Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Computers

  • Time to start cleaning out sites – the internet’s getting too full….

    Or at least Google may be…. stories here and here. The way the Register puts it is that Google is in an arms race with blog spammers, with tools out that can create 100 blogs in 24 minutes and shops that can provide mass numbers of private label articles, they contend that google is drowning in the spam so to speak. I can’t help but connect it (as they do) with the changes related to the Big Daddy update which really seemed to mark a drastic change in search rangings for some of the pages on this site. Search terms that had for a time done quite well for me (page 1) dropped an average of 3-4 pages almost overnight (literally over two nights).

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  • Microsoft May 2006 patch Tuesday updates

    Now that the April patches have been patched…. it’s time to look forward to what updates we’ll be seeing from Microsoft this coming Tuesday May 9th… There are 3 expected updates for May, 2 for Windows and one for Exchange Server. The Exchange update is listed as critical as is AT LEAST one of the two Windows patches.

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  • Using .htaccess to ALLOW directory browsing

    By default the apache install for most sites now restricts directory browsing. It’s a good idea, you don’t want just ANYTHING to be browsable on a web server, but there comes a time that it makes life easier for a directory (or tree of directories) to be browsable without having to write (copy and paste) links to a bunch of files. Fortunately, .htaccess files can be used for many things and this, of course, is one of them…

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  • /bash/rm: argument list too long

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this complaint from the bash shell when trying to remove a bunch of files. In this case, I was trying to clear a directory where log rotating had run amuck and there was a 10 second lag in typing ls ∗.gz and seeing any output…. So, I did rm ∗.gz and got bash/rm: argument list too long in response…. So, then I though I could “surgically remove” some files and shrink the list a bit… rm ∗5∗3∗2∗.gz -f; rm ∗5∗3∗1∗.gz -f, etc, etc, etc after about 4 of these it became obvious I’d need to find another way because even some of THOSE gave the “argument list too long” error. (What’s more, it looked like I was going to have to deal with files matching ∗[1-5]∗[0-9]∗[0-9]∗gz – yuck…)

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  • Clamav and Firefox updates

    In the last couple days there have been new security releases of both clamantivirus (0.88.2 is now the current) and Mozilla-Firefox (1.0.3 is the current release over there). If you use either of these programs you should be looking to update. I’ve been busy looking at getting src.rpm’s recompiled here for various Mandr-ake/iva’s and if time allows I’ll even upload the latest. It sure feels like firefox has been getting rebuilt about every week or two lately though.

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  • Make an autorun cd show a web document on autoplay…

    There’s a utility called Thumbs that looks like a good quick way to make a cd launch a web documented on autoplay in Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/ …Of course, autoplay under windows is fairly easy to setup. If you have a program on the disk you can just have autorun.inf in the root directory of the cd and in that you can specify WHAT program to autorun. The problem with html documents on a disk is telling the computer how to run it. (Yes you can adjust the icon as well.)

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  • 3 Critical Microsoft Updates, 1 Important, 1 Moderate and 1 re-released

    Looks like an interesting patch day. Looks like there are several bugs covered by the cumulative IE patch… Sans has a good writeup (7 CVE issues addressed by this 1 patch….) Also the Eolas ActiveX settlement (“Eolas Patent Patch”) solution seems to be included in this bundle. Also a MDAC and a Windows Explorer (not to be confused with the Internet Explorer) patch. (The Windows Explorer AND MDAC bugs are Remote code execution vulnerabilities…)

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  • Clamav 0.88.1 for Mandrake 10.0

    Since, I’ve still got a few older Mandrake 10 installs that I’m maintaining as mailservers, there aren’t supported security fixes for various things anymore… Friday there was news of a new clamantivirus to fix some security flaws with 0.88, new version is 0.88.1 I’ve taken the cooker srpm and recompiled for 10.0, so… for my convenience (and that of anyone with an older Mandrake box…) the links will be below.

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  • IE phishing exploit..

    There is ANOTHER IE vulnerability that’s come across the news in the last week. It seems that this is currently only a Proof of Concept, I’ll have to check and see if anyone’s reported seeing this in the wild…, but essentially a race condition between a Macromedia flash file and web content can allow a forged address bar location… in other words it might say www.google.com in the address bar, but you’re actually looking at www.evilhackerplayground.org….

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