Karl’s Place

Here’s a video by Laura Chappell analyzing the network traffic from a bot-infected host.? Good stuff!

If this really works, it’s incredible!

We set up a Windows Media Server just like we’ve done many times before, but this time we were not able to connect to the streams from outside the local network.? After spending a lot of time verifying that it wasn’t a firewall problem, I found this article that gave an answer: the media server rejected the requests because it didn’t like the dns name in the URL.? Adding the public dns name to the localhost like of the media server’s hosts file fixed it.

Thanks, David!

This is awesome!

We were trying to write some machine images to a Server 2008 share with Acronis True Image.? True Image would see the shares, but would fail with a strange “bad file name” error.

It turned out to be the same issue that stopped Mac OS 10.4 from talking to my Server 2008 shares at a different location:? the security policies on Server 2008 require SMB message signing.? Both Mac OS 10.4 and the version of True Image that we’re running don’t support SMB message signing.

Here’s how we disabled the message signing requirement (SMB messages will still be signed when a client supports it):

1. Open Group Policy Management and edit the Default Domain Controller Policy
2. Go To Computer Configuration, Policies, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options
3. Scroll down and find the entry Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always)
4. Set this option to Disabled
5. Execute gpupdate on the DC and the file server to apply the new GPO ruleset.

When our users started upgrading to Firefox 3.0.10, they began noticing that our Dotnetnuke intranet’s menu bar was broken — only “Home” showed up, not the rest of the page titles.

It turns out that DNN uses a config file to tell it what capabilities the various browser versions support.? For some reason, the user agent string from Firefox 3.0.10 isn’t recognized.

I empathize with the arguments on the DNN forums that it’s not a good practice to maintain a table like this, but I’m not going to try to rewrite DNN.? Since I’m not worried about really old versions of Firefox accessing our Intranet site, my fix was to edit the file \js\ClientAPICaps.config and add this to the first section:

browser contains="Firefox"

We have an Access database that has been used for years as a data source for merging Word documents.? A button in the Access app would run a MakeTable query and then launch Word, which would open a document that looked to the table as a data source.

Two weeks ago, the mail merge documents began refusing to see the data source.? I read all of the tips about using Internet Explorer’s security settings to put the network path in the Intranet or Trusted Sites zones.? That actually helped on some machines, but not most.

My solution was to use the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) function “TransferText” to export the table to a text file on the local hard drive.? I then reconfigured all of the merge documents to look to that local file.? The basic instructions can be found here.

I’ve been trying for a while to get the Mac “Screen Sharing” to work.? I want to control the Mac from a Windows Vista machine.? Even though Screen Sharing is just a VNC server, my RealVNC client would seem to connect for a split second and then the connection would go away.

I finally found the solution: in the VNC client (vncviewer) options, set the encoding to “Hextile” and the color level to “Full”.? Now it connects fine!