Computer Tips -Tech Info

Well, where are things? The gui installer did a good job, got the system up and running. The biggest initial problem is that it didn’t change the default boot entry in lilo, which meant the system tried to boot under the old kernel and things died (likely c++ incompatibilities?) So, on a REBOOT, I chose […]

OK, we’re moving on to BHOdemon to take care of the browser helper objects. Unfortunately it looks like BHODemon is not being currently maintained, the developer has had a housefire. I am very sorry, but BHODemon is currently on hiatus, as I no longer have the time to devote to it (due to a house […]

There are acouple situations where my systems memory needs have exceeded the supply. The most likely cases are running virtual machines and building cd/dvd images. Those things realistically take LOT’s of memory. I have a swap partition – I don’t recall the size right off. I have about 512 MB on the desktop and probably […]

So, AVG has been scanning away finding things we’ve really got a foothold on the system and the malware has a fight on it’s hands. It’s good to see progress. Up to this point we’ve had multiple Spool32 errors (printer related). These errors are what prompted the system to be brought in initially. There’s a […]

Sendmail is not my favorite MTA. I really prefer Postfix, but… I have to use sendmail in a few situations. I’ve run a little script on the web server for a good while to monitor the mail queue. I was running into a problem where I had LOTS of messages backed up. I suspected I […]

Picking up from last time… AVG was failing to install with a peculiar registry error. (Which I didn’t see much reference to online.) OK, so here is another fruit of the online search (so many bugs to identify…) jawa32.exe is listed as spyware.seekseek in sarc’s database. OK – let’s see if we can kill of […]

This is related to MS05-054… According to Incidents.org it’s possible that this will not install (user submission of this). They also have a user submitted workaround…    Send article as PDF   

Ok, the last post got a bit long with the hijackthis log, but I wanted to include the whole picture. I put a few comments in, but thought it might be useful to include the notes I took at the time. For starters I leave it unplugged from the network. (There is no network card […]

I had someone call and start by saying she bet me a dollar I’d never heard of this before…. She said she was doing something (adjusting font size?) and all of a sudden everything on her screen went upside down and nothing will bring it back. I’ve actually heard this before, not too long ago […]

This is the first in a several part series documenting the cleaning of an infected PC. The only real noteworthy item is that it was a dial-up only connection and was rather infested for that. (On par with some of the broadband connected pc’s I’ve seen. It’s also an interesting counterpoint to the network security […]