stuart test blog

I signed up for Pownce today to see what it’s all about. Signup was nice and easy and updated my profile (http://pownce.com/amanzi/) with the same photo from Facebook.

But now what…? I went to add some friends and my only option is to add someone who’s already on Pownce. The thing is, I don’t know who’s on Pownce already and even then, I don’t want to have add everyone individually.

To me, the best feature of Facebook is how easy it is to find and add friends. I begrudgingly signed up to Facebook just to see what the hype was all about, and was then hooked from day one when it scanned my address book and told me that almost 50 of my contacts were already using Facebook.

Now I know that Pownce isn’t the same thing as Facebook, but both services are really only useful when you have lots of friends using them too. Pownce needs a better system of finding and adding friends I know.

Via: Nigel’s Blog

Most large organisations employ dedicated packagers to create automated software installations that can be deployed enterprise-wide using distribution tools such as Microsoft’s SMS 2003 or Group Policies. Smaller companies, however, can’t afford to package applications and often revert to manually installing the software on computers as required. Adobe provides a useful utility to help administrators customise and deploy the latest Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat products.

I won’t actually do an in-depth write up here, as the documentation provided by Adobe is more than enough to create your first package:

• White paper (PDF) – this provides all the information needed in PDF format.
• Solutions for IT professionals – this page discusses how to deploy, maintain and support Adobe Acrobat and Reader software across your organisation.
• Extract the Adobe Reader 8 msi installer for enterprise deployment – Adobe TechNote describing the process of extracting the required MSI file from the download package. (also see note below.)
• Adobe Reader Distribution Agreement – this is the agreement you need to fill in before getting the link to the full download package.
• User forums – a quick search of these forums will find you the link to download the full Adobe Reader package if you don’t feel like filling in the Distribution Agreement.
[tags]deploy,packaging,wise,microsoft,windows,group policies,active directory,sms,adobe,acrobat,reader,package,downloads[/tags]

The Disk Cleanup tool can be incredibly useful but is often underutilised. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that can help you utilise the tool to its fullest.

• Launch the tool quickly by opening the Run command (Start -> Run or Win Key + R) and type: “cleanmgr” (without quotes)
• To configure the settings to be used while running the tool as scheduled task or in  script, open the Run command and type: “cleanmgr /sageset:1” (This creates a profile that contains the settings.)
• To configure additional profiles, just increment the 1 as needed such as: “cleanmgr /sageset:2” and “cleanmgr /sageset:3”
• To run the Disk Cleanup tool with one of the profiles that you have configured, use: “cleanmgr /sagerun:1” (or the number of the profile that you created.)
• If you find that the Disk Cleanup tool is hanging on the “Compress old files” action, follow the instructions in Microsoft’s KB812248 which says to delete the “Compress Old Files” key from the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches” registry key. Don’t forget to backup the section of the registry first, by clicking on the key and choosing the Export option.

Let me know in the comments if you have any other tips that you’d like to share.

A utility that I’ve just recently started to use a lot is the Contig tool from Sysinternals. What it does is check one or more files for fragmentation and then attempts to move the file to an area on your hard drive where the whole file can live contiguously (is that really a word?) on your disk – in other words the whole file is in one piece with no fragmentation.

The utility is really simple to use:

Usage:
    contig [-v] [-a] [-s] [-q] [existing file]
or  contig [-v] -n [new file] [new file length]

  -v: Verbose
  -a: Analyze fragmentation
  -q: Quiet mode
  -s: Recurse subdirectories

The best use of this utility comes from when you’re working with virtual machines on your computer. The virtual disk drive files grow to be very large and if you use dynamically expanding disks then they are prone to getting very fragmented very quickly. This obviously degrades disk performance – especially on slower drives such as in laptops. The fix for this is to run the Contig command which moves the file into a contiguous part of the hard drive like so:

contig -v c:\virtual-hard-drive.vhd

You can also use Contig to defragment a whole folder (or even the whole disk drive) by using the “-s” option which performs a recursive defragmentation on all files in all of the subfolders:

contig -v -s c:\virtual-machines\

You can get more information about Contig at the Sysinternals site, and check out some of their other utilities like the wonderful PStools, the old favourites Filemon, Regmon, and Process Explorer (and yes, I prefer these three individual tools to the combined Process Monitor utility.)

