Computer Everything

Today we ordered Eight HP brand PC’s custom configured with Windows 7 Pro/Windows XP Pro downgrade option.  They arrived preinstalled with XP Pro so I upgraded one to Windows 7 Pro to do some benchmarking on two identical machines.  This is what PassMark had to say:

Benchmark Results

Okay all, I’ve been refraining from posting this for some time now but I figure since Sony just signed a deal with NetFlix that it’s about time to come forth.

All too often I see my friends PS3’s not being used to their full potential.  Like installing Ubuntu with the Six Axis support to be able to play online poker games that don’t suck as bad as the PS3 store ones!  Most of my friends aren’t this geeky, but we’ll talk about this later because you don’t need to be a geek to follow this one.

So you have a PS3 and you probably realize that it’s much more than a gaming system, it’s actually a pretty beefy computer system with wifi and ethernet and beautiful HD visuals.  Unfortunately I’ve yet to find one decent and legal site that offers streaming media to the PS3 owner.  This is due to very poor browser design and flash support on behalf of Sony.  After months of owning a PS3 I’ve collected a handful of awesome ways to both download and stream movies and TV shows which I am sharing with you.  The following is for informational purpose only and I do not condone the piracy of any copy protected content (see disclaimer).

Downloading Movies:

My favorite resource to download movies to my PS3 is StageVu.  I’ve setup some decent search filters to help me find high quality DVD rips in short time.  To try this start by going here:

http://stagevu.com/videos (if on your PS3, hold the X button down to open new window then L2 to come back here for more instructions…)

Now that your back your going to want to click on Advanced Search on the top navigation bar.   Set the Minimum Length to whatever you feel is appropriate, for example if your looking for a full lenth movie I’d give a minimum of at least 45 minutes.

Next I usually set the Rating FROM 5 stars TO 5 stars and click search.  This gives me a wide selection of highly rated content to select from.

(Another way to search if your looking for HIGH quality is to specify a minimum resolution of 640 x 480.)

Now with this in mind hit R2 and go back to the the StageVu site and do as I say! (then hit L2 to come back!)

You should have seen a fairly sexy list of movies to choose from, again, I DO NOT CONDONE THE PIRACY OF COPY PROTECTED CONTENT.  From this point proceed at your own risk. 

Once you have selected the movie of choice click on it and when prompted to run the plugin click Yes.  You should see a flash video window draw on the screen with the Play Icon.  Hover over the icon then hit Triangle button to pop up your menu screen.  Now click File then Save Target As.  This should feed the .avi file into your Download Manager.  Select Download in Background and go find some more movies!

Typical full lenth movies average around 700 MB and can vary due to length and encoding quality.  I’ve had over 80 full lengths downloaded at one point in time all with cute icons.  (picture to come).   The quality typically is as good as Digital TV if not slightly better.  (one notch below DVD quality).

Streaming Movies and TV shows:

There are actually quite a few decent sites to stream content for on the PS3… too bad Sony’s new PS3 YouTube interface TOTALLY SUX0RS!  I mean it’s cool… looking… but wtf Sony, UPGRADE YOUR BROWSER PLEASEEE!

For this tutorial i’m going to talk about TVShack.net

TV Shack has a large number of links to outside sources that host TV Shows and Movies but I will warn you… Sony’s browser sucks when it’s fed a large amount of data and will often cause a Denial of Service like state on your PS3 where it will totally freeze up.  (or if your lucky you can hold your PS3 button down to power cycle).

So you’ve been warned… if you notice your PS3 becomes unresponsive during this walkthru dont panic, just try to Add a Bookmark to the page before it freezes (then reboot your PS3 if needed… This problem occurs most often on the Movies page because it loads such a big list of movies poor PS3 can’t handle it).

Now head over to http://tvshack.net/ and click on Video Channels -> Television.  A list will load of TV Shows that you can watch on your PS3 or PC.  Some of the links are bad but dont get frustrated, tons of them are still live.  Many of the episodes have alternate links on the top right of the page, i find that Megavideo links are the best quality and fastest to load.  Unfortunately you only get about 60 minutes on megavideo before they give you an hour long timeout unless you pay for their service.

Once you’ve played around with this for a bit you may notice that many links are also hosted on Tudou and Youku.  Both these sites are overseas so often time the content is less restricted, unforunately in the USA you will most often get poor bandwith from these two sites.  If you dont mind waiting a half hour or more for the video to buffer then just queue it up and pause it till enough of a buffer is built for you to stream without interruption.

