Computer Tips -Tech Info

I was doing a remote connect to a machine today and the “send ctrl-alt-del” for some reason didn’t work to bring up the task manager, so I had to get to it another way. For those that never noticed (or don’t recall), if you right click on the taskbar, you should see an option to launch the task manager. (I was looking to kill off a program that was being uncooperative.) Another way to get it is to press ctrl-shift-esc and it will popup.

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I really ought to find a way to alias “rm -f *” to “rm -i” IF the time is between 1 AM and 7 AM…. Last night I was working late (2:30AM or so when this happened). I had just made a few “refinements” to some of my audio streaming scripts (kept in a “Foreign News Sources” folder). I was curious to see if I had any scripts that were still using realplayer, so I had done a “grep realplay *” and saw a lot of results… but most were in temporary files (left over from a text editor ending in ~)… so there’s radiopragueenglish and radiopragueenglish~ …………..

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So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…

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A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…

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Sunbelt blog has the details on a spysherriff clone called pesttrap (distributed through pesttrap.com). I guess clone is not the best word as they’re calling it a “variant” which suggests to me that perhaps more has changed than just the name. SpySherriff, of course, is one of the “rogue antispyware” programs or “wolves in sheeps clothing” as I like to think of them.

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I normally don’t follow updates for Oracle, as I don’t have an installation running Oracle to support. Right now, I’m quite glad of that… The Security Fix is talking about the 82 patches they released Tuesday in their quarterly patch release. The fact that they released 82 patches is not what’s disturbing though. According to the article, Oracle claims that 75% of their patches come from internally reported vulnerabilities….

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It’s been a long day out and I didn’t have but a few moments to check mail this afternoon. I did happen to check stats and saw a lot of people visiting an old article (November 28th) on a Worldnic DNS server outage. I thought it was a bit odd and this evening, now I know why. Incidents.org has some details on the outage.

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I haven’t had much time to look into this, but one of the mailservers I administer is typically configured to relay through mail.lig.bellsouth.net, with mail.averyjparker.com as a fallback. Sometime overnight, mail.averyjparker.com started getting heavy use and on checking this morning was getting all of the outbound traffic. So, I did a bit of investigation mail.lig.bellsouth.net is no longer found and I’ve switched the configuration to mail.bellsouth.net and all is churning along well.

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F-secure has information on a fairly aggressive new email virus. Their name for it is VB.bi although it’s aliases are…. W32.Blackmal.E@mm, WORM_GREW.A, W32/Nyxem-D, Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi depending on which AV vendor you check with. It’s a worm as well, in that it tries to spread through remote shares. It attempts to disable antivirus software as well. Here are some details from their writeup:

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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 for quick access to replacement hardware. One that probably is easily overlooked is very low-tech. That’s a system log. I don’t know that this isn’t a BAD idea for any system, but certainly is a good idea for servers and other “mission critical” systems. (In thinking about my desktop, this kind of log wouldn’t be bad….maybe a bit obsessive with a desktop, but…. I think I’ve messed it up more times than it’s spontaneously had problems…) So what am I rambling on about this time?????

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