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
Note to self. When installing Debian Sarge on VMware Workstation make sure to use IDE virtual disks not SCSI.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
libranet.com :: View topic - Two handy little apps for laptop…
I found these two quite usefull apps for my laptop:
ifplugd
A configuration daemon for ethernet devices
ifplugd is a daemon which will automatically configure your
ethernet device when a cable is plugged in and automatically
unconfigure it if the cable is pulled. This is useful on laptops with
onboard network adapters, since it will only configure the interface
when a cable is really connected.
NoFlushd
allow idle hard disks to spin down
Noflushd is a daemon that spins down disks that have not been read from after a certain amount of time, and then prevents disk writes from spinning them back up. It’s targeted for laptops but can be used on any computer with IDE disks. The effect is that the hard disk actually spins down, saving you battery power, and shutting off the loudest component of most computers.
I haven’t tried this one yet:
i8kutils
Dell Inspiron and Latitude laptop utilities
This is a collection of utilities to control Dell Inspiron and Latitude
laptops. It includes programs to turn the fan on and off, to read fan
status, CPU temperature, BIOS version and to handle the volume buttons
and Fn-keys.
The package includes also a small Tk applet, designed to be swallowed in the gnome panel, which monitors the CPU temperature and controls automatically the fans accordingly to user defined thresholds.
The programs require the kernel module i8k.o which can be compiled from the package sources or found in Linux kernel 2.4.14 and later versions.
The kernel module has been tested only on Inspiron 8000 laptops but it should work on any Inspiron and Latitude laptops.
Haven’t tried either but could be usefull for older laptops without a CD-Writer (like mine):
backuppc
A high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up PCs
BackupPC is disk based and not tape based. This particularity allows
features not found in any other backup solution:
* Clever pooling scheme minimizes disk storage and disk I/O.
Identical files across multiple backups of the same or different PC are stored only once (using hard links), resulting in substantial savings in disk storage and disk writes.
* Optional compression provides additional reductions in storage.
CPU impact of compression is low since only new files (those not already in the pool) need to be compressed.
* A powerful http/cgi user interface allows administrators to view log files, configuration, current status and allows users to initiate and cancel backups and browse and restore files from backups very quickly.
* No client-side software is needed. On WinXX the smb protocol is used.
On linux or unix clients, rsync or tar (over ssh/rsh/nfs) can be used
* Flexible restore options. Single files can be downloaded from any backup directly from the CGI interface. Zip or Tar archives for selected files or directories can also be downloaded from the CGI interface.
* BackupPC supports mobile environments where laptops are only intermittently connected to the network and have dynamic IP addresses (DHCP).
* Flexible configuration parameters allow multiple backups to be performed in parallel.
* and more to discover in the manual…
14 Aug 2004: This document will introduce OpenVPN as a free, secure and easy to use and configure SSLbased VPN solution. The document will present some simple (and verified) scenario’s that might be useful for preparing security/networking labs with students, for creating a remote access solution or as a new project for the interested home user.
This article discusses Network Access Quarantine Control with Windows Server 2003, which allows administrators to quarantine mobile users before giving them full network access, by first ensuring these machines are up-to-date according to a baseline security model.
…excerpt from: http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1794
Jason Brooks of eWeek offers a primer for integrating Linux and Windows on the network using Samba and Fedora Core. Brooks says that by integrating Linux clients among the Windows desktops, users can use Microsoft’s Active Directory to administer Linux desktops. But he warns that it does not come easily.
Armed with the Samba HowTO, Google searches, and John Terpstra’s Samba By Example, here is how you too can do it.
[Via DesktopLinux.com]
25 Jul 2004: I’ve been collecting command line tips and tricks
over the last while, based on questions from work
collegues and from my local LUG. Others have found them useful so
I hope you do to.
1. Learn the basics of all Microsoft products’ keyboard shortcuts.
2. Become expert in Visual Studio .NET keyboard shortcuts.
3. Serve some speed with SQL Server shortcuts.
4. Mozilla browsers go here, IE browsers go here and select your IE version.
5. Do you use Google? Of course you do. Check out Google Labs’ experimental Keyboard Shortcuts searching.
Ever wanted a really small font to save on screen space?
This is an excellent toolbar that Mike@Larkware pointed out. it has some great features and it is open source
If you have ever been an administrator of an IIS/ASP webserver this is something you dread
Here is a good visual monitoring app for *nix and windows
I soooo want a Athlon FX system like this one
And since I love WAP and Love RSS maybe I can build something like this on my own with help from this walkthrough
I consider myself a power internet user. I typically have at least four browser windows open and the nature of my job dictates that I be able to diagnose issues with web servers as fast as possible. So in that persuit I have tried just about every web browser on the MS and Linux platform. And while there are some outstanding browsers out there I have come to love Mozilla Firebird. It is by far one of the best availible on either platform. With so many powerful addons it can really help in diagnoses and hacking around websites. Below are a the Extensions I use on all my PC’s
Here is the list I currently have installed.