal steps that can be undertaken for purposes of testing or benchmarking are called “tests” in Inquisitor and are implemented as simple Unix shell scripts that run other (binary) programs and collects their results. In its simplest form, test outputs only binary result: success or failure.

StressLinux

Stresslinux is a Mini Linux designed to test a computer’s hardware by running the components at high load while monitoring their health. It is designed to be booted from CD-ROM or via PXE.

Ophcrack

Ophcrack is an open source program that cracks Windows passwords by using LM hashes through rainbow tables. The program includes the ability to import the hashes from a variety of formats, including dumping directly from the SAM files of Windows. These tables can crack 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords of up to 14 characters in usually a few minutes.

BackTrack

BackTrack is a Linux distribution distributed as a Live CD which resulted from the merger of WHAX and the Auditor Security Collection, which is used for Penetration testing. It allows the user to include customizable scripts, additional tools, configurable kernels in personalized distributions, and includes over 300 security tools.

perfSONAR Network Performance Toolkit

Based on a customized version of Knoppix perfSONAR Network Performance Toolkit delivers network performance software developed by Internet2. NTP offers a complete network performance suite.

Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a free software disaster recovery, disk cloning and deployment solution. Clonezilla Live allows a user to clone an individual machine. A particular partition or entire disk can be cloned to another medium. This can be saved as an image file or as a replicated copy of the data. The data can be saved to locally attached storage, an SSH server, Samba Server or a NFS file share and then restore them at a later date.

Do you know of any other live CD that should be included in this list?

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Tags: backtrack clonezilla dban Inquisitor ophcrack perfsonar stresslinux

Open source tools I can’t work without

January 3rd, 2009

Whether it’s for recovery or day to day activities open source has a lot to offer. From simple entertainment software to data recovery there are a lot of options available in the Internet. Here is a list of what I commonly use to get the job done, if you have any recommendation feel free to comment.

Testdisk

Sometimes accidents happen and partitions are deleted or the system may become un-bootable for some reason. Useful for those nasty Windows viruses which may damage the partition table.

PhotoRec

PhotoRec was design to recover data from storage media like hard disk and Flash drives alike that may have been accidentally formated or deleted. PhotoRec aims to recover common formats like PDF, HTML MP3 to name a few. When doing a recovery you might only want to recover the actual files that contain the data and not the software it used to run on.

DBAN

By far the best tool for those who want to re-use hard drives which may or may not contain sensitive data. Instead of just erasing the data DBAN rewrites random data generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC on the hard drive multiple times. How secure it is?, well it holds several official certifications from government agencies.

Ophcrack

Useful for when the user forgets his or her password and has no other way of obtaining the password to the system. It beats other commercial tools I have used previously.

GParted

For those who boot into multiple operating systems and need to re-size the primary partition or have to re-size the partition where Windows resides. Some PC manufacturers do not provide an actual CD/DVD, instead the OS is installed in to a partition.

UNetbootin

Some tools are offered in the form of an ISO for a reason, meaning they have to burned in to a CD/DVD. UNetbootin allows a USB drive to become bootable with little effort, reducing the amount of CD/DVD’s I have to burn (waste). UNetbootin removes the hassle of having to make the ISO’s bootable, just point to the ISO and UNetbootin does the rest.