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WarWalking (3)

Published January 7, 2004 by lievenlb


This time we turn to Ethereal, ‘sniffing the glue that holds the
Internet together’. Here is the description they give : “Ethereal is a
free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to
examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can
interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail
information for each packet. Ethereal has several powerful features,
including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the
reconstructed stream of a TCP session”. Whereas OSX is not included it
is possible to get Ethereal running under OSX but it
requires some work. To begin you need to have the XTools
installed (the extra CD shipped with 10.3) (btw. you probably needed
already the XTools to get Kismet up and running). Secondly, you
need to have X11 in Applications/Utilities. This is not a
standard option if you install 10.3 but with a custom install you can
install X11. If you haven’t done this, no problem, you can download X11
from the apple-site (43Mb! download). And finally you need
to have Fink installed (see a previous
post). If you are set, open the Terminal and type

sudo fink install ethereal-ssl

Fink will tell you that it needs some additional packages to
install (12 in my case) and you agree to this with typing Y. Get
yourself a coffee and a book or newspaper because the compilation
process takes quite a while (in my case it took over one hour!). When it
finally stops you hope to be done, so start up X11 and type

sudo /sw/bin/ethereal

and it
works! If you want to begin sniffing you have to click on
Capture/Start and a pop-up window appears. Specify en1 as
Interface and click on Ok. If after some time you press
Stop all the captured packages appear in the main window and you
can start playing. We will see another time what exactly you can do with
all this information…

The previous time that I
tried to install Ethereal (on an iBook) I got an error message :
dyld: /sw/bin/ethereal can’t open library: /sw/lib/libdl.0.dylib (No
such file or directory, errno = 2). Fortunately a simple Google gave
me the following work-around. So if you get into problems that will
probably solve them. I also needed to type xhost in X11 to
allow su to use my window. But, none of these problems appeared right
now so maybe they updated the package.

Moreover,
Ethereal is very well documented both with an online manual-page and a User’s guide (which you can also download as
PDF-file : 454 pages! but only the first 100 or so are worth
printing).

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the best LaTeX system

Published January 3, 2004 by lievenlb

If you are
a mathematician, you’d better have a functioning TeX on your computer
which I do not have at the moment as I completely erased my HD yesterday
and started brand new. Some time ago this would make me slightly nervous
but as I did install TeX on a number of computers recently I hope to get
it up and running in no time. However, as the install process changes
slighly each time I’ll log here my actions for future reference.
Further this log may convince you to buy a Macintosh because I really do
not know of a better TeX system around.

A good source
for TeX material is the PennState Mac-TeX page. The
first thing to do is to get a good editor such as the freeware BBedit
Lite but the present link directs to the commercial version so has this
Lite version been taken off the net? Fortunately not, a quick
Google tells me that BareBones still maintain a BBedit Lite page from which you can get the 6.1.2
version (it contains a version for OS X and one running under System 9),
so copy the BBedit Folder to the ApplicationFolder and the OSX program
to the Dock.

Next, we will need a spelling checker
like Excalibur which you can find under the
Tools/Utilities of the PennState-site. So download from the links
: Excalibur 4.0 (782k), the Mathematical Lexicon (29k) and the Dutch
dictionary (791k), put these two Folders (or any other Dictionaries you
like to download) in the ExcaliburFolder and copy this to the
ApplicationsFolder and Excalibur itself to the Dock. These matters
settled, it is now time for the big gun : TeX itself.

You can get there from the Engines subsection of the
PennSate site but it’s better to go directly to the excellent TeX on Mac OS X page and follow the instructions (which as I mentioned before tend
to change slightly). I used to get the iInstaller first and
install then the required packages but this time I’ll go for the quick
and dirty route : I’ll get myself the TeX-fat.dmg disk image
(77Mb) which contains TeX and Ghostscript 8 and the i-Installer!
What you obtain is a Volume with the i-Installer, a i-Packages
Folder, some files to read and the TeX-fat.iid. Take the
i-Installer to the Applications/Utilities Folder and to the Dock.
Drag the TeX-fat.iid file on the mounted volume on the i-Installer
application icon. You will be presented with an i-Directory with two
packages on the volume. Install all of them. It is best to install
ghostscript after you have installed TeX as it may contain configuration
material that can take advantage of TeX. I got a warning message but
choose to ignore it, seems to install as expected. Along the way you are
asked a few simple questions (such as paper size, formats you want to
have etc.) when in doubt go for the default! Okay : Task finished! But I
still have to install the ghostscript 8 package but this goes a lot
faster. So we should now have a working TeX installation but are still
missing a front-end. These you can download fllowing the links at
the beginning of the TeX on Mac OS X page. I usually go for TeXShop which is a 3.1Mb disk-image download. Drag
TeXShop into the ApplicationsFolder and the Dock. Find the file named
“pdfsync.sty” in the distribution directory. Drag a copy of this file
to ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex. Here ~/Library is the Library folder in
your home directory. You may need to create the folders texmf, tex, and
latex if they do not already exist. Alternatively, you can gp for iTeXMac (I never figured out what went wrong
between these two developers, but surely it was something
big).

At a later stage I am sure I want to add
new style files from CTAN. So here is the drill : copy them in the
diectory

/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/tex/latex/…

and do a texhash from the command line (as root).
I noticed that lately one do no longer need to adjust parameters to get
a heavy xy-pic file being compiled but if one does not to change any of
the values : be root and go to

/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

increase values and do a texhash. Finally, if you want to
print chess or go-diagrams or other fancy pictures requiring
metafont files here is the drill : be root and copy the .mf files
in an apropriate directory under

/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf/fonts/source/public/

(if necessary change the owner of the directory) and
then do a texhash.

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