ECS Computer Solutions, Christchurch

Can’t open this item. The text formatting command is not available - Outlook. This error was received when trying to open an Outlook item. Also it seems that Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) couldn’t render a page and it would just be blank. After trying to remove profiles and repair office etc I traced the fault to a recent Windows update KB978207 for IE to be exact. After removing the update and rebooted everything worked again!

By using Sysinternals PSEXEC I installed Visio remotely unattended.

Copy the visio files to the PC in question
Edit the setup.ini file for visio located in files\setup\setup.ini add:

[Options]
; The option section is used for specifying individual Installer Properties.
USERNAME=Your Name
COMPANYNAME=Your Company

Then fire up a command prompt and execute command:

PSEXEC \\PCNAME -S -E -I MSIEXEC /PASSIVE /QB /I C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI PIDKEY=12345abcde98765zyxwv34567

PCNAME Being the name of the remote PC
C:\TEMP\visio2003\VISSTD.MSI being the path to the VISSTD.MSI package
12345abcde98765zyxwv34567 being your Visio license key

I came across a Windows 7 Skins for KDE - It looked really….exact but the install script was crap it installed a new user and was only Kubuntu based and was pretty brutal at overwriting stuff so I Read the rest of this entry »

After ’successfully’ upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 (64bit) on my laptop KDE4 failed to start with error: Kstartupconfig4 does not exist or fails. The error code is 127.

Gnome still worked but KDE and KDE apps failed to load. Trying to run dolphin in terminal produced libssl.so.8 & libcrypto.so.8 shared library missing errors.

The resolution is put in the symbolic links that are missing

cd /usr/lib64 (64bit) and /usr/lib (32bit)
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.8

and reboot

Today at work a client he needed to access a cisco router but no-one new the password but we had the config files saved which included the MD5 hashes of the enable and enable secret passwords. So I set about cracking the hashes, which was done successfully btw, following on from that I then remembered a John the Ripper MPI patch which I had seen some time ago I ended getting it going at home and the results are good!

Directions for installation are as follows (on Fedora 11)

yum install mpich2 mpich2-devel
wget http://www.bindshell.net/tools/johntheripper/john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
tar -zxvf john-1.7.2-bp17-mpi8.tar.gz
cd john-1.7.2-bp17/src
make linux-x86-64 (for 64bit version duh!)
cd ../run
touch ~/.mpd.conf && echo "MPD_SECRETWORD=secret" > ~/.mpd.conf && chmod 600 ~/.mpd.conf
mpd &
mpiexec.py -n 4 -path ./ -wdir ./ ./john --test

Initial Benchmarking looks good. Below is 1 core vs 4 cores

Traditional DES [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
1591K c/s real, 1594K c/s virtual / 6131K c/s real, 6380K c/s virtual
BSDI DES (x725) [128/128 BS SSE2-16]
Many salts: 53222 c/s real, 53329 c/s virtual / Many salts: 207665 c/s real, 215407 c/s virtual
FreeBSD MD5 [32/64 X2]
Raw: 9718 c/s real, 9816 c/s virtual / Raw: 37720 c/s real, 39581 c/s virtual
mysql [mysql]
Raw: 2571K c/s real, 2571K c/s virtual / Raw: 9397K c/s real, 10254K c/s virtual

About a 100% increase per core! Life is good!

Seems I’m in fix it mode tonight - amazing what you get done when you don’t have women distracting you!
Anyway it seems that my fail2ban has been broken for quite a while, the resolution of this was me running:
fail2ban-client -x start and that worked ok

So I modified /usr/sbin/rcfail2ban and added the line:
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;

Here it is in context:

case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting Fail2Ban "
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;
/sbin/startproc $FAIL2BAN_BIN start &>/dev/null
rc_status -v

Well you get the drift. Happy Banning!

Recently I came across a new file format called RSDF, these appear to be txt files which have a bunch of links in them, so called link containers.  I wanted to access the URLS in these files, but I didnt really want to entrust my computer to just “any” application. Read the rest of this entry »

Hooray! I did it!
I have managed to boot my bootable usb pendrive (BackTrack 3) under QEMU within Windows XP.

For those of you who want the magic one liner here you are:

qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -std-vga -hda \\\\.\\PhysicalDrive2 -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -kernel ../../boot/vmlinuz -initrd ../../boot/initrd.gz -append "root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=../../boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 vga=0x317"

• This gives you TextMode with 512 MB Ram and Mouse Support!!
• You will need to change PhysicalDrive2 to what ever drive number your USB key is. (Hint look under the DiskManagment snap-in)
• You require administrative rights also
• My Qemu directory lives under USBDriveLetter\BT3\QEMU FYI
• QEMU Version Win32 PreCompiled 0.9.1

Hopefully this saves you a few hours

It seems there is a bug in Ubunutu (a possibly other distro’s) that certain keys don’t work as they should.
For example Page up and Page down in the guest were producing something similar to a right click.

The fix for me was quite simple: echo "xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true" >> ~/.vmware/config
More helpful tips are here

I have been pulling my hair out trying to resolve a backup issue with a client’s backup on Veritas BackupExec 9.1. What happened was that backup was failing on 1 message because the antivirus couldn’t scan it, and locked the backup from reading it.

BackupExecs error was:
0xa0008488 - Access is denied
Backup - \\SERVER\Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes
Access denied to file FirstName LastName [user]FW: Your Tracking # 835503826372.

Now this particular message was found in the Inbox, I then deleted it and emptied the Deleted Items.
Backup still failed! But this time the message was it the root_store IE. The top level of the Mailbox and I couldn’t see it with OWA Client etc. I had to pass it on to another engineer who started looking at it, who then gave me the right tact to search.

I deleted the message by using a Microsoft tool called MDB Viewer, this is a low level tool for Mailboxes,  It’s on the exchange CD-ROM CD-ROM_Drive\Server\Support\Utils\I386\Mdbvu32.exe

I then basically (Remember I don’t do Step by Steps, I do summarys) Choose the Server, Choose the Mailbox (username), then clicked  OpenMessageStore on the MDB menu,
Click Open Root Folder on the MDB menu
From there I saw the message in Messages in Folder Column, I selected it, Choose the operation IpFld->DeleteMessage() and called the function!

Woo Hoo Backup now works!

Merry Christmas to me and you!