Running Chromium as Root on BT5R2

Well, sort of.

You can't do it.  They (the omnipotent and wise developers of chromium) won't let you.  If you try to run it as root, you'll get this...

You can run it su'd as a regular user while logged in as root, but it takes a little X-Fu to get it done right.  First, create your user with the "adduser" command.  Then, give him access to the X display with the "xhost" command.

Here, our user is called "bob":

xhost +SI:localuser:bob

Now start a terminal session and "su bob".  Then run...

chromium-browser --user-data-dir=/home/bob

...and you're in.

This is not unique to Chromium,  The Tor Browser Bundle for Linux will also not let you run as root, which is a bitch and a half.  This trick will work with Tor as well, but it will bitch about the user's profile.  So far I haven't found (or looked for) an equivalent "user-data-dir" switch.

Chromium isn't in BT5R2 by default, so you need to install it with...

apt-get install chromium-browser

Neither is the Tor Browser Bundle, but I'm sure you can figure out how to install that.  It's as simple as downloading & extracting it.

So anyway, BT5R2 is the best version yet, but as usual I have my complaints.  I won't bore you with them now.

Give me another week.

BT5 on a Stick

A STICK!!!!

I've been running BT5[r1] as a "disposable OS" almost every day on a laptop for months now, booting up from a CD. Great stuff. Boot up, do your dirty work, shut down, and all the evidence is gone.

A few weeks back I installed the BT5 ISO to a USB stick with UNetbootin and tossed the CD forever. Excellent perfomance. Now it boots up fast and quiet. But there's one tiny issue: it still thinks it's a CD so I have to run my apt-get script every time to get the utilities I can't live without. I thought I could get the same performance by installing the OS itself onto stick, so I bought a cheap 16G thumb drive and tried it out.

Boy was I wrong!

I installed using the defaults and booted the stick up. It was dog shit slow—slower than using a CD at times—but it was still usable. Disappointing, but usable.

After a few days of this I did some research to see what I did wrong. And I found that it's not a good idea to install onto USB using the ext4 filesystem (the default). Either ext2 or UVFAT (formerly known as UMSDOS) is recommended, and UVFAT doesn't work on 2.6 kernels.

I reinstalled to ext2 and booted the stick up. It didn't boot because it switched from sdc during installation to sdb at boot time. Editing grub.cfg took care of that, but after rebooting it was still dog shit slow. Not sure why that wasn't a problem with ext4.

So I decided to simplify things. Instead of messing around with multiple partitions I made one big one and used a swap file instead of a swap partition. This offered a mild improvement but it's still a dog.

There must be a better way.

Oh and by the way... if you've ever installed BT5 to anything, you will find that the last 1% of "almost finished copying files" does indeed take for-fucking-ever. With the ext4 install, it took twenty minutes. With the ext2 install, it took from one hour to "screw it I'll check it in the morning". So be patient. And don't use a CD. Install it from USB.

Belated BT5 LiveDVD Review

When Backtrack5 came out, Blogger was down, which probably aggravated a lot of security blogtards because they wanted to get their two cents out to the masses as soon as possible.

I was one of them, but I didn't really have anything to say except I was glad that BT5 finally included JFS support.

Maybe "glad" is the wrong word. It was more like "no longer pissed off".

I mean—for fuck's sake—why have a shitload of disk forensics software that you can't use? And if it's too bloated to fit on a CD in the first place, what's the harm in bloating it a teensy bit more with a friggin' JFS kernel module? I mean Jeebus, I had to download a goddamned kiddie distro (Linux Mint) to get JFS support.

Suffice to say, I am now a bigger fan of BTx than I was a couple of months ago. And since it does IPv6 so well on my network, I will be using it all day long come World IPv6 Day.

But I still have my issues.

Their motto is "The quieter you become, the more you will be able to hear."

I have a corollary to that: "The more invisible you become, the more you will be able to see."

Hinky's First Rule of Invisibilty: Lose the hacker desktop.

I know it makes you fell like a L337 HAX0R, but anyone with an IQ of over 65 shoulder surfing you knows you're up to no good. And smarter people will start having paranoid delusions. Underneath all that cruft is a plain vanilla Ubuntu desktop. Use it. The best way to do that is after booting the DVD, change root's password, add a non-root account (I use "notroot") to the admin group, do "su notroot", then run startx.

If you're doing wireless, you should be able to fire up Wicd and get connected. I have noticed that in some environments you may have to fire up "dhclient wlan0" in a terminal to get an IPv4 address.

Why not run as root? Aside from the getting the plain desktop by default, you're going to run Chromium, which refuses to run as root. Open a terminal and enter "sudo apt-get install chromium-browser". After it's set up, open Chromium and install a better-looking theme. "Dolce&Gabanna" looks good with the default Ubuntu brownishness, as does "Desktop". Next, install Ad Block Plus for Chrome, because no one likes ads.

Sure, BT5 comes stock with NoScript, but you're booting from a DVD, so who cares if you get hacked? While you have Chromium open, check your IPv6 connectivity just for laffs.

Since your "notroot" account is in the "admin" group, you can sudo anything without entering a password. A lot of the tools from the Backtrack menu will automatically bump you to root, some won't. For the most part, running as "notroot" isn't too restrictive.

At this point I generally install mc (Midnight Commander) and my favorite non-vi editor jed, mostly because I've been running both for the last fifteen years and I can't live without them.

And of course, I need obfuscated-openssh if I want to "phone home" over ssh. You have to build it (BT5 already has build-essential, but it needs libssl-dev to compile). Get a USB drive and build it there and you'll have it next time you need it. If you're going to be hopping between 32 and 64bit versions of BT5, build the 32bit version since it works fine on both platforms.

If you're into wireless hacking, get yourself an Alfa 1 USB card (based on the RaLink RTL8187) and check out Vivek Ramachandran's megaprimer on SecurityTube. Lots of excellent information on wireless hacking with BT5 for newb and expert alike.

As a LiveDVD, I highly recommend BT5, but I doubt if I would ever install it as a desktop or notebook OS. It is an excellent tool that I would have used—instead of Linux Mint—to rescue my JFS drives back in March.