Sunday, May 29, 2016

Unconventional way of studying things..

Sometimes I think that I studied lot of things in engineering text books, but don't have any clue on how the concepts/formula derived or how much analysis they put behind on those concepts.That research or hacking experience generally missing in text books. Sorry ..I am not saying school/college text books are bad. We ( as students) always needs to read text books .. but what I am trying to convey is... sometimes  textbooks are missing practical possibilities of  formulas or concepts.

There comes the importance of unconventional way of studying things..  or the hackers(in good sense) way of mastering the interested areas. Our schools and  colleges should give these kind of opportunities for students.

 Okay.....

These things came to my mind when I was watching the below video... 





She (http://jvns.ca )  explains the tool 'strace'

I tried 'strace' against our normal linux command 'ls'. This actually listed me amazing tracing log ...

 This is just an example .All concepts that we are studying/hearing should have unconventional way of mastering it or we should at least try to develop it !!!

None of the computer text books might have taught you on, what actually happens behind the 'ls' command. But the unconventional way is, find out some tool which can list the activities behind 'ls' and mastering what is it doing.... obviously it is very difficult, but  it gives you the full concepts behind the 'ls' upto very low/machine level.

Unconventional way of studying things opens opportunities which are not described in most of the text books That gives you the confidence to question the actual concepts or current implementation.

But it will have some initial difficulties and extra research  out of your text books or tutorials. But I am sure that there will be always some supporting tools/methods which somebody might have implemented already or you can implement such a method if it's not there!! :-)

Below is the screenshot of 'strace' on  'ls' in command line



some research on each system calls behind means ..











LXR Cross Referencer to read linux kernel source code

LXR Cross Referencer

This is the best place to refer one who like to know about linux kernel. http://lxr.free-electrons.com/ LXR Cross Referencer, usually known as LXR, is a general-purpose source code indexer and cross-referencer that provides web-based browsing of source code, with links to the definition and usage of any identifier.

I also found the following site is very helpful to start with linux kernels http://kernelnewbies.org/FirstKernelPatch

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Installed wireshark for Networking package analysis

WIRESHARK

Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer. This is actually nice tool which gives opportunity to analyze  and understand different network layers. Each packet  traffic is diplayed when we start browsing a website.Its very easy to install in Ubuntu using 'Ubuntu Software center'. After installing I used the command and changed to root. I am not sure any alternative way for getting my 'wlan0' wifi internet without changing to root.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common

started wireshark with 'sudo wireshark'