When I first started using cygwin I didn’t really see much sense in having X windows, within MS Windows. I think that’s because for those of us who became familiar with Linux via desktop environments had limited exposure to the origins of X and some of the things it was intended to achieve - distributed GUI applications on client machines, run off a central server. So when you ssh into a computer, and they both have X servers, and you’re using the -X switch to enable port forwarding, you will get the GUI on your computer, while the program runs on the server.

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Cygwin doesn’t automatically update itself, and doesn’t provide a command line utility to do so. In order to get updates, and install or remove software, you need to run the installer again. Occasionally, you will also need to get an updated copy of the installer. Fortunately, all this can be automated:

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As one might expect, taking a voluntary redundancy, job hunting, and getting up to speed in a new role leaves very little time for blogging. Now that I’m able to do so again, I’ve decided that instead of focusing on new programs for a while, I’m going to go through and update previous guides. Cygwin is a moving target, and there have been changes to how windows and cygwin usernames are mapped to each other, and other updates. So first off, installing cygwin…

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When you next upgrade, if you have installed a package that depends on libusb, you will get a prompt to download and install libusb-win32. The popup contains the download link, but if you don’t want to retype it, libusb-win32 is available here.

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As part of pentesting your site, or that of a client, you will need to find all as much detail out about a domain and it’s IP ranges as possible, or at least demonstrate what can be found via automated tools. Typically this is done through dig, or a bruteforcing tool like dnsenum or fierce.pl. Dig is installed with the bind-utils cygwin package, and it straightforward to use (type ‘dig any domainname.com’, or look at man dig to get started).

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This is a quick note to share a useful tool by Vidar ‘koala_man’ Holen, www.shellcheck.net. ShellCheck is a site that allows you to paste in your bash scripts and receive automated feed back on common errors and security holes.

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