I saw a comment somewhere else that zero-day was overused and in essense ANY previously unknown vulnerability in open source software is technically zero day… the intent here though is to use the word in this context…. “vulnerability has been released without giving the vendor an opportunity to patch…” Yes, the fun vulnerability weekend seems to be continuing – there’s a javascript zdnet has coverage it’s “impossible to patch” (?) from the individuals that have publicized it. The announcement came at Toorcon.
Category: Tech Support
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FreeDos 1.0 released
After 12 years of effort FreeDos has reached the milestone 1.0 released. It can be found here. I’ve really found freedos to be quite usable for quite some time as a drop in replacement of MS Dos environments. I’m struggling to remember any dos-based prorams that it wouldn’t run well. *(Possibly some games?)
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Recovering lost files
There’s an article at linux.com that gives a good overview of using testdisk and PhotoRec. Testdisk should be able to recover at the partition level and PhotoRec should be able to just pull the files out of a damaged partition. Truth is Hard drives fail in a number of different ways and some of those can give the same error messages. Not too long ago my brother had a laptop hard drive failure, it gave a “no partition found” kind of error message. We talked about a utility such as ghost4linux (g4l) which includes dd_rescue which does a remarkable job with failing disks.
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Strange net problems with a Netgear FS608 switch
This was weird and now that the switch is replaced I haven’t been able to duplicate it, but let me explain. There was a netgear fs608 (8 port unmanaged) switch plugged into a linksys router (model number not noted.) The cable was straight (although the fs608 has support for link through straight or crossover cables.) This setup worked well for quite some time. 4 computers and a printer hooked up. 3 pcs with fixed address and 1 with DHCP for their IP address. Well, I had a call that two pcs were unable to connect to the network and when I got there and looked… sure enough 169.**** ip addresses from Microsoft’s “auto configure” pool.
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Evolution error “summary and folder mismatch even after a sync”
In my wife’s profile on the desktop she said she was getting an error message sending and receiving messages so…. when doing a send/receive of mail I saw evolution giving an error message of “summary and folder mismatch even after a sync”. It seemed to download mail ok, it was just nagging for some reason. I’m thinking it may be a bug, but there’s a pretty quick and easy workaround. I found someone suggest deleting the following files .evolution/mail/local/*summary….. (look in /home/youruser/.evolution/mail/local and delete ALL files that end in summary.)
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Tech support tutorials made easy on linux….
One of the real frustrations with phone tech support is translating step by step what is needed to the person on the other end. I know it sounds easy, but in reality – what if they’ve got xyz theme for their menuing and it’s not there, what if… oh you know – they’ve just got something in a different place than you expect it. The person on the other end usually has to be the eyes and that, many times doesn’t work out great. That’s one reason that I’ve worked to start doing the remote tech support because that way I can BE AT the machine and what seems like an eternity on the phone can actually become a short and quick resolution. Anyway – Newsforge today detailed a way to capture videos of actions on screen in a “how-to” format under linux with ScreenKast and share the how-to video online with captorials.com
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Running windows applications directly in linux
Linux.com has a good explanation of using binfmt_misc to directly launch a windows (or java or python) application just by typing in the application name. *(without all the contortions of … /home/user/bin/wine /home/user/.wine/c_drive/Program\ Files/Really\ Neat\ Software/Program.exe ) You do have to make the app executable under linux (chmod 755) and you can take it as far as symlinking from a directory in your path (/home/user/bin???) or the system path (/usr/bin).
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Wireless Driver Vulnerabilities
There are a couple notes to pass along with regards to some pretty serious vulnerabilities in various wireless network adapter drivers. First, Sans has information on some Intel Centrino updates that resolve some vulnerabilities that would affect the Windows Centrino driver and the ProSet management software. F-secure chimes in on this noting that the download is a whopping 129MB.
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New site domain www.computerrepairasheville.com
Just by way of information….. I’ve seperated out the www.computerrepairasheville.com and www.ashevillecomputerhelp.com domains now to point to a seperate web site with the main goal of simplifying and clarifying my computer services in the Asheville, NC area. I’ll keep the brief page on this site that gives an overview, but the new computerrepairasheville.com domain will act as the main point of information for those services. On there I’ve tried to put a list of all of the “things I do” although I’m sure I’ve forgotten something.
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Mozilla Firefox user-agent spoofing
Sometimes you run across a site that’s a browser snob. You know the type…. you visit it in Mozilla Firefox or (anything other than IE) and it says, “you must use Internet Explorer version 6 or newer to use this site. Well, some browsers have nice ways of changing the user agent through the menus, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a plugin for this in firefox (haven’t yet looked.) But, there is a way in about:config.