If for some reason Youku or Tudou load fast for you, you may like to use google to locate a movie or tv show of choice.  Here are some examples on how to do that:

1. goto Google.com

2. search for:  

site:youku.com Entourage 

or

site:tudou.com Entourage 

Google will provide you a list of pages on the site with the results “Entourage”.  Even though the sites are in another language, the look and feel should be familar enough for you to find what your looking for.  If you need further clairification on this feel free to post!

Out of bordem I googled “hacker games” to see what would turn up.  I came across a fairly cheesy yet cryptic puzzle game called Hacker 2.  I was unable to complete the first level but I didn’t give up.  I decided to decompile the .swf program and  see how it was written.  Well deciphering the puzzles was a hell of a lot easier… Was this cheating?  I think not!  The way the designer explains the puzzles makes the game a little more difficult, heres an explination:

Level 1: “XK Servers”

The facts:

website: www.xkservers.web

company name: algoEX

Well this isn’t quite enough information for us to complete the mission so what happens when we scan www.xkservers.web ?

Open ports found… 6204 used for webmail.  What happens when we point our browser to www.xkservers.web:6204

We get a banner saying that our username has been reset to 01CompanyName

Now that’s what was difficult for me.  I did not realize that algoEX was in fact the company name.  Anyways its now safe to assume the username is 01algoEX.

What happens when we run this username in the Crack against the webmail URL?  BOOM we get a password. PWND! (p.s. PWND! is not the password).

Now if we login to the main website with the username 01algoEX we get the address of the victims FTP site which is: ftp.01algoex.xkservers.web.  Login to the FTP and download the algorhythm and you win level 1.

Level 2: “F8datastreams”

The facts:

website: www.f8stream.web

upload website: www.upload.f8stream.web

username: admin

This ones even easier than the first, go to the Crack and run the admin username against the upload URL.  BOOM… PWND!

login to the upload site as admin and enable FTP then Scan the server… looks like FTP’s running on its default port 21.  Put in your newly discovered password and upload your virus!

Level 3- “Delta adworks”

Facts:

Victim’s email: gary@deltaadworks.web

Website: www.deltaadworks.web

If we visit the website we dont get any useful info, so lets scan the server… And it appears port 6945 is open for Database Management.  Lets point our browser to www.deltaadworks.web:6945 and see what fact we pick up next…

username: adminuser

once again lets Crack this username against the URL (www.deltaadworks.web:6945).  There’s our password.  Lets go ahead and login to see what else we can get access to… Lookie Webmail database is down, better restart that and get connected!  I wont ruin the final steps of this game for you but you get the point.

If you’ve enjoyed this tutorial or have any questions please feel free to post feedback!

Recently I’ve been keeping a close eye on netbooks with the hopes of building a mini BackTrack beast with hefty battery life. Well thanks to Asus I’ve turned that hope into a reality.

Several weeks ago I had some spare time after being called to jury duty which turned out to be canceled. Instead of twiddling my thumbs for a few hours I decided to check out netbooks. I wandered into Micro Center and looked at several brand machines including Asus, HP, Acer and MSI. When looking at specs I ideally wanted a quality brand netbook with 2 GB RAM, an SSD hard drive and Wifi card that supported promiscuous mode and packet injection. Unfortunately Micro Center did not offer ANY netbooks with 2 GB RAM or SSD hard drive, those I would have to pay extra for. I decided to keep my money on the upgrades but notcied that Asus (my first netbook brand name choice) had a machine with an 802.11 N card (1005HA-VU1X-BK). I did some quick research to see if anyone was successful with a BackTrack installation on this machine, the vertict looked good and the price was the same as NewEgg so I decided what the heck and bought it.

After leaving the store I eagerly opened the surprisingly small package, popped in the battery and proceeded to the nearest Wi-Fi Enabled coffee shop to plug in and begin tinkering. The box came preinstalled with Windows XP and booted right up no problem. All the drivers worked perfectly out of the box and system had very minimal bloatware. The machine has a 160GB hard drive split evenly into two user partitions. I trimmed down a few services, preinstalled applications and performance settings to achieve maximum performance from the rather mediocre Intel Atom processor and was cruising the net at very acceptable speeds. I installed my standard Windows security packages including: NMap, Cain, WireShark, Nessus, NetStumbler, 7zip, SRWare Iron, etc and have had very decent performance.

