Password Security
This is just too crazy. Right now I am sitting in a hotel room of a hotel chain which offers WLAN services itself (a software called “HotSpotCenter” from Dr. Eckhardt + Partner GmbH) and through Swisscom.
Both solutions are far too expensive and I usually do not depend on such things since I have a UMTS flatrate. But for some reason I do not get a connection in my hotel room and so I looked for unsecured wireless networks and of course I found one right away with the hotel name as SSID. Connecting to it and opening a web browser I was presented with a welcome page asking me to present my credentials.
I then figured they have some kind of MAC authentication and wanted to sniff wireless traffic a little bit and see if I could capture a MAC address of an allowed client. So I started MS Netmon and shortly after I had a MAC address to try out. But then my wireless network driver would not let me change my MAC address and with no Internet access I was chasing my own tail.
“What the heck let’s try some passwords” I thought and my first try was the hotel name as user and password. Doing so I found myself confronted with the administrative interface of the HotSpot Software.
Playing around a little but I finally printed myself a nice little voucher and now I am writing this post.
Now this is password security the way I like it.
Tweaking the Nokia N800
I’ve been using the Nokia N800 for quite some time now and never found the time to enable Dual-Boot. The reason one might want to dual boot the device is that you can copy the OS to another SD(HC) card that may be faster in terms of I/O than the internal flash memory.
So I looked for a fast SDHC card and finally chose a SanDisk Extreme III with 8GB. According to Alternate read and write speed is 20 MB/s so it’s far more than the Class 6 standard (6 MB/s) requires.
I then used this How-To from Schmot’s blog to configure dual-boot. Nice walk-through and I had no problems at all. Afterwards the N800 greets you with a new welcome menu:
Now, the big question is if this is really worth the work? Subjectiveley spoken I’d say yes it is faster than before. Objectively I can’t tell. I use mYtube to watch You Tube videos and I hope it a least profits from the fast SD disk it now uses as buffer storage.
Ah yes, the reason for this post is a personal shortcut:
fsck -fy /dev/mmcblk0p2
This command is needed whenever there is a problem with the MMC booted OS and has to be launched from the internal flash OS, of course Hopefully my super trouper SD card will manage any filesystem problems itself.
Cool commandline moves
FOR /L %f IN (1,1,254) DO ping -w 500 -n 1 192.168.1.%f | findstr /I reply >> %TEMP%\ping_results.txt
SMB/CIFS Download Manager
With this article we’re going back to the origins of the “Perimeterless Network“. If you (like us) are living the idea of the “Perimeterless Network” you sure can access your SMB / CIFS shares from anywhere in the world. Fo security reasons connections are protected with IPSec, right?
Now, for testing purposes I had to download a large DVD image from a remote file server and since I am accessing the Internet by WLAN and IPSec slows down the connection, too, I thought of using a download manager. The best choice would be a handy command line tool like wget. I did remember a tool called smbget I had used before which actually is part of the Samba Suite. But the only Windows binary I could find was at http://paully.com/smbget/ and on that page it says:
“For me it was very useful to transfer big files with size about 1 gigabyte over the our intranet through Samba from Germany to Belarus and from Belarus to Germany. If remote file is not available the application will try to download it until the job is done ”
OK, Belarus is not really what I’d call a democratic country so I was a little anxious about downloading a pre-compiled binary from such a source. Furthermore, I don’t know if Windows binaries are always larger than BeOS, BSD, and Linux ones but in this case the difference was huge. Anyway, if the source is not available anymore I am hosting the Windows Zip here.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RC1 Inline Search
Some might remember my post quite some time ago about what is still missing in Internet Explorer. Major criticism was the antiquated search box. What can I say, finally someone chastened the IE developpers and they integrated an inline search that will fit most needs. Good job!
It took me a while to remember this new feature since I still had the IE Inline Search plug-in activated. But once I deactivated it I got enlightened.
So, who still needs Firefox and for what reason? Only speaking for Windows systems, of course. And leave me alone with Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.
Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on IBM Thinkpad R30: Screen Resolution Problem (1024x768)
I just got my old IBM Thinkpad R30 back and I thought installing Ubuntu on it could be useful. So I downloaded the Desktop Edition Live-Install-CD thing and booted into the live system.
Disappointedly I discovered that the latest Ubuntu seems to have problems configuring the right resolution. The system would only let me choose 800×600 as a maximum but the display is capable of 1024×768. So I started searching the web and found descriptions of a bug. Still, all this seemed a little overdosed to me and searching around a little more I found another thread where a guy describes the problem of Xorg detecting the right display refresh rates.
So I figured out that I wouldn’t need all this xorg.conf stuff except the refresh rates and changed my original xorg.conf to look like this:
Section "Device" Identifier "Configured Video Device" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Configured Monitor" Option "DPMS" HorizSync 28-49 VertRefresh 43-72 EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Default Screen" Monitor "Configured Monitor" Device "Configured Video Device" EndSection
The only lines I added are bold. And after I restarted X with [CTRL][ALT][DEL] I got the wanted resolution. Btw it is a Trident graphics chip but /var/log/Xorg.0.log showed that it is detected just fine.
