Here’s the link to Microsoft’s advisory. The main workaround seems to be…. Don’t open or save powerpoint attachments that you receive from untrusted sources, OR that you receive unexpectedly from trusted sources…. So, the only real workaround is what SHOULD be common practice. Whether or not there is a vulnerability in the news you should always be cautious with receiving file attachments. ANYTHING unexpected, even from a trusted source, should be verified “out of channel”.
Category: Tech Support
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Open Source NTFS driver for linux with Read and Write support
Linux has full support for so many file systems. Fat32, which is the filesystem of the Win98 and ME systems has had full read-write support as long as I can remember, but NTFS has not. In fact, NTFS has had read-only support in the main open source driver, but NO write support. (Or at least VERY limited and risky write support.) There was the captive ntfs project which used Windows own NTFS driver, but…. it looks like we’re getting very close to a true open source, read write NTFS driver for linux (and really, for any other OS that wants to implement it.)
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VMWare server 1.0 final release
I’ve been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they’ve released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as in no charge.) Although support is available….
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Adobe Acrobat reader update
On the heels of yesterdays massive update day from Microsoft, Adobe has released an update for the free Adobe Reader. The Adobe reader is one of those ALMOST essential applications that MOST everyone has installed. So, this will be of particular interest to MOST computer users. A SERIOUS security flaw (They’re tagging it CRITICAL) could be exploited with a specially crafted PDF file in version 6.0.4 (or earlier – back to 6) of the Reader for Mac or Windows.
Version 6.0.5 has been released to address this. It should be noted that the current newest version available is 7.0.8….
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Converting MPG video to dv files
I don’t know much about the dv format, except that it is a standard format that many camcorders use. For this reason, many video editors (such as kino for linux) prefer to see files coming in dv format. The problem I ran into is that the new handycam dvd puts images in .VOB files (which are really MPG). So, I found this handy script… that runs on Mac or Linux and is called mpeg2dv. It does the trick and is public domain. The only requirement I can see is ffmpeg.
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Thinclient PXES from 2x and thinstation
I have spent about a week with the 2x page open in one of my browsers. I’ve been trying to get to know PXES’ new incarnation. For background. PXES was hosted on sourceforge.net and was an attempt at making a multi-protocol thin-client boot distribution…. In other words, among the files released were iso images that you could use to boot up and select to be a thinclient for rdp, vnc, xdm, nx (compressed and optionally encrypted x), citrix, etc. What was really interesting to me is that you could also customize your disc to only connect to a specific protocol (or hard code a disc to only be a client to a specific server address.)
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Denyhosts as an added defence to ssh server
A couple days ago I had a brief article on the vandals banging away at the door of my ssh server. Like I said, I’ve, at times, been fairly smug abou the futility of their actions, but…. the persistance concerns me. Let me be more specific, I keep a fairly tight ssh server setup (don’t allow version 1, only have specific users allowed, use privilige seperation, deny root login, and keep it updated whenever there is a problem with a running version.) But, when you see a single IP making THOUSANDS of attempts to log in, you start thinking…. what if they were to hit on the right username and try a thousand combinations of passwords with that username. Hmmmm… disturbing. So, I wound up setting up denyhosts and thought I’d share a bit more about it here.
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New User Guides for Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva
As I was searching online this weekend for something ubuntu related… I ran across this nice reference Wiki…. ubuntuguide.org. They’ve got a good Ubuntu new user guide and also a few things Mandriva and Fedora related. The site is done wiki style so you should be able to collaborate if you have suggestions (although they require login it appears due to wiki-vandalism.) Anyway, looks like a good guide, fairly new-user friendly.
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NTFS cloning
Sometimes drives just go bad. Surprise. One recent fresh install of Windows XP had started having real stability problems. On running a chkdsk and looking at the event viewer, it was fairly clear that 16KB of bad sectors and the disk problems had likely been the problem (lots of disk and atapi errors in the system log. Mostly disk error during paging operation (swap filing)) So…. I looked at cloning the drive using dd_rescue. All went well and the new system booted up on the new identically sized drive. In fact EVERYTHING was fine except chkdsk still reported 16KB of bat sectors….
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VMware Server
OK – just fresh off solving the reason I couldn’t get vmplayer to start on my 1Ghz AMD 64 1GB of memory machine…. I started looking at vmserver. (RC1). Now, vmplayer is a free download (so is vmware server). I’m really liking what I see from vmware server and am pretty sure I’m going to stick with it over the player. There are quite a few interesting features and I’ll try to give a skim over them. For starters, there is a management console that gives you the ability to connect to a vmware server on a different host (with credentials as a user on that system), or the localhost. On the localmachine it shows what virtual machines you have configured and gives you the chance to create another one, open an existing one not in the list, or tweak host settings.