After a day of XP I decided it was time to start my BackTrack installation. Some easy googling pulled up two excellent articles:

http://forums.remote-exploit.org/backtrack-4-working-hardware/24386-howto-backtrack-4-pre-final-asus-eee-pc-1005ha-3 .html

http://forums.remote-exploit.org/bt3beta-working-hardware/10225-bt3-eeepc-7.html

Here’s my installation summary:

1) Download the latest BackTrack4 iso (pre-final).

2) Download UNetbootin and create a bootable usb.

3) Boot the from USB to BackTrack4 (spam the escape key while PC is powering up to get to boot menu).

4) Login as root, startx

5) Run the install.sh script on the desktop.

6) After setting up the basics you will need to configure your partitions. WARNING: (Pretty sure) the default setup will overwrite your XP installation. I clicked manual then deleted my non-xp partition, then with the free space created a 1024 MB partition for Swap and used the rest of the space as Linux ext3 system space and let the installer rip.

7) After the install completed I rebooted and removed my USB device. Here’s where things got a little tricky for me. Ubuntu by default does not enable the root account. I wasted much time running BackTrack as a user trying to sudo everything. This proved to be a waste of time for me so I finally did a “sudo passwd root” and rebooted logging in as root everytime there after.

Enabling and testing certain features

A) Wifi: /etc/init.d/wicd start This worked off the bat enabling my Atheros wifi card (ath9k driver). I could then use Wicd Network Manager (gui) to input my WPA2 settings and connect automatically (authenticates very quickly!).

B) LAN: /etc/init.d/networking start This did NOT work out of the box for me and took quite a bit of finesse to get going. I had to download a modified driver for my card (will post link later).

C) aireplay-ng: First few times I tried running this from KDE it crashed my system, stdout said Injection Sucessful but seconds later my whole system would lock up. After some googling I installed and fiddled with linux wirelss compat drivers and still got the same results. I uninstalled the drivers and tried again from the command line before starting any networking services and sure enough it worked. THEN it started to work magically under KDE.

9) Final Grade: A (9/10)

I give this machine a 9 out of 10 for quality, performance and overall satisfaction. My only major issue is that the Touchpad and Keyboard will stop responding randomly on occasion (under both OS’s). I will be giving Asus a call to try to resolve this one but my suspicion tells me that this may be a hardware issue. The other question that lingers in my mind is Hard Disk security. In the bios you are able to set a Hard Drive lock password which for obvious reasons is a very useful tool. What i’d like to know is just how secure is this, Who if anyone can easily unlock this drive and for what purpose? If anyone has any wisdom to share please make a post! Also please feel free to post any questions you may have as this BackTrack installation was a bit tricky.

Good luck!

For one of my employers I’ve been facing a huge storage challenge due to a lack of IT budget and growing profiles, shared folders and email stores.  I’ve been on the hunt for an affordable solution and been looking at everything from Email Archiving Servers to SAN and NAS devices.  Last week I got approval to order a Seagate BlackArmor 440 which from the spec sheet seemed like a good fit in our environment.  The box came shipped with 4x 1TB drives in a Raid 5 array, just needed power and ethernet cables plugged in and I was able to http to the IP address I got off the front LCD.  Logged in with default username/password (admin/admin) and was presented with a fairly basic configuration site.

I went straight for the network setup entering my FQDN, netbios name, domain username and password.  The NAS successfully joined Active Directory so I created a folder on it called Private with the intention of giving each user a 5 GB slice for storage and .pst files.  The folder was created successfully so I created a subfolder with my username then went to assign NTFS permissions, but Guess what? ..Access Denied!

Okay I thought, I’ve never used one of these before, might as well give Seagate Tech Support a call.   1-800-SEAGATE and only about 5 minutes of hold time I had a rep on the phone.  He had me look at the Groups link of the Access tab to see if I could add Active Directory users from the web interface.   Unfortunately no users were showing up in the list box.  He then had me delete the box’s AD entry and unjoin/rejoin the domain.  Once again I was able to successfully join the Active Directory domain but unable to get a user list.  Seagate could not offer any additional support at that point so I’m left blindly to fiddle with permissions?  The data sheet advertizes Active Directory support but I don’t think their techs are trained very well on supporting this functionality.

All in all it seems like a nice unit, very sturdy, easy to manage, nice features such as encryption and media server but without the Active Directory functionality is it useless in this environment…

Oh well!

