Classic Tech Tips Archive

There are a lot of elements to a good disaster recovery strategy.... knowing where offsite backups are located, keeping the offsite backups fresh. Knowing where any ON-site backups are. Having a plan…

How many times have I had this kind of phone call.... "my computers not working"... "the light on the monitor is on, but there aren't any lights on the keyboard. everything seems connected, but there…

I've run into this in the last few days too. (In spite of the fact that it's an OLD update (April 13, 2004?) MS04-013.... I think on the last visit (and my first one to this machine) we had probably …

I ran into strange problems accessing a shared Novell Netware (5.0) folder. Everytime the folder was attempted to be accessed from multiple machines the window would freeze and if you waited long eno…

When Google Talk first came out, many people were excited that they were using the protocol that jabber is built on. There were also disappointments that ALL of the protocol hadn't been implemented. …

Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there....) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft's A…

Saw this today.... "Error while aging folder "Inbox" in store "Personal Folders". File access is denied. You do not have the permission required to access the file C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microso…

This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it ove…

Well, in the article the other day about the Windows wireless problem/(feature that could be exploitable?) there was a mention that the default behaviour for Windows would be changed with the next se…

Bugtraq has an interesting post which picks up on a note in Stephen Toulouse's latest entry on the WMF vulnerability. When I first read the post I was more interested in the way he was responding to …

So, juice (formerly known as ipodder) was a bit too gui-only for my tastes, I took a look at bashpodder which is a bash-script based podcast client. Really, this is very much to my liking as it can b…

I've been playing around a bit with podcast clients the last couple of days. I've been finding online news feeds for the onlineradiotv.com site and for many of those I have bash scripts to handle dow…

So for the past month and a half I've been puzzling over northcarolinagenealogy.net and it's mysterious sudden disappearance from google. I mean... let's see, there are a couple hundred posts there. …

The last time I used openvpn, it was version 1.x and only supported a single connection per running process. So, if you had a server that you wanted to support multiple clients connecting, you had to…

Dealing with text.... we've looked at a couple of basics on logging in and starting to use the command line and hopefully not feeling too helpless there... we've seen ways to navigate directories and…

Now that we've logged in and learned how to move from one directory to another (and find where we are if we get lost...) it's probably time to start learning how to find out about other commands. Wel…

This is part two in a series of "how to use the command line in linux" style articles.... these are intended to be quite basic for those that have not used a command line before.... In part one we lo…

I know many people get intimidated with a black screen, white text and blinking cursor. No mouse, not knowing where to start.... well, I'm going to spend a bit of time in this article trying to help …

I did an article a while back about cron and scheduling tasks in linux (I also mentioned kron which is a graphical interface for cron scheduling...). That works well and good for things that happen o…

This sounds like a serious vulnerability. The SecurityFix is reporting on a very serious vulnerability in AOL. The problem affects AOL version 8.0, AOL version 8.0+, and AOL version 9.0 Classic. The …

The 2006 Winter Olympics are coming up. This time around, the olympics are being held in Turin, Italy. The official site can be found here. I can't say that I've been a huge fan of the Olympics, but …

Not long ago, I switched from Evolution to Kontact as my primary mail/calendar/addressbook/etc.... program under linux. One of the nice things about the Kontact suite is that you can either open up t…

It seems the WMF patch that was recently released for Windows 2000 and XP (and 2003) has been ported to Microsoft Windows Vista Beta.... This makes it the first security patch for Vista. eweek has an…

I've posted several things over at the onlineradiotv.com site. For starters I've got links to a few international (shortwave) broadcasters live audio streams and where available their "latest" englis…

There's another patch for those Win98 users that are nervous about the WMF vulnerability that was announced at the tail end of the year. This site has made the patched version of gdi32.dll available …