My web wanderings

www.leastprivilege.com - Turning on Remote Desktop - remotely

if you want to turn on Remote Desktop on a WinXP or 2003 machine over the the network, this little WMIC command will help

wmic /NODE:Server /USER:administrator RDTOGGLE WHERE ServerName=”Server” CALL SetAllowTSConnections 1

Why DNS Based Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Doesn’t Work
Why DNS Based Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) Doesn’t Work

Note to self. When installing Debian Sarge on VMware Workstation make sure to use IDE virtual disks not SCSI.

Netron Light: a lightweight version of the Netron graph control is available for download . Read the article entitled ‘Diagramming for dummies’ (PDF fromat, 15 pages) to find out what it is. The article is enclosed in the download as well. Hopefully this simple control will reach even more developers. This simplified version is filling a gap in the market or, at least, this is my conclusion from the mails and forum postings. The article can also be found on the CodeProject space.

SpellBound, a spelling checker for Firefox. is a port of the spellchecker code and user interface from the Mozilla Suite’s Composer that enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea / input elements (html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound) and rich text form elements. This allows you to spell check forms (e.g. message board posts, blog entries, wysiwyg, etc.) before submitting them when using your Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Suite browser.

Overview and Background

Microsoft’s terminal services client (also called ‘Remote Desktop Connection’) has one main thing against it. Remote applications do not appear as if they are running on the local desktop, instead they appear in a separate window which represents the server’s desktop. This is fine if you just want to work exclusively on the server, but can be a pain if you want to switch between applications on the server and the local desktop or want to run applications on different servers. What is needed is a way to display the remoted applications as ‘Seamless Windows’ on the client.

Commercial products have been written to achieve this in a Windows enviroment, the most well known would be Citrix. Citrix uses it’s own protocol (ICA) to publish applications to the client. Others have used Microsoft’s protocol called RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) with additional software to achieve the same effect (the most notable of these is Tarentalla’s Canaveral IQ – I suspect they use a similar, but more sophisticated, method to the one presented in this article).

While these products provide a lot more than just seamless windows, they are also quite expensive. It would be nice to have this feature in a regular RDP client without having to buy a whole application publishing product.

This article provides a possible solution to this problem by extending Microsoft’s RDP client using virtual channels to communicate between the server and client. This option has been chosen over writing or extending an existing open source RDP client (such as rdesktop) because we will still be able to take advantage of all the features in Microsoft’s client (and presumably all new features they add in the future). Also an advantage to using Microsoft’s client is that we can get some rudimentary application publishing over a web page since their terminal services client has and ActiveX component to do this.

By Martin Wickett

Build an Open Source Network Sniffer
This article reviews common issues of wireless security, and shows how to use open source software to suss out wireless networks, get information about them, and start recognizing common security problems. You will learn how build a lightweight wireless sniffer that runs on open source software and see how simple it is to interact with wireless networks

I have found the following useful items for my project at work to automate our deployment process.

Power Outage Knocks LiveJournal Blogs Offline (Ziff Davis)
(16 hrs, 16 mins ago)
A sudden power outage has knocked millions of Six Apart Ltd.’s LiveJournal blogs offline.
The power failure occurred on Friday evening at the Internap data center affected more than 100 servers that keep LiveJournal’s blogging network up and running.
“LiveJournal is currently completely inaccessible, and we’re waiting on Internap for an estimate when power will be restored. Once power is restored, the service will be brought back up slowly so that we can ensure data integrity,” Six Apart said in a notice. “We’ll [provide an] update with an estimate for when the service will be brought back up once we hear back from Internap.”

freshmeat.net: Project details for LinkChecker
With LinkChecker, you can check HTML documents for broken links. It features recursion, robots.txt exclusion protocol support, HTTP proxy support, i18n support, multithreading, regular expression filtering rules for links, and user/password checking for authorized pages. Output can be colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, or a sitemap graph in GML or XML format. Supported link types are HTTP/1.1 and 1.0, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Gopher, Telnet, and local files.

A tool that collects configuration data on Unix/Windows systems.

Here is something I want to check out. freshmeat.net: Project details for Debian System Wide Information Manager
DSWIM is a powerful informational tool for Debian’s packaging system. Designed with an integrated approach it combines the functionality found in several other programs and scripts. This provides users with a centralized approach for querying the installation, allowing programmers the liberty of writing smaller and simpler code.

After nearly five months of development, version 2.3 of the Metasploit Framework has been released. Version 2.3 includes a dozen new exploits, new and improved payloads, a new msfweb interface, the Meterpreter, and many speed and functionality enhancements. Please see the release notes for more information. Additionally, the Opcode Database has been refactored and is currently in beta mode.

When someone claims five 9’s of availibilty what does that really mean?
Translating the Metrics

Formula = (3651/4 x 24)

As you can see It would take a lot to get five 9’s of availibilty. Most of all it requires no single point of failure and that includes physical locations.

How cool is it that I am posting this wirelessly from my brand new Treo 650. Oh yeah baby. btw I can also manage my servers from it. No more laptop for me on road trips.

Thanks to lovely wife for putting up with my need of geeky toys.

SourceForge.net: Project Info - Enterprise Monitoring, Windows Systems
Centrally monitor eventlogs, no agents needed; Send alerts to different people on different events; Integrated with ticket tracking system; Forward events to syslogd; Archive events into MYSQL/MSSQL; Web interface to search for events;

Home Page
NagMIN is a WebMIN module that provides centralized, integrated, web-based management of popular Open Source monitoring tools to help create a holistic network monitoring environment.

Synthis Corporation - Process Excellence Suite
The Process Excellence SuiteTM empowers you to document and manage your business processes and systems to maximize efficiency and deliver strategic change.

Enabling The Transparent Enterprise TM
Whether providing the transparency demanded by your customers, complying with industry standards and government regulations, or working to improve your existing operational effectiveness, the foundation for all of these initiatives is to have clear visibility into how your business operates.

I haven’t posted much personal stuff here but I just wanted to tell everyone about how happy I am being married and that my wife Ellen is very good to me. She helps me tremendously and I am so lucky to have her in my life. She and her wonderful family have made the last 3 years some of the happiest of my life. Thank you honey!!

Meet the experts: Bobby Woolf on J2EE architecture and design

Excellent article on J2EE.