It is tax time again. I am probably one of the strange ones out there. I like doing my taxes, well I like the challenge of it, not the idea behind it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like giving my money to anyone. But, what tax time does for me is to see where and what I have going on. More to the point, I had to decide this year which program to use: Turbo Tax or Tax Cut. I have used both in the past and until last year was exclusively using Turbo Tax. Last year, Turbo tax decided to add a product activation that would be placed onto your machine. As far as I am concerned this is spyware and even more, they did not tell you about it. (past articles regarding this) . So last year I went with Tax Cut and was really happy, it is cheaper and was just as easy to use. This year, I started to do some reasearch and went with Turbo Tax. I found a few reviews that placed TT over Tax cut (LINK HERE)
Now if I could just have a way to make more money then I would hire someone to do this for me. Happy Tax Season.
Once again I had an eye opening experience on how much I really don’t know. I was working with a client and needed to export a list of users from active directory who were all part of an specific organizational group (OU). Now I have done some coding against the Active Drectory before with WMI / ADSI but in this case I just wanted a simple export. I began looking around for options and did not find to many simple solutions. To me this seemed like a very simple and trivial task that has to have been done before. But I could not find any great documentation. So I tried a few things. 1. I tried to just use the MMC and select the organization unit and right click and export. I did not really like what it gave me .. Just usernames. 2. I then used an old .vbs script I had to parse through the ou and return values. This seemed to be the solution but seemed too hard for a novice users. So I kept looking. And I found the solution. 3. CSVDE it imports and exports data from the active directory to a CSV file.
You may ask where did you find this? Well it is build into Windows 2000 and 2oo3. I had never even heard of this before. The help file calls it CSV Directlry Exchange. It does not really even show up on any google searches, even when you search directly for it. Now that I have found this tool I am not going to let it go.
Here is an example of what I did. To get a selected OU group into a csv file.
CSVE -f adexport.csv -n
The above will give you all active directory accounts. I used the -n filter to remove any binary values. I then used Excel to direct a list of all OU’s.
Have fun.
I just found out there is a very useful tool built into XP and Windows 2003, called diskpart.exe. This program will allow you to expand a windows disk volume to larger disks. I had the chance to use this recently to increase a server from three 36 gig drives to three 72 gig drives. This program allowed me to extend the drive space with out having to backup and restore to new volumes. This program is great. It works on windows 2000 and windows 2003 and also XP.
Here is the microsoft.com link for how to use DiskPart - KB325590
You can download the program from here if you do not have windows 2003 - DiskPart
The next time you are upgrading take a look at this program.
I have had a lot of issues recently with updating source code on my GotDotNet workspace. Not only with source code but also up time. Recently I have received a few emails from people who have not been able to access the workspace, to either download the app or to get the source code. It is very frustrating when you are trying to do some work or update some info and you get a message like this (”no joke this is the actual text”) —
Operational Troubleshooting in Progress
The Gotdotnet team is aware of the current site operational issues and is working on a solution. Thanks for your patience.
I have been kicking around the idea of moving the source over to sourceforge.net.
I have worked on projects at sourceforge before. I will keep all posted. My major issues would be to just update all links and location documents.
I finally got this infected machine cleaned. My magic potion of software goodies ended up as:
1. Install firefox - this way the here4search would not take over every web page
2. Download - lavasoft ad aware (did not do too much) - somehow machine would reboot upon scan
3. Download - Microsoft’s Anti-Spy ware - this found and removed everything (Great work MS)
4. Removed Corrupted norton 2003 (out of subscription) installed AVG by Grifsoft for virus scan
5. Ran virus scan and MS anti spyware till machine was free and clean.
6. Updated OS to XP Sp2
7. Installed Zone Alarm
8. Set nightly cleaning schedules for both Virus scan and Spyware.
Once this was all done the machine was running fantastic. I just wish we could keep the trojans, virus’s, and spyware off innocent machines. Because I end up having to fix them for friends and family…..
A friend of mine had a serious computer issue today. His machine would not even boot to XP - he was getting the great “Please insert Original XP disk and select ‘r’ for repair”. Well since this machine runs his finance (web browsing for banking) and also his quicken, he needs this thing to work.
After making an image of his machine and then booting to my favorite Knoppix flavor, I backed up all critical data and started to play. After a few file renaming on the /system/config/system files I was able to get XP running again. Once I had the box up, all the crazy stuff started.
when you opened a browser all it did was go to http://here4search.com I did not realize that this is on heck of a great spy ware (hi-jack) application. After some great google searching I found a few articles that explain how to kill this thing off.
Before I started on the above process I went out and did the usual (downloaded firefox) browsed with that instead of getting tons of pop up’s. Tried to run windows update (I guess the hi jack program stops that) .Downloaded Ad-Aware, that did not find the program. I even downloaded the new MS Spyware program.
My favorite part of the night was when I started Ad-Aware the system decided that it was going to be shut down remotely via rpc…. This happened twice during an Ad-Aware scan.
To be continued ……
One of the most useful tools I have ever used just released an update. Microsoft Log Parser 2.2 is now out.
Get it here - Microsoft.com
I have used this tool for many projects. To analyze server data for multiple sites and also for just straight traffic reports. There are many scripts you can write with this product. If you are not heard of the log parser, it allows you to run sql like statements against almost any log file, event log, Linux syslogs, and such. You can then store it as variables, xml files, CSV, or add to a .Net project.