At this point I think it’s time to give a Western Digital 4TB ShareSpace a shot.   Review to come!

Today I deployed PDFCreator to one of our Windows print servers and unfortunately the program doesn’t work quite how I’d expected. I was hoping each user could install the printer, and when printing, have the choice on where to save the .pdf file. Instead this destination is configured by me the administrator. With security concerns in choosing a common \\NAS\Public location I ended up configuring the application to print to each users roaming profiles home directory / My Documents folder.

This has been an excellent solution for our environment to export PDF files from our applications that don’t support it natively.  Staff members are now able to print quotes and invoices as PDF and send via email directly to their customers.

HURRAY FOR PDFCreator!!!

Started the day off as usual… verifying backups, auditing logs,  and sipping coffee over emails.

Vendor newletters, webinar invites, forwarded spam, ERP and CRM upgrade gabber… Ooh yay, another Labelview problem and potential solutions from their support vendor.  Guess what?  Our legacy environment is NO LONGER SUPPORTED by Teklynx…  understantably so since the About window shows a copyright date of 2000 but that still doesn’t solve my problem.  It seems we have  a mystery here.  The .lbl files for this version don’t want to open properly on this particular client machine which is somewhat baffling because the machine is virtually identical to the one it works fine on.  It’s almost positively due to the “Field length” settings not carrying over to the faulty computer.  I’ve copied all the registry settings and application settings and even started to disassemble pieces of the application to figure out whether this is A) a driver issue  B) a database issue  or C) a configuration or preference issue.  It shouldn’t be this hard!

After hacking away at this for a bit I’m left with few options because it’s sucked so much time away already… Do I A) say forget about it and put a working Windows 98 machine back in place.  B) Tell the department: “Sorry, you have to recreate these labels from scratch. ” C) Have the company upgrade to a current and supported version  or D)  Pour gasoline on myself and light a match?

I was left but a moment to ponder these options when a Customer Care supervisor came to my office so we could rerecord and program the CCR and Automated Attendant settings in our Nortel system.  This took about 2 hours and we still got some work to finish up on it.  Around that time I got a call from a local doctor’s office which I support saying they wish to accept our proposal and commit to a 3 month service contract – Great!  Shortly after, I got a call from another client asking to setup a network printer, and then a call from an OpenBravo ERP partner.

As we look to upgrade ERP systems there are many well known commercial products we are evaluating.  In addition I have committed to exploring some open source alternatives and narrowed my list down to the following four products worth evaluating for this particular environment:

OpenBravo

postBooks

Adempiere

WebERP

We’re looking for an ERP that has excellent sales, accounting, inventory and production tracking as well as a POS.  Other important features we seek are well designed security, user-friendlyness, handheld wireless barcode readers or pdas integrated with POS.  For a full review on the above products check the product reviews section (reviews coming soon!).

Other fun stuff included a call from MessageLabs trying to get me to evaluate their product as an alternative to Postini.  Now I do know our Postini services are due to expire soon and also pretty sure their prices have gone up 4x from what we paid last year – go Google!  But MessageLabs is still more expensive and I wasn’t really impressed by the 3rd party anti-virus products they use for filtering.  I am however very impressed with the statistics i’ve seen so will be getting a trial soon (expect a full report!).

Hello Everyone,

This is my free support section for the time being while we evaluate bulletin boards such as bbPress, phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision.

If you are seeking Free Computer Support please post your problem by replying below. All posts are subject to moderation.

If accepted your post will be replied to publicly, feel free to post anonymously and provide a link to any relevant information or even your own website.

Due to the rising importance of data security and many flaws discovered on PC’s every day it’s no wonder criminals are turning to the electronic circuit to claim their stakes. Throughout the years we’ve seen many personal security products come and go and never has there been an all-in-one safeguard for administrators, that is until we started discovered Nod32 by ESET. But the good news is that even your average user can get the Home edition which is just as powerful as the Business edition.

So what’s our top choice for Anti-virus?

- ESET Smart Security

What other products have we compared it to?

Symantec, Norton, Trend Micro, Avira, AVG to name a few.

Why is it better?

Well to start we get many calls to service infected PC’s, many which are running any of the above mentioned products. We’ve literally cleaned thousands of infections that these other AV’s have missed. In addition ESET doesn’t hinder performance and is highly customizable with the ability to turn on and off certain features with just a click or two. For additional information google search “Nod32 VS ” and you will find lots of geeks comparing it to other leading AV’s. If you find something better please recommend it to us.

