I have been using the Office 2007 Beta for the past few weeks, and I have a few problems with it. My biggest problem is with the new interface. While I think the new interface looks slick, my problem with it is that it is new. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Publisher, have all had virtually the same interface since they first came to Windows in 1992: Continue reading ‘Microsoft Office 2007 Review’
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I’ve always known how to do basic IP sniffing, but with all the recent news focus on the Data Mining of the NSA and AT&T I decided to do a little research and dig into IP sniffing. Obviously the NSA uses some pretty sophisticated software and hardware to handle all the IP data that they collect, but there are plenty of open source tools that will do pretty much the same stuff for a smaller network.
The best program for packet capture and analysis is Ethereal. It captures packets and displays them in a nice GUI. It can also save the packets to a file and open and process captured packets files. It has the ability to process the packets by applying filters. For example, you could filter out all arp traffic, or only capture http. Ethereal also allows you to filter by TCP stream. It can display all the data portions of a packet in the stream that they came in. In this way, you could reconstruct an html page, or smtp email. However the purpose of this article is not to be a guide on Ethereal, but to show you how to arrange your network to sniff your internet connection and capture all packets coming and going across your internet pipe.
There are many reasons that you might have to want to sniff your internet connection, or even to capture and record all packets that are passing through. One reason is that it is a fascinating and great way to learn about networks and how packets flow through the network. Another reason could be to find and defeat a hacking attack or malware. You could also monitor your network to determine what users are doing and watch them. (like the nsa) Continue reading ‘Network Layouts for IP Sniffing’
Somebody obviously wasn’t thinking when they set the default power options in Windows. I have been setting up new desktops and laptops from Dell the last few days, and every single one has the power options set like this:
This is from a Dell laptop. Why would anybody in there right mind want the laptop to go into standby in 25 minutes if it is plugged in. For that matter, why would they wait 1 hour while it is on battery. And all the desktops are set up like this too! Why anybody would want to have their desktop computer go into standby is beyond me. I keep my computer turned on, so I can have stuff running on it while I am away, and so that when I need to get to it I can without having to wait for it to come up. Standby defeats that. And hibernate is even worse.
While I’m on a rant, why would Dell disable the internal nic when the laptop is on battery power? That gave me the biggest headache one morning a while back. I even went so far as to call Dell to see if the motherboard was bad, cause the nic kept disappearing.
I’ve had a very busy last few weeks, working on some different project for at work, and finishing up finals for my night classes. I’ve learned several interesting things in the past two weeks at my job.
The first thing that I learned was that Dell support people will bug you until you fix your computer. A hard drive went bad in one of our production servers. So I called Dell Gold support (which thankfully has american techs.) to get a replacement. After a lot of discussion, the tech told me to run a firmware update which would fix the issue. So I had to explain to him that it was a production server, and to do the fix he wanted would require me to schedule downtime and then go in to the hosted environment on a Saturday and perform the fix. Continue reading ‘Lessons learned from IT this week’
Here is how to tell if you are a Philadelphian. I know I don’t actually live in Philadelphia, but I have lived 20 miles west of Philly my whole life, so I understand practically all of these.
You know you’re from Philly when:
You punctuate every sentence with, “You know” at least twice.
You want olive oil, not mayonnaise on your “hoagie”.
You hate the Redskins
You hate Dallas.
You realize that your favorite dessert is “wooder ice”.
You find yourself using “yo” and “youse guys” when talking long-distance to family members.
You know how to spell Schuylkill.
Continue reading ‘You Know You’re from Philadelphia if…’
I have been using the google personal homepage www.google.com/ig as my home page, since the day it came out. I use it on several browsers on several different computers. This morning, when I opened up Firefox at my work computer, I got a google capcha screen, that I have shown below: (Click to view full size)
I figured it must be some virus or spyware, but multiple scans revealed nothing, and I keep a close eye on my computer too. So I tried IE7 and got the same result. When I tried to access the homepage from my home computer via my vnc connection, it came up just fine. So I rebooted my work pc. Same thing. I then tried it from another work computer(a brand new Dell laptop right out of the box no spyware there). And got the same capcha screen! So my conclusion is that google is blocking my IP address from the home page. Everytime I reopen my browser I have to reenter a capcha code. This is pretty annoying, since I open my browser a lot. If it doesn’t go away in the next day or two, I am definitly going to move my homepage to something else. Has this happened to anyone else?
Update:
I learned from some comments on Digg, that this is related to some Di Vinci Code Quest that Google is running from the personalized homepage. I’m not sure why I was affected, but it seems that this has happened to a lot of people. The Quest is ending soon, so it should soon return to normal.
This is a pretty interesting screenshot I took showing what can happen with a VNC loopback. I have setup VNC tunneling over ssh to connect to my pc from my work. I also use the Cisco VPN client to connect to my work. I then use Remote Desktop to get to my work pc. Two different methods to do the same thing in different directions, right. Now I have to use the cisco method to get to my work from a virtual machine I have setup on Virtual Server, because of a driver problem with Windows XP 64-bit. So I have connected to my work here, then I connected back to my pc from work.
As you can see it started opening tons of VNC connections, since it kept looping around. Kind of like holding two mirrors together. I guess it would keep going forever, except the computer would eventually crash. I closed the first vnc windows pretty quickly, and everything was back to normal. I wouldn’t recommend doing this, but I wanted to see what would happen.
After my laptop had some major problems, I decided that it was time to build a new computer. I am always reading about what the current hardware is. I wanted to build the best computer I could, however I had to do so on a pretty tight budget. Of course after using my laptop as my only computer for the last three years, just about anything would be faster. I also needed to get a nice monitor since I didn’t have anything but my broken laptop screen. So I did a bunch of research, found what I wanted, and then waited for my tax refund to come in. If you are looking to build a new computer, on a tight budget, I think this one works pretty good.
I came across a very useful tool for logging port use in Windows. It is called the Port Reporter. This tool runs as a service on a Windows 2000, XP, or 2003 computer. It logs all TCP and UDP port use to log files. A seperate utility called the Port Reporter Parser provides a nice GUI interface for viewing the log files and analyzing the data. Continue reading ‘Port Reporter, a Windows tool for logging port use’
I had a major problem with the LCD display in my Dell Inspiron 600m laptop this past weekend. Everything was working fine all day Saturday. That night however, I went to use my laptop and the screen started acting weird. It looked fuzzy and things were flashing around. So I restarted the it to see if things would clear up. They only got worse. I shut down the laptop and decided to give it a day of rest. Sunday night I booted it back up. The screen was really bad now. The dell logo was all over the place on the boot screen. And when it got to Windows all that showed up were some vertical bars. I decided to take the lcd display apart and see if anything was loose, or if I could spot any other problems. I never figured out what was wrong, but I figured I would take some pictures and write an article about how to disassemble a Dell laptop lcd display.
Continue reading ‘Disassembling a Dell Laptop display’