I will post some of the common scripts I use. One such script I use frequently for our shared hosted sites is a Log Parser program that reads the URLScan log and reports stats. Our clients love to see that report - How many code read / cmd.exe attempts are being sent to their site.
Here is a screen shot from v1.6
I have rolled out another update to IIS Reporter. Version 1.6 is now the most current. I have added many features to both enhance the program and also ease the use.
Below is a list of things added and removed, but before I get into the new features let me discuss one major change. I had to drop the (Connection Attempts/Sec) counter. For some reason Visual Studio 2003 is not returning the correct information from the performance counter. I have tried a few different ways of createing the instance of the performance counter, with no luck. It appears to be returning the total connection attempts (Sum of connections) rather than the connections attempts per second. I will keep looking for a solution but till then I have replaced this counter with Maximum Connections. Max connections is the max number of connections for the uptime of the web service.
Here is a list of updates / changes
1. Removed Connection Attempts/ Sec and replaced with Max Connections
2. Added Tool tips for all instances on the forms (this is the nice little info that appears when you hover you mouse over areas of the app.
3. Added definitions to each counter and what is returned. If you click on the name it will tell you the info
4. Added a status bar icon. When minimized the app will run in the status bar on the right.
5. Write to an XML file - I have added a feature to write all this infor for IIS to a XML file. The xml file is in the same directory are the iisreporter.exe file.
Happy Downloading - You can download the new version here
Well I have MythTv about 80% of where I would like it to be. I realized that I should swap the machine it was running on, to another box I had around the house. This did not go so well. KnoppMyth, the distrobution I chose for my mythtv did not support Dual processors. The machine I am going to be using has dual P3 cpu’s. So I had to do a few things. First, I made a ghost image of my current working system (for backup) . Then installed that ghost image on to the new dual processor machine. It failed over and over. So that is when I decided to go forward with a install from scratch.
I decided to go with Fedora Core 3 as the base and then roll KDE in with Myth TV. So far I have everything installed (KDE, MYSQL, WEBMIN, and the Myth Package) but I have not configured to verify it it works.
I will keep all posted.
I was on the phone with a client the other day and was fielding some questions regarding SSL certificates. This particular client was looking to secure two web applications. Both were non public sites (email and a reporting tool). They were asking how to generate self siging certificates from Windows. I have to admit my personal experiences with self signing certs has not been that great. Don’t get me wrong, it works well but it is combersum and hard for anyone outside the domain to use. In this particular case they were hoping to have home users connect to email and also to this other app over SSL. The main constraint here was money, they did not want to go out and pay 300 - 600 for an ssl cert.
For this particular case I recommended CACert . CA Cert is a “CAcert.org is a community driven, Certificate Authority that issues certificates to the public at large for free.” Once you create an account you can create an SSL cert that is publically available. It works with almost 98% of the browsers. I have found this to be a great way to secure an application that will be used by your current users. Especially apps that you want to use personally just to secure data.
Not to mention you cannot beat the price (FREE).
Here is a great article of a programmer (Brian Hook) who was testing Active X and how secure it is. I have to agree, I created an active X object a while back and found that there were some inconsistencies from what I thought it would do vs what it could do.
http://bookofhook.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=387
He brings out a good point. The quantity of machines out there, that are connected to broadband and have some type of spyware or software loaded on them is very high. With some simple code you can then install some type of program that will make that machine a Zombie (Definition). Some people stand to make some money if they drive traffic to their site with banner ads. All it would take is someone to drive traffic to a site with some high paying banner ads and these zombie machines can be turned into a profit center. I have not heard too much of this being done, but what is to stop people from doing this?
Today at News.com.com and Slashdot, I read that Comcast is raising the broadband speed. From 3mbps to 4mbps.
This is great news. As I start to do more with VOIP, and streaming media this will make things much easier to use.
Read here http://news.com.com
Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/article.pl
I have been finishing up on my install of mythtv. If you are not familure witht his you should read up here www.mythtv.org. Myth Tv is a Tivo like os and system that is free. I have build an earlier version and had not used it for a while, due to a bad hard drive. So I got the sytem out, an old athalon 1.3 ghz machine w/ 256 meg of ram and tried a new distro, KnoppMyth. It is a Knoppix based MythTv distrobution. You can read up on it at www.mysettopbox.tv. I plan on writing all about it once I have it finished and working the way I would like it to. My goals are:
1. Watch TV
2. Record TV
3. Record TV remotely
4. Playback / stream recorded shows.
5. Use Remote on system
6. use system as juke box
So far is have 1, 2, and 3 completed.
I will have more later
What a week, it was one crazy week. I have been doing a lot with IIS Reporter and plan on making a refined version. The current version does not have a remote server monitor, I do have a version that does allow for remote monitoring but have not implemented it into the code.
This week I discovered how tuning an IIS server can lead to some benifits. When your server farm of 2 servers is pushing 12 Mbits of data a second you realize that any change you make can cause a bad thing to happen. Anyways I spent a few hours of my week, trying to debug an issue with the boxen that caused the servers to spike at 100% CPU. It was crazy, high volume traffic and then a cpu that was on fire. I even updated the cache setting and the compression settings to releave the stress on the boxes. I learned a lot as always, but my stress level went through the roof.
RSS Feed
