You may encounter the following error on installation:
Installation ended prematurely because of an error
when trying to install 32-bit or 64-bit qlikView on Windows 7. With or without UAC (User Access Control), installation fails.
Suggestions to (re-)install vbscript.dll using regsvr32 vbscript.dll in the c:\windows\system32 (64-bit equivalent) directory didn’t help.
(more…)
VMWare Plug-in Error - Cannot access virtual machine console
As the VMWare plugin does not work with Mozilla‘s Firefox 3.6.6 – and as it cannot launch a virtual machine console – you’ll have to use a workaround. This post results from the error I kept receiving:
Cannot access virtual machine console. The request timed out.
The paths are applicable to your OS and version – the below is for Vista 64-bit. You can add a direct link to the VMConsole on your desktop (much easier, actually). (more…)
Windows Vista and 7, if not before, allow symbolic links — mklink is your command-line friend!
Creates a symbolic link. (more...)
Assuming you have a Windows machine and you interact with Linux boxen at any stage, chances are high that you have used and interacted with PuTTY at one stage or another. That beautiful, less than 2 sec, 444K download of a tool (currently at version 0.60 beta) allows you to SSH, COM-direct, RSH, Telnet etc from the desktop. Both examples below relate to MySQL port tunneling.
Running on a proper machine (or even a Windows with Cygwin or a Mac Terminal) allows you to quickly tunnel a session to a remote server: (more…)
Samba. Whopping goodness. Here are a few notes that help in the setup – from user creation, to directory settings etc
This blog post contains a few lessons learnt and thus by extension a migration plan from a Windows file server to a Samba-based one running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I look at users, system vs smbpasswd user creation and linking (set that up in Webmin before you start, as well as for groups), share setups, general permissions and some very basic troubleshooting (as there weren’t many troubles, just headaches.) (more…)
So the Security Summit 2010 has come to an end. Featuring speakers such as Moxie Marlinspike, Joe Grand and Jeremiah Grossman (again), it’s a pity to say that there wasn’t much new that was presented. With repeated concerns about input- and output-validation, as the OWASP Top 10 for 2010 highlight and were used as a repeated example, and a call for a holistic approach to a company’s security posture, the idea of making the thought (and practice) of security part of the organisation’s culture came through over and over again. (more…)
It’s quite simple, really: POP3 (Exchange, dovecot etc) you know, IMAP (Exchange, dovecot, courier etc) you know — so this is just a recap, right? You know how to telnet into the machine — in Vista or Windows 7, you may need to install it separately using “Add/Remove Programs”, or just use Putty in Telnet mode… otherwise, apt-get install telnet if it’s not on your machine (or yum install telnet)
POP3:
telnet SERVER 110 (more...)
Uncheck Excel's Ignore other applications' DDE and you're done!
You double-click an attachment in Outlook – or Thunderbird – or any mail client or third-party client, for that matter – and you can’t open the file in Office (in my case Excel 2007, but this works for Excel 2003 as well).
But instead of the file, you get a notification telling you that Windows cannot find “filename“. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search for a file, click the Start button and then click search.
Fear not – there’s hope. (more…)
Windows XP – got to love it. We have all reached the spot where we need to activate XP over the phone for some reason or another.
On the activation screen, there’s a phone number – which does not work. It’s a matter of finding the right one, though – an a simple Google. Yahoo! or Bing search doesn’t return the result quickly. (more…)
Local: CTRL+ALT+DEL
Remote: CTRL+ALT+END
Local: Start -> Shutdown -> Restart
Remote: Start-> Run -> shutdown -t 0 -r
I just keep forgetting it…
You’re stuck on a Windows box. But you don’t want to install MinGW32? Can’t dual-boot to run Ubuntu or Debian on your Windows machine for some for that GNU happiness that sed, groff, wget, whois and all those happy apps bring with it? (more…)
Now you get to kick back - a dog's life!
It’s up – the full network and business system audit and asset tracking service by synch.cc, tracking hardware, software and assets using a background scheduler – more at systemsaudit.co.za!
A systems auditing service with clean reporting and charts like this has never been easier!
Had to just add a plug for it here, too 
And the picture of the puppy was just too cool to resist!
Microsoft today announced service packs for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but declined to set a release date or a schedule for getting a beta in users’ hands.
