This article may come in handy if you are out there battling the latest rogue du jour. Occasionally I have been through a cleaning process for these rogues and got to a point where the scanner had run and cleaned things out (whether it was malwarebytes antimalware or superantispyware.) It was time to reboot and the system reboots, starts to load the desktop wallpaper and then…. You see the windows login screen and the words “saving settings” under the username followed by the words “logging out”. You may try again, but it doesn’t even load the desktop icons it just boots you back out to the login screen. If you try safe mode you may get the same behavior (it was in my case), administrator or the typical system user didn’t seem to make a difference. I couldn’t even get to safe mode with the command prompt. No choice but to reinstall right? Wrong….
Tag: login
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BBpress integration with WordPress
I’ve started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of WordPress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, wordpress is the “blogging” software that I use for this and several other sites. It makes adding content to a website very easy and has a great ability to be extended with plugins. bbpress is forum software by the makers of wordpress and with a similar look and feel. It also has the capability to share the user list with wordpress.
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Great tip for Dealing with SPAM email
In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.
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Varying Degrees of Password Security
Last week we talked about creating strong passwords, but should we use different passwords for every site? It’s best practice to do just that. Do they all have to be really hard passwords? Again ideally, yes. So, how can we keep up password spreadsheet? Big sheet of paper? Password management program. Some advantages of password management programs are that many are equipped with encryption. In other words one password locks the whole list away. The bad news is if you lose or forget that password you are locked out of everything. Lists are generally bad because with access to your pc, your list is easy to get at.
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Windows lost administrator password rundown….
I’ve done one or two mentions in the past of ways to recover/reset lost windows passwords and thought it was probably time for another “brain dump/web research dump” of things that I’ve run across. This is not just for lost administrator passwords, but could apply to a lost user account password as well. (I’ve found that the mileage varies on the system. NT/2000/XP/2003 are not the only variations, there seem to be variations related to certain Windows updates/etc.) I should also put a disclaimer here that this information is not so you can break into someone else’s windows installation (without their permission), at the very least that’s a privacy violation and at the worst, against the law and unethical. What this is for is a guide to someone that has accidentally locked themself out of their windows install (or in some cases where someone ELSE has locked you out of your own pc.) In other words – don’t use this to crack.
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Nxclient into xubuntu box
I like nx server and client, it can really make good use of low bandwidth connections to get a gui link. But, by default it’s quick and easy to setup gnome and kde login sessions within nxclient, but if you’re using xubuntu then you will need to setup a “custom” session and the command is startxfce4 …. so, start up nxclient, click configure and on the General tab, halfway down it should say Desktop, leave Unix and change KDE to custom, then click settings and check “run the following command” now, type startxfce4 and you should be set.
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Google sign in’s out of order?
Is it just me or does it seem like about half of google sign in pages are out of order. (GMail seems ok) Adwords, Analytics, and Adsense all refuse to bring up the login box. (Main page for adwords and analytics loads, but the iframe that houses the login doesn’t.) It’s about 11:20AM EST now and this has been the case for the last hour or two. I haven’t seen any mention yet on official google blogs. (Calendar seems unresponsive for me right now too.)
Ok – I think it may have been just me, maybe leaving firefox open for 5 days at a time with 29 tabs causes funky things like that to happen. *(Tested on the same machine with another browser and the login came up, si I killed and restarted firefox and all is well.)
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ftp access problems with lulu.com
As I’ve mentioned, in the last week, I’ve released a CD through lulu.com and I’ve also done a calendar, one of the frustrations I’ve had was the inability to do an ftpupload. My username and password were continually rejected. Well, after contacting support and being told someone would be back in touch with me in a few days, I just figured out the issue. I had a character in my password (#) that they didn’t like, I changed my password to something without the # sign and was immediately able to log in. So, IF you’re trying to ftp into ftpupload.lulu.com and are sure you have the login/password right, but still are being denied try changing to a password that JUST has a mix of numbers and letters (preferrably a good mix of upper/lower case as well.)
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WordPress “siblings” released… bbpress and mupress
There are a couple new software packages in wordpress’ family: MuPress which is a multiuser (and multi-site) wordpress archicture… is available. IF that had been available a year ago, I might have based my sites on it, because it sounds as though you could have one backend for several sites. I may yet play around with it, but…. let’s see.. the other entry is bbpress which is a bulletin board backend that integrates with the wordpress user management system (shared user name/passwords/single login kind of stuff..) Good to see these releases and continuing development.
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Linux Permissions Headache
Yikes, what an evening….. it started innocently enough in the afternoon. I have an old Mandrake 10.0 server that I was upgrading clamav on (recent security update). While I was at it, I was reviewing the anti-spam setup to see if I could get any better success with filtering junk mail. spamassassin has had an update since I updated this one last and also it seemed that dcc was installed, but not in active use *(no indications that it’s being used at all.) So, I set about trying to fix that and install the latest spamassassin. Somehere along the way something BAD happened. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how, but at one point I was root having just installed the rpms for spamassassin and then exited to my user account. Promptly on switching back to my user account I got a “permission denied” error. Eh? Ok, well let’s su again and see what’s up…. “permission denied” uh oh…. ls “permission denied” most everything actually….. permission denied.