Archive for March, 2009
April 1st is coming beware of the Conficker worm and impending doom.
Mar 31st
Have you heard about the Conficker worm? It has been all over the media
Before you even continue reading make sure your Windows XP machine is patched up to Service Pack 3 and your Vista Machines are Service Pack 1. Now check out this information from the Symantec website:
The Conficker worm, sometimes called Downadup or Kido has managed to infect a large number of computers. Specifics are hard to come by, but some researchers estimate that millions of computers have been infected with this threat since January. Current users of Symantec’s Norton security products are protected. Users who lack protection are invited to download a trial version of Norton AntiVirus 2009,Norton Internet Security 2009 or Norton 360. All of these products will detect and remove this worm. Symantec has a detailed technical analysis of the threat here.
So even if Symantec is not being paid to protect your machine they will still help you out with removing Conficker. This is just another variant of an older worm and it is set to mutate again on the 1st.
We poked around the web a bit more and came across this on Cnet:
Even worm creators write buggy software.
Once it infects a computer, the Conficker worm closes the hole in Windows that it used to get onto the system so no other malware can get in. This also makes it difficult for organizations to detect which computers have the legitimate Microsoft patch and which have the fake Conficker patch.
Wow! Isn’t that nuts? They go on to say they have developed a proto-type of a scanner that can pick up the infection from Conficker. You can read the rest of that article here http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10207375-83.html. Read more after the jump.
Windows Error 0×80070052 on Copying Lots of Files to a USB Drive.
Mar 31st
I was copying a few thousand files to a San Disk Micro Cruzer Memory Stick with over 2gb of space on it. Windows kept throwing me an error that it was unable to copy my files due to error 0×80070052.
I tried via copy and paste and then drag and drop – and I went as far as to try it via command line.
No go.
On a hunch I decided to check the format of the drive – I was sure it was Fat32. But I was wrong and the drive was Fat and there are a bunch of limitations on Fat drives. I copied all my files off the drive, formatted it using Fat32 (Not NTFS because I use Mac’s occasionally and Fat32 is the cross platform friendly format)
Now my only issue is why the hell would they ship there drives as Fat over Fat32? Anyone got any guesses?
Last night Ubuntu saved my life – How I used Ubuntu to recover ALL my files…
Mar 30th
Hello Boys and Girls,
Commodore 64 here to bring you another horror story from binary-land. Lord knows I’ve been through hell and back with computers. Overheating CPUs, which were fixed by the cold of the winter outside my apt; crashing hard drives which were fixed or accessed by various means; faulty power supplies, which had me gutting and re-assembling my machine; and many more.
Up to this point, the only time I actually lost data, was to my ex-wife, who got to keep the computer with all my stuff in it, while I made away with a crappy laptop. Other than that, I’ve always been able to salvage my data somehow.
This time I had a new problem. Upon conferring with the Admin, to whom I have exclusive access (belonging has perks people, hit the comments if YOU want to belong as well) we came to the conclusion, based on past problems that were brought to his attention, that I have a power supply which is not supplying a steady stream of power to my hard-drives and various other internally powered devices. Now so far, to the best of my knowledge, a hard drive and ram are really the only components that can suffer from a faltering power supply. For the past 6 months, my computer has eaten through 3 Western Digital hard drives, which I’m sure were perfectly fine from the get-go. I will note here that I DO NOT blame Western Digital for these issues. I am a fair consumer which doesn’t point unnecessary blame where it is not due. I will however give them a call and will update this blog with their responses and whether they are able to help me at all along the lines of some replacements.
My problem started because of me. I let waaaay to much time go by before I blew the inordinate amount of dust out of my computer, and more importantly, my power supply. I have gotten into the bad habit of leaving my case open, as I am also inordinately lazy. This probably contributed to the systematic weakening of my power supply. My hypothesis is that the dust caked up on the power supply fan, causing the power supply to rise in temperature, and over time this started to affect it’s power output. This, in turn, caused my hard drives to fuzz in a very weird, intermittent way. At first we thought that my snazzy hard drive enclosure was the culprit. I had one of my drives, my all-important work drive with all my years of work, in an enclosure which, through an lcd display provided me spin-up and temperature info, but more importantly this enclosure allowed my drive to be cold-removed from my machine easily. My justification was, that in the case of a fire, or a world-wide Huxley style pron hunt, I would have the ability to simply slide my drive out of my machine, and make off with my all-important stuff. Karl and I had hypothesized earlier on, that this was the culprit to the failing of my first WD-320 drive. At the time this was my data drive on which I kept all my data, but I also had a recent copy of the data on another drive, so it was no big deal.