T-SQL Simple Timestamp With Leading Zeros
I just had to create a simple string in MS T-SQL that would look like the following:
200812041613
or
yyyymmddhhmm
I solved it this way but I have no idea if this is a good solution (comments welcome):
DECLARE @timestamp AS varchar(12) -- Create Timestamp with leading zeros -- Year SET @timestamp = CONVERT( varchar(4), DATEPART(year, GETDATE() ) ) -- Month IF DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) < 10 SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT( varchar, DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) ) ELSE SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) ) -- Day IF DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) < 10 SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) ) ELSE SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) ) -- Hour IF DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) < 10 SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) ) ELSE SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) ) -- Minute IF DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) < 10 SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) ) ELSE SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) ) -- Done creating timestamp print N'' + @timestamp
The Bitlocker Odyssey or How I Killed Five Hours of my Time
(…and yours if you are going to read this )
My Windows Vista System had some strange side effects and so I decided to do a reinstall. After having postponed this action many times I finally started yesterday.
First I thought it would be nice to have SP1 slipstreamed into the installation sources but it seems as if Microsoft does not support this anymore. I think they provide slipstreamed sources themselves. Still, there exits two ways to do so: the manual and the vLite way. vLite is the Vista version of nLite. Both are tools to create custom Windows Installation Sources.
Since VLite ist pretty much straight forward I decided to go that way. Still, the process takes around two hours!!! So get a can of tea (I suggest a FTGFOP Darjeeling)…
Once, this process finished I needed a tool to burn the ISO image. I like InfraRecorder which is the first decent GUI to the open source cdrtools I’ve seen.
I did the first try with maximum speed and a second one with the lowest possible speed and both burning processes finished successfully. Still, when launching the installation process I always got the error that it “Cannot find the file D:\Sources\Install.wim. Error code 0×8007000” after I entered the license key. Well, I remember we had burn issues with Vista ISOs and the solution usually was to use a different burn software and to burn at single or double speed but I got pissed and so I continued using the RTM image w/o SP1 I had. Two hours later I had a fresh Vista installation and SP1 was applied manually. And guess what? Of course I didn’t do a backup of the slipstreamed ISO I created and so I couldn’t use it inside a virtual machine to at least test if the slipstreaming process was a success.
Anyway, during installation I left around 1.5 MB of unallocated space on my hard drive because I knew BitLocker would need this as an unencrypted boot partition. But it seemed as if I didn’t leave enough space because when I startet the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool it said it would shrink my system partition. Since I didn’t want that I directly canceled the process and checked what was wrong. This turned out to be the worst thing I could have done because it left me with an unallocated hard drive space that wasn’t enough for the BitLocker boot partition and a system partition that Vista could not shrink anymore.
Exaleading around a little bit I tried the following:
- Disabled paging and delete pagefile.sys
- Disabled hibernation and deleted hiberfil.sys
- Used JKDefrag (supposed to be able to move the NTFS MFT file)
All the above didn’t work. If you want to try yourself maybe this link is of help.
So what else could I do. Use something like Partition Magic, of course. I used the open source live CD gparted before but this time I tried Parted Magic.
And I tell you it rocks, perfect hardware discovery and after two hours I had a NTFS partition resized with gparted.
Automatically Create IIS Application Pools
Here is the script for the AppPools
@ECHO OFF ECHO. FOR /F "eol=# delims=; tokens=1,2*" %%f in (apppools.txt) DO ( ECHO Creating AppPool "%%f" with user identity "%%g" CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS CREATE "w3svc/AppPools/%%f" IIsApplicationPool CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/WamUserName" "%%g" CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/WamUserPass" "%%h" CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/AppPoolIdentityType" 3 ECHO. ) pause
And the correspondign text file:
# # ";"-delimited file to create application pools # Beware of strange characters in password, # though ; should work # Structure is # # AppPool Name ; User ; Password tmpAppPool;tmpUser;tmpPass
Automatically Create IIS Websites
I had to create quite a lot websites on a Microsoft IIS webserver and of course there is a nice scripting solution to it. Here is how I did it:
Batch code:
@ECHO OFF SET webRoot=D:\websites ECHO. ECHO Creating directories ECHO and websites ECHO. FOR /F "eol=# delims=; tokens=1,2*" %%f in (websites.txt) DO ( ECHO Creating Dir %webRoot%\%%f\%%g and website %%g in appPool %%h MD "%webRoot%\%%f\%%g" iisweb /create "%webRoot%\%%f\%%g" "%%g" /i 192.168.228.30 /d %%g.perimeterless.org /ap %%h ECHO. ) pause
and here is the text file that goes with it:
# # ";"-delimited file to create directory structure, # websites and application pools # # Structure is # # Subdirectory ; Sitename ; AppPool testing;test1;DefaultAppPool testing;test2;DefaultAppPool testing;test3;DefaultAppPool
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)