Classic Tech Tips Archive

Spyware Confidential has the top 10 tips to keep that new pc spyware free. Some good tips here and these should be on the checklist when setting up a new pc any time of the year... Paraphrased here..…

There seems to be a 0-day exploit involving WMF (Windows Meta File's) according to SANS. Here's their lead-in Just when we thought that this will be another slow day, a link to a working unpatched ex…

F-Secure is warning about ads for a "leaked version" of Windows Messenger 8 beta. There is no public beta of this and it is a virus.... If you download and run BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE from that site, you…

I saw an article at Barrapunto that Wordpress 2.0 is now available. I went over to the Wordpress site and found indeed it is released. (No mention in their blog yet of it.) Here's the Gaceta Digital …

Ok - I was thinking I might have been a bit too dismissive of flightgear. So, I took a second look (and a third and fourth.) In fact, I found a source rpm of the 0.99 version and rebuilt it for Mandr…

Linux systems give you many possibilities and one of them is good scheduling (cron), another is good scripting capabilities. I've done things with linux fairly easily that with Windows would have bee…

I remember many years ago watching a Dr. Who episode where a very important key was "hidden" in a display of many other keys. Kind of like hiding a tree in a forest. This concept is "security by obsc…

Let me start by saying I am FAR from being an expert on the subject of building rpm's... RPM's are binary packages for use in red-hat based distributions. They are used (*in my case on Mandriva) with…

I remember back when I was running Windows as my primary OS, one of my favorite diversions was Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000?) In fact, I clearly remember circumnavigating the globe in a Cessna in…

Ok - so now post upgrade to Mandriva 2006 I sit down to try something out. Put a dvd in the drive and see what happens. I rarely sit and watch dvd's on the desktop, but it's always been a possibility…

I'm going to do a few articles on building RPM's as much for my own reference as anyone elses. I'm not an expert on the subject by any means... I do this from time to time, rebuild an rpm for an olde…

I'll confess to having a lot to learn about IP ethernet networking. I feel pretty comfortable with basic TCP/IP (v4), the concept of UDP vs. TCP ports, ICMP pings, etc... but ARP is something that I …

There are ways that risks can be avoided. Recently, there was what was called a zero-day exploit for Internet Explorer. As I write this, the exploit surfaced 3 weeks ago and tomorrow there will be a …

OK - so as I have mentioned after upgrading to Mandriva 2006 I was looking at the possibility of moving from Evolution to Kontact as the main mail client. I moved contacts and got things massaged qui…

I REALLY like secure shell (SSH) for remote access to linux machines. You can do more than just a "telnet" like remote shell with it. (Port forwarding.) However, the default configuraton for the open…

There's a joke that many people bring out when new Windows viruses hit big.... it goes along the lines of, "download a fix here" and the link points to a knoppix linux livecd download, or a Mandriva …

Once upon a time I did an article about the biggest computer security vulnerability ever. I've also passed along the old "the most dangerous part of a car is the nut behind the wheel" joke. If you ha…

I've toyed around with the idea of migrating everything over to Kontact for my mail. I've used Evolution since moving over to linux, but there are some things about Kontact that just seem slicker to …

For those that read this I'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I have several posts scheduled to come out each day through the 1st of the New Year, but will likely not be a…

In the spirit of the day before Christmas, I've come across a couple links to help you track Santa Claus' progress around the world. First up the Google Blog points out that you can track Santa with …

I've talked about Antivirus software as an essential. Today we're going to look at Antispyware software. There is a difference. By definition a virus is a piece of software that infects other files o…

All in all, what I've documented was a bit over three hours worth of attention to the machine (much more for the full scans, but I didn't have to stand and watch them.) I didn't document a sidetrip t…

Nobody wants to be tied to their job over the holidays, but what if someone has hacked your servers and is using your machine to scam thousands of people a day? Does that keep for two weeks? Does som…

Incidents.org writes to remind as that bot's aren't just for Windows. The recent PHP exploits have seen the use of the "kaiten" bot. After infection on the system it connects to an IRC server. It wou…

I think it's time to wrap things up. The KDE start new session option is back after the changes I mentioned to the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file I mentioned in a previous post. There are no outstanding iss…