Solar's writeup for Crack Me If You Can 2012

Hi,

This is my personal writeup for my participation on team john-users.
Aleksey is working on a team writeup.

	Preparations

I was hoping to prepare much better, but in the end aside from the two
4-hour trial pseudo-contests I only found time to produce a contest
edition of JtR based on one previously prepared by magnum (thanks!) and
to slightly enhance my dirty hack master/slave Perl scripts that I
initially wrote the night before 2011's contest and did not touch since
then.  The contest edition of JtR was not terribly different from the
publicly available bleeding-jumbo - in fact, that's what it was based
on, and we'll likely be rolling some of the changes in there now.

	Hardware

Virtual cluster 1 (Russia): changing node count, up to 156 logical CPUs
by contest end.  Started with just four 8-core machines, peaked at 168
logical CPUs for approx. 1 hour during the contest, then some servers
had to be removed as the password cracking was adversely affecting their
primary function because of details of the virtualization setup on those
specific machines.  Some machines were dedicated to the contest (some
were CD/DVD/USB-booted, without hard drives).  Some others were servers
doing other work as well (so the password cracking was a lowest priority
task on them).  Overall, this probably included about 100 physical CPU
cores at about 2.5 GHz.

Virtual cluster 2 (US): similar to the above, setup about 12 hours into