Using Terminator to Hack Efficiently

edited June 2012 in Tech & Games
Here's a short but sweet guide on hacking more effectively using an application called Terminator. It comes with the latest release of Backtrack but you can easily install it on another distro if you want to. Lets say you're cracking someone's WEP key - this requires about 3 terminal windows open simultaneously to work properly, as you'll be capturing IV's with one, replaying ARP requests with another, etc. Sure, you COULD open other terminal windows, or even hit CTRL+SHIFT+T to open new tabs in the same terminal, but it can be annoying having to flick between each one separately. If only there was a way to organize your terminal windows nicely on the screen with minimal effort...

Introduce Terminator.

Terminator acts as any regular terminal window would, except when you right click on it, this menu drops down. Notice the buttons "Split Horizontally" and "Split Vertically"? Well, clicking on these can do exactly what it says on the tin. Check out the screenshot below for an example!

ruUNZ.png

Just as an example, I've split the terminator session into three. At the top I've got airodump-ng running, the "top" command running bottom-left, and the bottom-right shows me typing some stuff using Vim. Imagine the earlier example of having three terminal windows open while cracking a WEP key, capturing IV's and replaying ARP requests. Yeah, that would look great using Terminator :D

ep3j8.png

Like I said, a short but sweet guide on using such a handy tool to help you to hack more efficiently.

Comments

  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    edited June 2012
    I use stuff like this extensive. The technical term for apps like this is "terminal multiplexer"

    There's a console app i love that does this called tmux - useful when SSHed into a machine or you don't have X11 installed
  • edited June 2012
    I use stuff like this extensive. The technical term for apps like this is "terminal multiplexer"

    There's a console app i love that does this called tmux - useful when SSHed into a machine or you don't have X11 installed

    That's pretty cool, I've never used tmux before but I'll have to check it out. Obviously tools like this are useful whether you're hacking or just USING a Unix OS, but I figured I'd write about the hacking side of things to make it more interesting :thumbsup:

    tmux runs entirely in the console then? Meaning that without even having an x server, you can still split your console into multiple sections?
  • SlartibartfastSlartibartfast Global Moderator -__-
    edited June 2012
    It's completely curses based (so no X11) it does what terminator does + some neat background processing stuff and other fancy session management tricks.

    tbo i only use it for screen-splitting though. you might have heard of GNU Screen - tmux is the BSD version of that (but better).

    All in all i find BSD software to be a lot better designed and written.
  • RemadERemadE Global Moderator
    edited June 2012
    I will be getting back into Linux related stuff now I have the time and WiFi down my road. I'm a tad grey-hat when it comes to this sorta stuff. Seems that Backtrack is always getting updated lol. Shame it hates my regular Toshiba L-500 Satellite Pro laptop.
Sign In or Register to comment.