Questions[payload](server)

I'm doing an academic work where I have to find vulnerabilities in CentOS and show how to take advantage of those same vulnerabilities.

I'm no hacker and I'm finding this task to be of great difficulty, that is, I see all the security alerts and their descriptions but no explanation of how to take advantage.

Maybe I'm being a little naive but all I want to know is if there is any tool I can use to show that CentOS 5.0 vulnerability XPTO exists and to show it "working".

If possible something like CVE-2007-0001 exploit tool, CVE-2007-0002 payload and so on.

Thanks.

I have a Dell 1950 Poweredge server with two Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.33 GHZ and 16 GB of RAM under Gentoo Linux. I'm running heavy calculation task which I don't know how they were implemented ...

Top gives my partial infos (%CPU, ...) but I don't know if the script is running on the 2 CPUs

I would like to monitor both CPU load/activity (like top does for the entire system) to see if the script takes advatage of the dual CPU or not ?

Except recoding the script, how to optimize the payload for 2 CPU ?