hons.un-excogitate.org

No Net Leads to Conversations and SRC Dissection

The labs proxy server had a hdd failure yesturday. The poor box was feebly printing out HDD I/O Errors on the console in a vain attempt to warn us that it was about to reach some sort of critical point. That point must have occured around the same time the whole lab had a brief-power out.

Anyway, this left the lab internet-less so my day of planned research and reading was reduced to conversations with pete about AMD64 and JtR. Which led me to another look inside the details of this password cracking tool. (READ ON FOR TECHNICAL SUMMARY)

What i don't know about Mandrake-AMD64
What AMD64 mode does this installation run in? Long 64-bit mode? Long Compatibility mode? Legacy Mode? (i really hope not the latter)

Pete made the observation that OpenOffice(OO) loaded just as quick on his single CPU axp2400 if not quicker, compared to this Dual Opteron 244 (2xOpteron's at 1.8GHz). I was quick to suggest that it's because the installed OO was still the 32-bit version, that is, the packaged OO that came with the MandrakeAMD64 installation files was just the default 32-bit version. So does that also lead on to imply that this installation of Mandrake forces the Opteron to run in Compatibility mode? (ie: 64-bit OS with the ability to run existing 16/32-bit x86 applications.) .. even if OO is running as a 32-bit app, with the extra benefits of a SCSI drive and much faster memory system, it should still run faster on an Opteron than on a vanilla AthlonXP. Is this because the mandrake kernel is still not truly optimised for AMD64? Or are a lot of the core linux libraries still running in 32-bit mode?

I'm wondering what sort of affect this will have on JtR running as a 32-bit compiled binary vs a 64-bit compiled binary? .. Will all the dependant libraries be 64-bit?