My web wanderings

Security Insights MS Security Architect

By Richard Bejtlich

By Erik Inge Bolso on Tue, 2005-03-01 00:00.

Keeping directories in sync on multiple machines can be difficult. Running Unison is one way to make the task easier.

Unison is a file-synchronization tool that runs on Linux, UNIX and Microsoft Windows. Those of you who’ve used IBM Lotus Notes or Intellisync Mobile Suite probably have an idea of what synchronization is good for, as compared to one-way mirroring options such as rsync. You might have mirrored a company document directory to your laptop, for example, and then modified a document or two. Other people might have modified other documents in the same directory by the time you get back. With rsync, you’d need to reconcile the differences between the two directories manually or risk overwriting someone’s changes. Unison can sort out what has changed where, propagate the changed files and even merge different changes to the same file if you tell it how.

Full article

Here is an article on Filesystem integrety checkers. There are several filesystem integrity checker applications, both commercial and open source. I chose to deploy afick, because it is written in Perl, which makes it lightweight and easily portable between different operating systems. Though by nature designed for the command line, afick also has an optional Webmin module and a graphical interface written in perl-Tk.

Here is an article on Filesystem integrety checkers. There are several filesystem integrity checker applications, both commercial and open source. I chose to deploy afick, because it is written in Perl, which makes it lightweight and easily portable between different operating systems. Though by nature designed for the command line, afick also has an optional Webmin module and a graphical interface written in perl-Tk.

QueryCommander is a Open Source Query Analyzer that you can use to work with the following Databases.

Considering the capabilities of Samba 3 and what they could mean for your workplace network.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8069

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

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

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.

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

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;

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

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.

GNU utilities for Win32

Windows 2003 Certificate Services article #1

Windows 2003 Certificate Services article #2

MS Cluster guide and tool

This guide provides step-by-step instructions for creating and configuring a typical single quorum device multi-node server cluster using a shared disk on servers running the Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition operating systems.

Download

The Cluster Recovery Utility is a tool that collects together a number of pieces of functionality that are particularly useful in a server cluster after a disk on the shared bus has failed.

Server cluster configurations manage disks on a shared storage infrastructure that are visible from multiple nodes although only one node in a server cluster can access any given disk at any point in time. In the event of the failure or corruption of a disk on the shared storage interconnect special care must be taken to restore the data and recover the applications.

The Cluster Recovery Utility is a tool that collects together a number of pieces of functionality that are particularly useful in a server cluster after a disk on the shared bus has failed.

This utility is primarily aimed at the following scenarios:

Restoring resource checkpoint files
Replacing a failed disk
Recovering from disk signature changes
Migrating data to a different disk on the shared bus
 
Note: this tool works on WIndows 2000 too!

Download

Mobile Access in Exchange 2003

To help me keep track of all the new PDA’s