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| 09 Sep 2012 05:54 AM |
So today I got bored and took out the USB Drive we got for use in school and school only. It's a 16 gigabyte USB 2.0 Cruzer by Sandisk.
Getting irked by the fact that I cannot use it for 'anything' else, I made it my quest to install a full ( Not a live ) linux OS onto the Usb Drive while making it completely invisible when using it as a file storage container. With the linux os I can bypass the school's slow windows7-on-2gb with a whitelist of sites and freely paint in gimp or browse the infonet.
To format the drive, I used a xubuntu live cd and my computer. I plugged the usb drive into my compter and booted from the xubuntu drive. Not having done this before, I just kinda guessed through the installation.
First, I selected the third option, so I could partition my usb drive instead of a automated install to my comp's drive. I selected the usb drive and began by deleting all partitions. I then messed up horribly and read a quick guide on ubuntu partitioning. In order to get the desired illusion of a emtpy usb drive, I had to make the first partition fat32. I set the size to only 2000 megabytes, to leave room for the distro.
After that, I made a ext4 partition with a size of 400 megabytes. This is to house GRUB so I can boot xubuntu. I set the mount point to /boot and made sure that it was a primary partition. Otherwise it might mess up.
I then made a second ext4 partition, but this time with a size of 10000 megabytes, this was to hold the entire OS. While it may seem small, xubuntu seems to be happy enough in it. I set the mount to / so that the OS will install into this partition.
Finally, I made a third partition with the remaining megabytes (~3500) and made it a swap partition to use as ( I think ) virtual memory.
After that, I ran the install and rebooted my computer. I removed the live cd and booted from the usb. It's fast enough to do basic tasks and you can easily bypass the school computer's entire hard-drive with it. The only thing that needs to be set is the computer's boot priority so that it will boot from the usb drive. And if the teacher comes to examine the flash drive, it will appear only as a 2gb fat32 drive on their computer. This is due to ext4 being unreadable by windows, making the fat32 partition the only thing being read.
So anyways guys, hoped you enjoyed this little breif tutorial /slice of scripter's life bit. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 08:45 AM |
That's epic, but wouldn't they know that it should be 16gb in size? Only 2gb is left, kinda suspicious?
"If I didn't want people to kill themselves, I wouldn't troll." -Corim, master sword fighter |
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fliboys
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| Joined: 26 Mar 2010 |
| Total Posts: 5559 |
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| 09 Sep 2012 08:56 AM |
Unless it's like a technology teacher, probably not.
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| 09 Sep 2012 11:13 AM |
| I've done this before. It's awesome to pull up a penguin-shaped USB with some Linux distro (ironic?) and to suddenly have everything there. IMO xubuntu is great for this. |
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Tarabukka
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| Joined: 18 Jan 2011 |
| Total Posts: 394 |
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| 09 Sep 2012 11:41 AM |
| The firmware on the computers lets you boot straight from a USB stick? What a brainless sysadmin... |
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stravant
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| Joined: 22 Oct 2007 |
| Total Posts: 2893 |
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| 09 Sep 2012 11:56 AM |
"with a whitelist of sites"
Did you actually bypass that? I'm guessing since you didn't mention it you didn't, that's usually implemented on the school network ISP side, not on the school's computers. |
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pighead10
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| Joined: 03 May 2009 |
| Total Posts: 10341 |
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| 09 Sep 2012 12:02 PM |
@stravant
In my school they have two filters - one which is done by their ISP (the county council), and another which is done purely on the school's network, which is almost always a wired network. All you need to do to bypass the school's network filters is use a wireless connection. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 01:39 PM |
My school uses ifl dawt net for their filtering.
Difference is they're not a bunch of chumps who should be cleaning toilets, they know their stuff.
VPN connections are banned, almost anything over the LAN is blocked and it is now impossible with a recent (and for once, very late) update preventing the running of exe's as admin without an admin account.
Even an HTML file with the word proxy in it will be insta-filtered.
"If I didn't want people to kill themselves, I wouldn't troll." -Corim, master sword fighter |
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| 09 Sep 2012 03:29 PM |
So to answer all ye questions:
@Megamatrix Our computer teacher is a russian guy who watchs soccer while we work on incredibly simple projects. I don't think he knows much about computers and will probably just shrug off the limited space.
@Tech More like iconic ( Get it? ). Also, xubuntu is absolutely amazing for the task. It's the perfect blend of flavors for when it comes to jamming stuff into 10gbs of space while still looking elegant.
@Tara I can't see how they would disable the BIOs when kids are almost always messing up the laggy install of windows 7.
@Stravant Sorry, I was really tired when I wrote the above. I actually ment to say that the teachers are able to monitor any activity using a really simple program which allows them to remote access your computer in a blink of an eye. I "bypassed" it by just booting from my usb drive instead of the traditional hard drive.
I'm pretty sure they are using a modified or hacked version of internet explorer which reports logs of browser activity.
Also, I'm on my moms computer with the usb drive. It's working fluidly and I've gotten chrome to work. I had to plug in a Wifi Adapter to download the drivers though. Since the adapter is the size of my thumb, I can just plug it in for a breif while to download the drivers for any computer and I'll never need to do it again.
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lucas668
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| Joined: 18 Jun 2008 |
| Total Posts: 6183 |
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| 09 Sep 2012 04:28 PM |
| My school's filtering is terrible, to bypass it all I have to do is connect to the site using www1 path instead of www. Lol. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 04:30 PM |
Solution: Download personal hotspot app, put phone in backpack, make it connect to supa fast VPN and turn off all other functions.
That's what I do, anyways. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 05:11 PM |
@Tech Why would I need to do that? A subway is next door to the school and so are a few other wifi hotspots. Besides, the school's wifi dosen't block anything anyhow, so I can just connect to that. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 05:26 PM |
| Well if you had that option it's obviously better but in my case my school is literally in the middle of a giant field...so, yeah. I'd love to leave my Raspberry Pi behind so I had remote access to my school's WiFi but I think it's too risky. |
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| 09 Sep 2012 05:34 PM |
| You have a raspberry pi? I'm jelly. I want a MK802 and a Raspberry PI.. |
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| 10 Sep 2012 06:36 AM |
My school is clueless. They block certain sites but I can still access them as long as it has a get request on the end of the URL. Images won't show up unless the same but thats why I use JavaScript to do it for me :D
pie.com = blocked pie.com?lol = not blocked
They also don't block access to the direct command prompt executable. |
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| 10 Sep 2012 02:59 PM |
@Strav: At my school There are various filtered and unfiltered internal proxy servers. The computers obviously are pre-configured to use a filtered proxy. Thankfully for me one of my teachers wanted access to a filtered site so I watched as the technician put in the unrestricted proxy address. Now with FF or Opera I can browse the internet freely.
As a side note, the techs screwed something up and as a result unfiltered access to the internet when directly connecting to it is now possible. Goodness knows if they even know about that. |
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| 10 Sep 2012 04:18 PM |
| The people at school know nothing at computers and leave millions of security issues in them. I managed to get past the website filter and download Slender. |
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| 10 Sep 2012 05:33 PM |
| that's cool. At my school when i go to install firefox it says i need to input the admin pass, but then i just x that out and it goes ahead and installs anyways. Youtube oddly isn't blocked this year, but the flash player isn't installed and i get some error while installing it, so I can't do that. Otherwise there isn't much security aside from the web filter. |
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