Bye bye Writely – hello Google Docs and Spreadsheets Inside Google has been reporting on the (happening right now) launch of docs.google.com which should be a shared login for both the writely successor and spreadsheets which is now known as Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It appears to support IE 6 and Firefox.
Tag: login
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Windows XP lost administrators password
Some time ago, I’ve talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you’re locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you’ve either forgotten (or weren’t informed) of the valid password to get in. It turns out there is a different approach… well yes, you could format and install from scratch blowing away all data on the drive, OR you could do a second installation in the same partition – that could be messy though and waste space. If you just need a few files off, you could boot up a linux livecd and copy the files to another disc before wiping and rebuilding, but there is yet another possibility….
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Hiding a user from the Welcome screen in Windows XP
So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn’t working correctly without administrator priviliges and in this situation, upgrading to a newer version wasn’t a great option. So, I created a new user account with higher priviliges and used runas to launch the application with greater priviliges. But that left me with another problem…. how do I hide the new priviliged user from the Welcome screen?
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Windows Run as to let a legacy program run in XP limited user mode
Several months back I had to figure out a way to get Create a card gold (5.0?) run on an XP system. The only real problem was that I had setup the account with limited user privileges (shared machine, several users, all with limited account priviliges.) But, somehow the program didn’t work well without administrator priviliges. Giving the account full administrator priviliges all the time was not an option and try as I might, I couldn’t find the right program directory to give expanded permissions that would solve the issue.
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Frustrated with Mandriva Club mirror finder
It seems like I go through this every time I have to search for an SRPM to rebuild… search at rpms.mandrivaclub.com then prompted to login – login… oops wrong password. Login again stranded at main club page….. ok – downloads…. mirror finder. First – there’s no way in the mirror finder to search for SRPMS (you can search for architecture builds). There is a search for cooker, but EVERY time I do it I find mirrors that cannot be found. For my own reference ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrivalinux/devel/cooker/SRPMS/main/release/ currently works. (Although given the name change from Mandrake to Mandriva I wonder if/when that will change.) It’s about the 4th or 5th mirror I tried after several “cannot change directory” errors, then looking at the mirror to decide if it really IS there and is just renamed to Mandriva…. They really need to look at updating their mirror list.
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Phisher’s getting sneakier
The SecurityFix reports on this clever two-factor authentication phishing attempt. They were looking for Citibank Business customers and in addition to username password information they were looking to verify a supplied token. The bottom line is that phishers will look to find any way possible to social engineer you out of your information credentials, whether they’re one-factor, two-factor or three factor, etc….. It appears as though it was a well done phish with a few exceptions and that it even checked some credentials by the citicard site giving an error message if you entered invalid login info.
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GDrive rumors and screenshot – Platypus
I saw this ZDNet post today with a tantalizing glimpse of Gdrive. It comes originally from cocaman.ch where he found a login page for something called Google Platypus, which is essentially a remotely used file storage. Now, from the page there are a couple of items that can be gleaned. Currently it’s something that’s in use internally (by the Googler’s…) Also, there is a download client for Windows/Mac/Linux that is used to synchronize files somehow. The benefits of it as it is advertised in the screenshot….
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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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Vandals banging on the door of ssh….
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t curious about things…. The other night I was working on something on the testbox in the back room and saw the switch lights flickering fairly actively between the server and the internet gateway. At first I thought maybe it was some mail coming in, but it was awfully persistent. So, I started nosing around. I saw that sshd was showing up in the process list and on checking /var/log/messages…. found hundreds of ongoing attempts to break in through the ssh server. (sigh….) Now, there was a time when I’ve kind of snickered when I’ve seen these futile attempts, because I have a VERY short list of allowed ssh users. (AllowUsers username can be set in /etc/ssh/sshd_config) But, this was fairly persistent and there was more variety to the usernames than I’m used to seeing.
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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.