Recently, I had my hands on a problematic macbook pro that often freezes up for unknown reasons, then, just as I disabled its wireless device directly from the terminal as the device isn’t responsive when I tried to turn it on through its graphical interface, it freeze up so I have to hard reset it. When it boots up and after all the services were initialized came another problem, it’s not showing up the login screen anymore and the login window server just keeps on re-spawning. It only displayed a blue screen too with the wheel icon spinning endlessly.

I then restarted the macbook pro then start it on a single-user mode (press command + s on start-up) to find clues for the problem using the commands below.

tail -200 /var/log/system.log | more

Using the above command, I found out that loginWindow service keeps on exiting and throttling while hinting to an authorization file access problem, meaning it’s not able to read the authorization file for some reason. The system.log showed this error when I checked it:

Login Window Started Security Agent
Login Window - Returned from Security Agent
AuthorizationRef returned errAuthorizationDenied. Exiting

To fix this problem, replace the /private/etc/authorization file by the authorization~previous file that is also located on the same folder which is /private/etc. If you have an OS X install disk around then you can mount and copy the authorization file from /Volumes/osx/private/etc/authorization and replace the corrupted file.

Here’s an error I’ve encountered while trying to modify settings on a newly created virtual machine on VirtualBox 4. The error won’t also allow me to see the attached USB devices on the computer so it needs to be addressed if you are to use any USB peripherals you have. Below is the exact message displayed on the warning box.

"VirtualBox is not currently allowed to access USB devices. You can change this by adding your user to the 'vboxusers' group. Please see user manual for more detailed explanation."

Given the hint above, you will need to add your username to the vboxusers group created by VirtualBox during the installation.

usermod -Gvboxusers

After adding your username to the group, you need to logout and login again for the system privy changes to take effect.

That’s all about it.

I’m posting here the error I got when trying to install Aircrack-ng on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx with the compilation errors below. The error was caused by the libssl library not being installed on the system.

In file included from aircrack-ng.c:65:
crypto.h:12:26: error: openssl/hmac.h: No such file or directory
crypto.h:13:25: error: openssl/sha.h: No such file or directory
crypto.h:15:25: error: openssl/rc4.h: No such file or directory
crypto.h:16:25: error: openssl/aes.h: No such file or directory
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
In file included from aircrack-ng.c:69:
sha1-sse2.h: In function ‘calc_4pmk’:
sha1-sse2.h:140: error: implicit declaration of function ‘HMAC’
sha1-sse2.h:140: error: implicit declaration of function ‘EVP_sha1’
aircrack-ng.c: In function ‘crack_wpa_thread’:
aircrack-ng.c:3934: error: implicit declaration of function ‘EVP_md5’
make[1]: *** [aircrack-ng.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/rdc/Downloads/aircrack-ng-1.1/src'
make: *** [all] Error 2

Depending on the Linux distribution that you are using, you will need to install either of the following packages.

On Ubuntu Linux
Download the package that corresponds to your Ubuntu release from http://packages.ubuntu.com/ and install it.

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

On other Linux distributions, you need to install Openssl-devel

Once installed you can now try to compile Aircrack-ng source again.

That’s about it, good luck.

One good thing about having the latest Xbox360 slim game console is that it comes with a built-in wifi adapter that you can use to connect to Xbox Live network and play Xbox games online. This how-to will guide you on how to connect your Xbox360 to your home network using its integrated wireless network (wifi) adapter.

So here’s how to configure the Xbox360 slim with Kinect to connect to the internet through its wireless adapter. It is actually pretty easy to setup assuming you already have a working wireless router and internet connection in place.

1. Power up your Xbox360 console, and on the welcome screen, scroll to the right and look for Go Wireless.

2. Open Go wireless tab to see the available networks and select your wireless network name (SSID). You will also see there a tab for Wired network as Xbox360 Slim also comes with a built-in network card for those using wired network.

3. Enter your wireless network key and hit done button when finished. You will then be asked to continue, select Yes.

More on Setting up Wireless Connection on Xbox360 with Kinect