Asking, here, you can interview an entire 'community'

Great advice, there.  Sums it all up, nicely.  Even IF you fail the first time (MOST but not all of us did), it opens your eyes, and you'll definitely nail it on a second go, because you'll be confident.  But if you follow cd1zz, ajohnson and MaXe's advice, you'll do well.

I'll second UNIX on all counts.  And likewise, if you need help, drop me a line.

Ultimately, dupe as much as you can, both from the course, and from outside of it.  The more you understand, and can do without too much difficulty, the better.  

Practice, practice, practice.

As you replied to UNIX's post, before I posted - By 'different techniques', try to find OTHER ways to exploit flaws that are noted in the course materials or what you work with from exploit-db, beyond simply using the publicly available exploits.  Also, try to learn how to do things for yourself, rather than simply mimicking / copying exactly what someone has done.  Try to accomplish the same thing, without simply doing exactly as they did.  This applies to both coding and non-coding exercises (such as some of the web exploitation stuff).

Great to see you stayed after it.  Congrats, and great job!!!

^^ +1

Congrats, UNIX!  I'm fairly certain you'll 'enjoy' that prize!   

Thinking that would likely be best / easiest answered, if asked to the Offensive Security folks...

That said, however, we might be able to give you a better idea, if you tell is what the nic's are (wired and wireless) in that device (rather than us having to do that, just to give you an answer.)

What will likely help us answer, as well, is if you boot to the Live BackTrack distro, currently, and give us output from "lspci" at the command prompt.

^ +2

As always, looking forward to seeing what they've done with it.

I think unicityd's method is likely what they want.

@H1tM0nk3y...  That's why I put my extra 2 bits in, at the end, and noted adding values in the array.  You could simply create an array with all the values in order, then call from the positions, etc.

But really, I think unicityd's method is what they probably wanted. 

Depends on the language...  It's simple in python...

As of version 2.3

bin(x)
Convert an integer number to a binary string. The result is a valid Python expression. If x is not a Python int object, it has to define an __index__() method that returns an integer.

You'd just need to strip off the first two characters of the return, such as:



Now, we'll assume that the bin() uses multiplication / division inside of itself, so if you really wanted to do this, without ANY, you'd likely need to create an array of values, during runtime, where you GIVE it the values, and parse the array to return them.  That's if he's TRULY not allowing the use of the builtin functions of python to do the work...

Winners have been announced (courtesy of Twitter):

http://pen-testing.sans.org/blog/pen-testing/2013/01/18/holiday-challenge-2012-winners-and-answers

Well, it IS useful, and I recommend it to a lot of folks I know, as a starting point for their labs.    BTW, glad you're doing better, and good to see more of you, on here, again, Thomas!

Welcome!

Have a look around the forums here, for posts about the live distros (such as DE-ICE, metasploitable, etc - there are MANY threads about them) and begin learning and practicing with those.

Also look into books on building labs, such as:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1597494259

to give you further ideas.

That sounds much more thought out.