Sven Welzel — Der Blog

Category: code

  • clamav 0.94 finally reaches end of life

    clamav finally sent the end-of-life payload yesterday evening – 0.96 is the current version, so it’s been a good run 🙂

    Possible symptons you experienced:

    • Repeated notifications:WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-
    • All freshclam mirrors are ignored
    • Your mailq fills up with detailed MAILER-DAEMON messages referring to the End-of-Life nature of clamav 0.94
    • (… add your own here…)

    But they warned they’d do this in October 2009:

    Starting from 15 April 2010 our CVD will contain a special signature which disables all clamd installations older than 0.95 – that is to say older than 1 year.

    This move is needed to push more people to upgrade to 0.95 .
    We would like to keep on supporting all old versions of our engine, but unfortunately this is no longer possible without causing a disservice to people running a recent release of ClamAV.
    The traffic generated by a full CVD download, as opposed to an incremental update, cannot be sustained by our mirrors. (more…)

  • Remote Desktop vs Local Desktop

    CTRL+ALT+DEL

    Local: CTRL+ALT+DEL

    Remote: CTRL+ALT+END

    RESTART

    Local: Start -> Shutdown -> Restart

    Remote: Start-> Run -> shutdown -t 0 -r

    I just keep forgetting it…

  • If you’re itching for those GNU apps from Linux on Windows…

    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…)

  • synch.cc has just launched systemsaudit.co.za

    You deserve to take a break and let the synch.cc system audit service take care of things for you
    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!

  • Step-by-step virus disassembly

    Over at SkullSecurity they’ve done a great job of a step-by-step disassembly of the Energizer Trojan using IDA. Using a sterile/insight environment, they go through the code to give you an insight into the workings of “obfuscation” (or lack thereof), backdoor management (on port 7777) and more.

    Good beginner’s intro with pretty pictures 🙂

  • OpenSSL v1 released after 11 years of development

    After a long, hard struggle of 11 years, which started with these two entries:

    23-Dec-1998: Released OpenSSL 0.9.1c
    23-Dec-1998: Official start of the OpenSSL project

    we are now at the point of “a major release” with v1.0.0 being made available. Fighting tooth and nail not to be a 1.0.0, we’ve seen iterations such as 0.9.8d to 0.9.8n (taking a page out of Google’s book of running pre-release?), though, to be fair, they started at 0.9.1c.

    Go on, then — go and get it!

  • Afrigator.com down?

    No access to afrigator.com, afrigator.biz and blog.afrigator.com – whole system, it seems… and no news on their twitter feed…

    Just early for Earth Hour at 20.30pm today?

    It’s resolving, but not responding…

    PING afrigator.com (69.162.110.42) from coolserver : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 42-110-162-69.static.reverse.lstn.net (69.162.110.42): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=276 ms
64 bytes from 42-110-162-69.static.reverse.lstn.net (69.162.110.42): icmp_seq=2 ttl=47 time=264 ms

    On a different note, amazing images of Cape Town and surrounds by Andre van Rooyen at The Fairest Cape

  • KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 Document Indexing and Indexer issues (SOLVED)

    Argh. Well, it’s really not quite out of the box, at least on Ubutu Server 9.10 (after reinstallations required after initial failures…), so this is just a selection of the fixes that made the import and indexing of the 160 000 files at 102GB possible. So for KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 Commercial Edition (the same holds true for the Community Edition), the following should help:

    1. Use the best-practice advice when doing the local file system import – rather do 10 000 files at a time rather than 100 000 at once. Really. Trust me. It defeats the whole idea of just running a batch job. Completely. As you’d expect the option of saying – just transfer all data in directory X. But alas, that doesn’t work. So do it in batches. Manually.
    2. Tika Apache Indexer for Lucene – not so much on PDFs, Docs, XLS or PPT files. Install catdoc (which includes catppt and xls2csv) and pdftotext (which you’ll find in xpdf-utils).
      1. apt-get install catdoc pdftotext
      2. modify knowledgetree/search2/indexing/extractors/TikaApacheExtractor.inc.php and comment out the mime types that are affected above from the returned array in getSupportedMimeTypes() – PDF, XLS, DOC and PPT: (more…)

  • KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 reinstallation site startup failure (SOLVED)

    OpenOffice.org startup failures, indexing issues and other niggles forced me to re-install KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 Commercial Edition (the same holds true for the Community Edition) more than once during setup. I was met with this delicious error notification which killed all further activity on the site (and prevented the startup of /setup/wizard/, control.php, browse.php, login.php — well, everything, really):

    Warning: include_once(DB/.php) [function.include-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/pear/DB.php on line 371

    Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘DB/.php’ for inclusion (include_path=’/usr/share/knowledgetree/search2:/usr/share/knowledgetree/ktapi:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/xmlrpc-2.2/lib:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/simpletest:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/Smarty:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/pear:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/ZendFramework/library:.:/usr/local/zend/share/ZendFramework/library:/usr/local/zend/share/pear:/usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/pear’) in /usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/pear/DB.php on line 371

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /usr/share/knowledgetree/thirdparty/pear/DB.php:371) in /usr/share/knowledgetree/config/dmsDefaults.php on line 299 (more…)

  • KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 – OpenOffice startup script (SOLVED)

    Having repeatedly received the error that OpenOffice.org is not running on the standard installation of KnowledgeTree 3.7.0.2 Commercial Edition (the same holds true for the Community Edition), further investigation was necessary. The key area of investigation must focus on the dmsctl.sh file, particularly from line 47 onwards, but more of that further down below. This is on Ubuntu (9.10 Server).