There’s no concrete roadmap (or tar one, for that matter) yet, but it’s good to see that, if Redmond sticks to it, the 22 month deployment cycle will be revised with a view toward tied-off user systems patched to baselevels. Microsoft suggests minor patches and hotfixes to be included in this roll-out.
The reason for the overlap between the service packs is the code-base overlap between the two operating systems – remind me to blog about the beauty of Windows 2008, or “how I installed Windows 2008 Enterprise in 6 minutes”.
We should be able to expect (unofficially) the roll-out from October 2010 onwards, with a focus on end November 2010.
Based on registry entries found in the base Windows 7 deployment, there are eligibility registry keys that may prevent the service pack to install — but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as it’s only linked to registered and legal software…
Bigger, better - more compliant?
While so many corporates are still locked into a Windows XP / IE6 platform, Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) looms on the horizon, “now even more compliant” (don’t you just love that: “not quite, but getting there…”)
In an effort to make Windows XP finally disappear from the landscape through a ‘force migration’ to Windows 7, Microsoft has released a statement relating to the interoperability between the legacy, no longer supported (but so-much-more-stable -than-Windows-98-and-Windows-ME (meh!)) Windows 98 and the next incarnation of their now choice-based Internet Explorer (remember – in Europe, free choice of web browser now required by the EU). (more…)
A Swiss firm, Objectif Sécurité, makers of Ophcrack_Office (for Word and Excel files) and Ophcrack Open Source (over at sourceforge.net), has tweaked their application to crack XP passwords with up to 14 characters on a Steady State Drive interface (think of large, light, laptop drive using Flashdrive technology) through rainbow tables (pre-calculated hashes) in an average of 5.3s.
Seek times on the SSD seem to be the big tweak here:
Oechslin has fitted an elderly Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with an SSD and the optimised tables. This system can, with only a 75% CPU utilisation, crack a 14 digit password with special characters, in an average of 5.3 seconds. Oechslin says that, worst case, it should be able to search arithmetically through 300 billion passwords per second, a speed that is a factor of 500 faster than an Elcomsoft cracker supported by a modern Tesla GPU from NVIDIA.
The attack (Operation Aurora) on around 20 companies in the US, including Google, Adobe, Juniper Networks and others using the zero-day exploit of Internet Explorer is partly linked to social engineering — as the carefully crafted emails were plausibly created and structured, users bought into it. Once the machine was owned after the payload was released, the affected machine would contact a Command and Control (C&C) server that would send back specific instructions based on Workgroup name and machine environment (OS etc), accepting and transmitting data via a home-made encryption based piggy-backed onto the 443 port — typically reserved for the HTTP SSL transfer of data. (more…)
You can get the latest stable version of a Windows compile of nginx (0.7.64) here.
Setup is quite straight forward; you’ll need the php-cgi.exe downloaded (copy the libmysql*.dll to the Windows system directory – quickest but dirtiest solution) and tied in; I assume that you can download and run the mysql application yourself?
You may need to run the startup as a batch file (f: below is the drive installed on, php has been extracted into the php under nginx as you can see). PHP is set to listen on port 9000, which nginx interfaces requests to below. (more…)
They ran a comparison of virus removal software in Oct ’09. Full results are here. Question is, why not compare latest versions throughout? Their methodology (a “work in progress”) suggests that the vendos provide their software, which is updated “as per the manual”… (more…)
Tunneling via Putty is quite well documented. In Putty (the link points to the lastest version), create a new session.
In the SSH section, make sure compression is enabled (for SSH v2 – you shouldn’t be using anything earlier, anyway).
In the SSH=>Tunnel section , set the Source port to 127.0.0.2:3389, and the target to SERVER:3389 (where SERVER corresponds to your upstream Windows Terminal Server).
Once the connection has been created, and you’ve logged into the Putty session, connect to 127.0.0.2 on the local machine and you should be prompted by the remote machine.
This is all as a result of the “localhost” restriction in RDP sessions – however, there is a patch.
Simple as π
Do the SVN server Trac relates to have to reside on the same as the Trac installation?
At present, alas it seems so. (If you’re new to Trac and need a one-stop-shop of commands, look here.)
http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/2828 points to and abstracts http://trac.edgewall.org/ticket/493
Seems like Trac and remote SVN is not happening yet, though SVN replication is an option… There is also an obscure comment some two years ago about a remote plugin, which was at alpha, but the project seems to have since disappeared/moved…
Sigh…
