A1
Contents
My Fox Is On Fire
A lesson in opensource exploitation.
The Work
Hardware & Software
Intel Pentium 4 2.00 GHz 512 MB of RAM ~6GB Free Space
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 w/ Service Pack 2
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003
Cygwin
Moztools
IRC Client
IM Client
Web Browser
Zip Utility
Method
In order to complete this task I utilized the method outlined in Sherman Fernandes' "Building the Fox".
Reflecting on the Fox
"Building" an application such as this was not an activity I had given any thought to prior to this course. I have never really worked with opensource projects at any level, but could not pass up on this opportunity based on lack of experience.
Prior to even starting to research the build I went out and purchased a mobile rack and 80GB HD to utilize for the course. With the help of Tom I was able to install Ubuntu and eventually VMware to run Win XP wherever I happened to be at the time. Unfortunately this proved to be an exercise in frustration as every new pc I seemed to go to simply wouldn't boot my HD - to my home I go.
At the start of this exercise I had literally no idea of where to start, all previous "builds" that I had done consisted of:
1. Click .exe 2. Click "Next" 5 or 6 Times 3. Poof - you have software
Noticing that the deadline was looming, I headed to where any other self-respecting procrastinator would go - other people's work. After flipping through a few people's pages, including the popular user Elichak's page, I visited Sherman. Having worked with Sherman before, I knew that we had similar home configurations, and as a result hopefully would have similar steps for building the fox. Thankfully I was right, and the steps outlined in Sherman's method worked very well on my home pc. The one error I encountered during the build:
was due to an oversight in the setup.bat file wherein Sherman had added a further file structure to his moztools that I had not implemented, a quick change got me running again. The build itself took ~2 hours, with the matrix style goop flying across my Cygwin window at an alarming rate.