How much does it cost?

Google Shopping search results indicate $39.99 – $79.99 for the latest version depending on which edition you choose. As a proud ESET Partner we try to honor or beat any price you can find. To order from us or to get a quote just contact us or give us a call!

After a week of being sick and falling behind at my other job I’m finally all caught up and then some!  During my downtime I was able to get much accomplished on this website which is finally almost finished!  Today started a little slow as I’m still recouping from the vicious cold that’s been going around but much to my suprise I ran out of priority work at 4:30 PM.  Hurray!

Upon getting to work, one of my more pressing matters included reprogramming phone extensions and handset configurations on our Nortel phone system to make way for the wholesale division who’ve just returned from the winter season layoffs.  They needed to be able to forward their desk phones to their cell phones so they can recieve calls while working in the commercial yard.  Also it was reported that some phones in the retail building were not picking up their proper call groups.  After wasting a good 20 minutes I found out that the actual problem was that the function buttons on the phone were not programmed properly.  Phone crysis solved!

Next was the ODBC issue with Labelview…  During the winter season I plucked the 2 remaining Windows 98 boxes from production because I was too lazy to configure a Nod32 Configuration file for them and quite frankly sick of seeing them on my network.  Unfortunately one of these two 98 boxes had a legacy printer application connected to a legacy printer.  Well you can see where this is going…

The replacement machine is not much newer but runs Windows 2000 which at least conforms to my Domain Security Policy and gets Automatic Updates from my WSUS server.  Anyway… After deploying this machine I had no had time to setup and configure the Labelview application, so sure enough last friday I was asked to get it running for them, and then got sick over the weekend.   After returning yesterday I got the application installed but could not get the labels to open and kept getting an ODBC error.  I saw that the latest MDAC was installed but did not see any ODBC in the Control panel.  After tearing thru the Registry i noticed odbccp.cpl was set to hidden (Security Policy ?) so I ran the control and noticed no drivers were installed –  Meh!  So i downloaded and installed the drivers from Microsoft and was still getting issues.  After further examining the application I was able to gather the credentials needed for it to properly login to the database and violla the labels started working again.   No documentation on this program from any former IT Admin and nothing but panic from the one employee who holds the disk.  WHAT A PAIN IN THE ARSE!  

Finally got that relic of an application figured out… now to document it… oh, that’s what this is ?  

What else… Oh yea, the “Musical printers” (Had to swap out 5 printers!)

… So the other pressing call I got this week was in regards to a printer (printerA) in the home services department that was “smearing the toner”.  Today I was able to take a look at it and confirm in fact it was printing very “sloppily”.  So I put in a call to our printer service company only to find out this particular printer is not under contract.  (Just my luck)  So as a quick fix I took the printer (printerB) from the president’s office and ran it down to replace the broken one  (it’s his company… i’m sure he’ll understand!).  Guess what, once I get there, their printer was printing fine!  So what do I do?  The minute I walk away its gonna start printing crappy again but they are printing 100 pages a minute to it so its not a great time to take it down anyway…  I guess i’ll leave the president’s printer down here for now (its pretty heavy anyway).  Also snagged an oldschool HP JetDirect (external) card that happened to be sitting down there, powered on, but not connected to anything. 

Both of these printers are higher end HP LaserJets.  Now let’s talk about the other 3 printers

printerC:  IBM InfoPrint series

This printer we got a great deal on and has NIC built in so I figured would make a great replacement for the accounting printer (printerE) which had no NIC and was attached to a PC that is never used except left on to print to via network sharing.  Unfortunately when printing to it from certian legacy applications you’d have to manually set the PCL type to Raster from GL/2.  …Yeah, i dont know what that means either but hey it made the printer happy but didn’t make the accounting team very happy.  Needless to say I promised them I’d find a solution…

printerD : HP LaserJet 2100 (spare HR printer)

During a chat with the HR manager she mentioned that I could take the printer in her office if I could provide a replacement, and since she doesnt print from this particular legacy app I figured she could use the IBM printer (printerC).

printerE :  HP LaserJet 2100 (original accounting printer)

Inevitably I swapped

printerA : printerB

printerC : printerE

printerD : printerA

printerE : printerD

Other than that there was the common “I forgot my password”… “can you reset my password” … “im not on the right email groups” … “my mouse was doing something funky” … etc…