Classic Tech Tips Archive

These stories come up from time to time. A free giveaway of some sort and it turns out that there's spyware or a virus embedded, company gives a big "whoops" and fixes things by replacing them.... Mc…

There appears to be a working root exploit against the binary NVidia driver for *nix based systems. It's reported at kerneltrap.org It was resolved a few weeks back by the release of version 1.0-9625…

Baring big problems, the final release candidate for the new 2.0 version of Mozilla Firefox is out reported here and here. Mozilla.com page for the RC is here.

Meta tags are not as useful as they once were, but.... if you're still trying to make sure that your description and keywords tags are done right (and match the consistency of the page) you might wan…

As I mentioned earlier, Bellsouth seemed to be in the midst of a big DNS meltdown when I got up this morning. I spent some time getting various bellsouth customers "worked around" the issue by settin…

This morning, I'm noticing some of the machines I monitor having big DNS problems. It seems to be Bellsouth.net's dns servers gone sideways - none seem to respond. On one network in particular we're …

The SecurityFix reminds us of what usually comes close behind Patch Tuesday.... exploit Wednesday or Thursday and this month, the exploits seemed to start coming out Thursday. There's a new Powerpoin…

I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about "will xyz program run on vista". The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started…

Networkworld brings us this report that exploit code removed from websites can live on for quite a while in caching servers. Which, in a way is NOT news, but it's worth remembering. Many times when s…

Sunbelt reminds us that the daxctle.ocx exploit was NOT among those patched Tuesday by Microsoft. They remind us of the following workaround... Mitigation: The DirectAnimation Path control can be dis…

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 succes…

It's not really a surprising headline. I think anytime a proprietary vendor tightens the screws a bit to limit piracy they are going to force people to other, competing products. Especially when ther…

Intelliadmin published this earlier today... with all the problems some people have had with the Genuine advantage notification that their copy of Windows may not be legitimate (many reasons for this…

Internet Explorer 7 is set to be released this month (October 2006) and it will likely be an automatic update for Windows users either November or December of this year. (I'm thinking November.) Now,…

The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities thi…

Multiple Security issues (October 2006 patch day.) details. update.microsoft.com

The other day I was trying to partition a drive hooked up via usb. (So it get's /dev/sda as it's device in linux)... I tried a few utilities to access the partition table and all failed, finally, I r…

It's kind of interesting to get to do a "browser wars" kind of post where I mention a new release of two browsers coming out about the same time.... The release of IE7 is coming within weeks we are r…

It was an odd message that started this on the official google blog. I saw it and thought this doesn't make sense - it doesn't sound like an official statement and it claims it was translated from an…

Shouldn'tthis and this get more news coverage? US Commerce Department computers (specifically a bureau responsible for export licenses) is under cyber attack from hackers based in China. The Bureau i…

11 patches will be released by Microsoft on the 10th of October. Bulletin is here, 6 for windows, 4 for Office (at least one in each of those two batches is critical) and 1 .NET (moderate) - yes the …

OK, I know there are probably quite a few looking at this thinking.... "Hello where has he been?" when I'm talking about playing around with software raid under ubuntu linux, but.... in spite of all …

NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux base…

Wolves in sheeps clothing.... from Sunbelt blog.... Watch out for pestcapture and "friends" (using dlls from spysheriff). Thanks to sunbelt for keeping their eyes open on the threat of wolves in shee…

First, I should disclaim that this is going to be a brain dump of the resources and experience of a quick setup of Ubuntu 6.06 on a software raid based storage system. This may be less than ideal, bu…