    First, do a few quick checks:

    1. Is the process running? Anywhere?
      Check whether OpenOffice.org is actually running, using a simple netstat -pant| grep 8100 — as the default installation is running with a headless OpenOffice.org on port 8100. You should see something like:

      tcp  0 0 127.0.0.1:8100 0.0.0.0:*  LISTEN  9655/soffice.bin

      For the fix in question, it wasn’t giving any results on this check (sudo the commands where required, but you knew that already), which means that it’s not running properly. Also,

      ps -aux | grep soffice

      gave no results, indicating non-functioning backend software.
       (more…)

  • Cracking passwords fast with rainbow tables on SSD

    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.

    (more…)

  • jQuery UI new 1.8 FINAL release imminent

    So twelve days after jQuery UI 1.8RC3 was released, which followed the release of the previous release candidate – 1.8RC2 after less than 2 weeks, the release of the final jQuery UI 1.8 is only a few days (moments?) away – seeing that 1.8RC3 is the final version before final release. In itself, the UI RC3 release has a huge set of fixes built into it already (listed below, as presented on the release notes) so the rest from here on in will be final testing and tweaking. It’s over at http://jqueryui.com/ (more…)

  • Excel 2007 password, cell and sheet protection removal – unprotect/remove password easily

    Elmcomsoft has a variety of really good brute-force and dictionary-based password attacks on the full Office suite, including a distributed version to run in the cloud (which I wrote about some time ago). As cool as the software is, it doesn’t allow the removal of cell-based or sheet-based passwords (which kinda sucks), and the password.xla file which seems to be the big thing from staxx.com requires a whole whack of goodies to run on Office 2007 natively.

    Enter the same macro that McGimpsey & Associates published in 2004 (reproduced here as per their GPL licence) that removes all internal Excel Passwords: (more…)

  • jQuery UI 1.8RC2 is out

    As you may know already, RC2 for version 1.8 of jQuery UI for jQuery 1.4 is out, heralding the final release of jQuery UI 1.8 “in the next few days” based on the What’s New post. You can link through directly from http://jquery.com/ or http://jqueryui.com/ — or get the deep-link download here.

    But you knew that already! 🙂

  • Afrigator internal recent items broken?

    Afrigator.com (Blogs, Videos, Social Media etc) seems to have issues on the cross-linking of author to posting – cross-linking internally and referencing incorrectly.

    Internal linking and cross-linking
    I'm sure they're working on the references, working to correct.

    I’m sure they’re on it.

    In this example, Gaming SA hasn’t posted since Dec 2008, but is being referenced for a post from Feb 2010. THe top link goes to the site directly, and a framed Afrigator in the first and second title, respectively…

    Oh well, it’s weekend 🙂

  • HTML5 takes over from Google Gears

    Google Gears is reportedly being relegated to the bench by the Campus (Google, that is, as mentioned in a range of comments before) in order to allow the fun-filled featues of HTML5 to replace the functionality required. Makes sense – why have a fully fledged custom system when a specification exists that covers most of the features that Google Gears encompasses. Also, this makes sense with the editors for the HTML5 spec (of at least the API vocabulary for HTML5) being Ian Hickson from Google, Inc. and David Hyatt of Apple, Inc. fame. (BTW – there’s a good presentation on the features from GoogleIO: GoogleIO presentation on Gears vs HTML5) (more…)

  • Google’s Do No evil mantra

    When last did you access google.com/ig/oscheck? It returns a serialized array — with a weird space-holder — instead of “Do no evil” (which implies that you can be evil, think evil, plan evil, but not execute it), they’ve upped it a notch — all the way to “don’t be evil’” (note the trailing apostrophe).

    This of course changes the mantra — you can do evil, think evil, plan evil and execute it, but just hug a bunny and buy milk on the way home in your green car (so don’t be evil). Strange deviation. Also, the apostrophe implies omission (or ownership, with bad grammar). So did they mean don’t be evilk (whatever that may mean) — you go through the alphabet and figure that one out.

    Happy thoughts! 🙂

    throw 1; < don't be evil' >{m:[{i:1,st:"c=ig&e=APu7icpPle4eIsUPx/8S%2BVe24JQkS/cBvDBsJhSnfdcogQ1nIoym4glNnR1WvsfaswewrREVMvHzqhekfe75PLUAm7A4%2BOlsToBUzAVE4axMYP2Q%2BGGHAMUnq61oFTnlsEU%2BiqWrfH8"}]}

  • No more silly Google.com fade-in effect

    You’ve seen it, you hate it, you threaten to switch to wolfram or Bing… Or you can just make it go away.

    Stylish allows you to apply custom stylesheets to sites by wildcard prefix, so that it works and look the way you want it to. For Firefox. For IE, IE8Pro does something similar (YMMV — I haven’t tried it…)

    All you need to apply is a simple CSS script:


    @namespace url(https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

    @-moz-document url-prefix('http://google.'), url-prefix('http://www.google.') {

    #ghead, #sbl, .fade, #fctr{ opacity: 1 !important; }

    }

    Lots of customisations available at userstyles.org!

  • Dump MS Access data from Ubuntu

    The mdbtools package for Ubuntu Jaunty includes a command called mdb-export.  This allows you to dump the contents of tblName from database.mdb to STDOUT in CSV format like this:

    mdb-export database.mdb tblName

    Output redirection to capture the output in a file is also supported (not that that’s a feature of the app, as you know):

    mdb-export sample.mdb tblFoo > capture.txt

  • jQuery 1.4 improvements

    Over at jQuery14 the full list of progress, changes and improvements, notably (amongst other things) in the .css and .attr methods, as well as new AJAXian improvements. Also, event multi-binding is now (finally) available! (more…)