UPDATE: I just noticed a new download from the Sysinternals website, and that is all of their trouble shooting tools bundled into one zipped download called the “Sysinternals Suite“

Microsoft have just released a new tool under the Sysinternals banner called Active Directory Explorer. Read the blurb from the website below for more information but based on this description, it sounds amazing! It’s odd then, that there is no other information about this new tool apart from the quote below.

This seems like a very advanced tool that would be hugely beneficial to anyone working with Active Directory. I’m intrigued by the idea of taking snapshots of your AD and then being able to load up those snapshots offline for browsing and diagnosis. My virtual environment at home isn’t up and running yet, but I will definitely be reporting some more information about this new tool soon.

Introduction

Active Directory Explorer (AD Explorer) is an advanced Active Directory (AD) viewer and editor. You can use AD Explorer to easily navigate an AD database, define favorite locations, view object properties and attributes without having to open dialog boxes, edit permissions, view an object’s schema, and execute sophisticated searches that you can save and re-execute.

AD Explorer also includes the ability to save snapshots of an AD database for off-line viewing and comparisons. When you load a saved snapshot, you can navigate and explorer it as you would a live database. If you have two snapshots of an AD database you can use AD Explorer’s comparison functionality to see what objects, attributes and security permissions changed between them.

AD Explorer works on Windows 2000 and higher.

Active Directory Explorer v1.0

As a follow-up to the secure USB drive post, I wanted to give some pointers on how to create secure, complex passwords.

Complexity…

In a Microsoft environment, a complex password must be at least six characters long, cannot contain three or more letters from the user’s username, and must contain characters from at least three of these five categories:

• Upper case characters – A, B, C, …, Z
• Lower case characters – a, b, c, …, z
• Numbers – 0, 1, 2, 3, …, 9
• Special characters – !, @, #, …
• Unicode characters – ?, þ, ?, …

Unicode characters are difficult to type, so we’ll ignore those for now as they are impractical, but if you stick with Microsoft’s recommendations here, you’re off to a good start.

First test…

Consider the following two passwords and think about which is more secure:

• July07
• HaUnChEofKslFnsoEasP

The second password is obviously more secure, but this doesn’t constitute a complex password as it only has characters from two of the five categories (upper and lower case.) The first password is considered a complex password as it has characters from three of the five categories, and it is six characters long. (This wouldn’t be an allowed, complex password if the user’s username was Julie or Julian, but that’s besides the point.)

Golden rule…

The golden rule when choosing a password is to not use a word that appears in the dictionary – not even when it is appended with numbers or special characters. Research has found that most people will throw in a couple of numbers at either the beginning or end of the password, and more often than not, these numbers relate to either the current date or an important date like birthdays, anniversaries, etc. So based on this, a better password would be “Ju07ly”. This doesn’t contain any dictionary words, it has three of the five character sets, and the numbers aren’t at the beginning or end of the password.

Common mistake…

A common practice when trying to come up with stronger passwords is to substitute letters with special characters. For example, you could choose your pets name, “Spotty” and turn it into this: “$p0ttY” This matches the requirements for a complex password, but the downside is that there are a bunch of commonly used special characters which any password cracker worth it’s money would factor into it’s algorithms. Some of the common ones are: @ for a, $ for s, 0 for o, ! for 1.

The other problem with choosing your pets name, is that hackers can use “social engineering” to obtain personal information from you which they could use to aid their password guessing. It wouldn’t be that difficult to find out your pet’s name, or any of your families or loved ones names. “$p0ttY” doesn’t look that difficult to guess now.

Looooong passwords…

The best way to overcome some of these problems is to use long passwords. As I showed in the example above, “HaUnChEofKslFnsoEasP” is much more secure than “July07” only because of it’s length of 20 characters. By my calculations there are 19,928,148,895,209,400,000,000,000,000 different password combinations using 20 characters with just upper and lower case. Compare this to just 56,800,235,584 combinations using 6 characters with upper case, lower case and numbers.

The rules…

Some of the rules we have so far are:

• Avoid using dictionary words, or names of people/places.
• Use long passwords – the longer the better.
• Use special characters, but not in an obvious way.
• Use both upper and lower case letters.

Don’t write it down…

The downside to obeying these rules is that you end up creating a password so complex, the only way to remember it is to write it down – usually on a piece of paper stuck on your monitor or under the mouse mat, or sometimes folded neatly in your wallet (with your bank cards!)

Methods…

So how do we create passwords that are both easily remembered and secure? Here’s one method…

Think of a short sentence that is easily remembered, for example: “My favourite movie is Titanic” or: “My husband never puts his socks away.” Then think of a way to shorten it into just one word like this: “My favourite movie is Titanic” becomes “MfmiT” This is too short, so perhaps we could make it: “MyfavmovisTitan” This is now 15 characters long and contains upper and lower case characters. We can now use special characters to increase the complexity: “My fav-mov=Titan” The password is now 16 characters long, has three different special characters, and is also relatively easy to remember.

Another method to create a strong password, is to come up with two passwords and then just join them together. For example, using our two bad examples from earlier, we can create this password: “July07$p0ttY” Even though each password by itself is not that strong, the two combined make a much stronger password.

Useful tools…

Once you’ve come up with a password that you think is strong, you can use the password strength checker from Microsoft to test it out.

SecurityStats.com also has a password checker with a bunch of other tips too.

Like Richard MacManus’s “Read/Write Web” blog, my site was down tonight for a couple of hours. Quite frustrating as I was inspired to write some better blog posts after creating my first Facebook group – “Wellington Bloggers”.

Here’s the MediaTemple response. 

Richard’s disappointing write-up: Grid Server Crushes Shared Hosting? Not Tonight It Didn’t…

A quick step-by-step tutorial on how I secure my 4GB USB drive:

Create the file…

• Download TrueCrypt from here: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php
• Unzip the download, but don’t install it.
• Browse to the “Setup Files” directory.
• Run “TrueCrypt.exe” and click the “Create Volume” button to start the wizard.
• Choose the “Create a standard TrueCrypt volume” option.
• Click the “Select file” button, browse to your USB drive and enter a name for the file – this can be anything and doesn’t need a file extension. I called mine “docs”.
• On the next step, choose your encryption algorithm. They are all secure – some more than others – click the run the “Benchmark” tool to help you decide between security and performance. (I just used AES)
• Choose the hash algorithm – if you know what you’re doing, or else just stick with the default. (They are all secure.)
• Choose the size of the file in the next step. I created a 2GB file so that I’ve still got space on the drive for other, unimportant stuff.
• On the next step, choose your password. This is probably the most important step in the procedure, as a short, insecure password negates the strongest of encryption. Force yourself to pick a long, cryptic password! Update: How to choose a secure password.
• Format the volume on the next step. If you’re a Windows user, NTFS is probably best, otherwise FAT is fine. Note: you aren’t formatting your entire USB drive – just the secure volume that you’re creating. Now you’ve finished the hard part.

Make it portable…

You don’t want to have to install software on each machine that you want to access your secure files on, so follow these steps to make it portable.

• Copy “TrueCrypt.exe” and “TrueCrypt.sys” to the same location on your USB drive as the file that you created in the previous steps.
• Drag and drop the secure file you created earlier on to the “TrueCrypt.exe” file.
• Select a drive letter to mount your secure file, and click the “Mount” button.
• You’ll be prompted for your password and then you can access the new drive.

Time to move on…

When you need to unplug your USB drive, just right click the TrueCrypt icon in the task tray and choose the “Unmount drive” option. TrueCrypt will also close once the drive is unmounted.

Notes…

You can install the TrueCrypt program if you want, but it seems to work just as well if you only use just the two files (“TrueCrypt.exe” and “TrueCrypt.sys”)

These steps can also be used to create a secure file on your hard drive too.

This was tested on Windows XP – I’m not sure how well this works on earlier or later versions of Windows.

If you have any comments or suggestions on how to make this better, let me know in the comments.

Don’t you hate it when you post a comment on a blog and then have to keep checking back to see if someone has replied to your comment. Well if you post a comment on this blog you can choose to receive an email notification when a new comment is made on the same entry.

Each email notification you receive has a link that allows you to prevent any further notifications annoying alerting you.

Credit: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/