So I removed the offending enclosure and drive, and continued on with a slightly bruised ego and one less hard drive in my collection. For about a few months this was fine. Most likely there was now less power being drained from the power supply so this proved to be a stop-gap measure which lasted only a few months, which I only know now.
Then the unthinkable happened. Something that hasn’t happened to me in years. A full-out dead freeze in Windows, which upon rebooting, no longer existed according to the cryptic error message my BIOS was giving me. Windows was gone. Since I couldn’t deal with the problem right there and then, I popped in my newly burned Ubuntu 7.10 Live CD to leave some semblance of a usable computer intact on my PC.
A few days later I was actually able to spend some time recovering or repairing my machine, whichever came first. Since I had turned the machine off the night before, I booted up and noticed that Windows was beginning to boot. Hooray!
By some miraculous feat, Windows was booting up! However, my beloved work drive was not showing up. Upon checking BIOS I noticed that the hard drive was being detected, but Windows couldn’t see it! Before I could do much else, Windows froze again. At this point I realized Windows wasn’t coming back, and that I had to concentrate my efforts on damage control rather than repair. Recovering my work files became my top priority.
Enter Ubuntu.
At first, Ubuntu did not recognize my work drive. Then, after a few minutes, my work drive appeared in the My-Computer-esque Home window Ubuntu had given me. Eureka! The OS sees my drive. I quickly connected my LaCie external USB drive and double clicked on the WD-320 drive which contained all my precious work files. One more obstacle: I received an error which said something to the effect of (loosely translated) “Ubuntu needs you to give it the command, in the command prompt, to mount the drive with the force option activated.” I popped open Firefox and Googled just the first part of the error and was presented with some results to some blogs which contained the exact command, with switches, that I was to use to successfully get my drive accessible in Ubuntu. The command worked an I proceeded to copy the 130 Gigabytes of precious data from my half-broken, limping hard-drive to my ever solid external USB drive. A few hours later the operation was complete. I can rest easy now.
A later memory test, courtesy of the good people that brought the Ubuntu Live CD, revealed that my memory chips were fried too – looks like a job for Crucial.com.
It’s been a week now, and thanks to Ubuntu, getting my data accessible after a hard system crash like that was not something I had to lose sleep over. Since I was able to safely offload my data without having to overhaul my computer, I was able to get some sleep that night, and many other nights following the incident. Sleeping is not an issue when you know your data is safe, even if for the time being.
Now I can slowly work on getting the $500 together to buy 2 new hard drives, and 2 new ram chips, so that one day my computer will be restored to it’s former dual-screen, design station ala Commodore glory. But in the meantime, I can survive rather comfortably using my Mac, and my resuscitated PC running Ubuntu 7.10. In all fairness this was a harrowing situation, but the availability of a self-contained, graphical operating system, that can run off a CD on a PC with nothing in working order besides a power supply, a motherboard, and some limping hard drives and memory chips, enabled me to not have to put my life on hold again to ensure access to my important stuff.
Piece of mind, that’s what it came down to.
Simple SEO: Force WWW via 301 Redirect
Mar 30th
Have you ever gone to a website where all of these combination work:
www.youwebsitename.com, websitename.com, and websitename.com/index.html?
Unfortunately, Google views this as duplicate content and frowns upon it. Many of us who run websites are always looking for ways to optimize our websites and truly want to avoid any Google penalties.
Rule of Thumb: When you’re linking to anything in your website always use the same link, whether its www.YourDomain.com, YourDomain.com, or YourDomain.com/index.html . This is key to showing google you really only have one link.
One Simple Change: Another nifty and very simple way of avoiding duplicate content is redirecting all non-www traffic to www via a 301 redirect. To do this, go to your highest folder, likely in the www folder add this text to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
# force www
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YourDomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YourDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END force www
Kerry Fitzgerald
Kerry is a blogger on a variety of topics. Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com
I feel the need….the need for speed
Mar 29th
Who doesn’t???
FireFox got a feature called pipeline which can speedup things and you will be able to browse fasssssssster.
The thing about pipelining is instead of using the old fashion way of sending a request then wait for the response from web server then send the next request, you can just send up to 8 requests while the responses are on the way, that would speedup your browsing if you got a fast Internet connection (there will be no significant difference if you got low speed).
The only drawback (and the reason why it is turned off by default) is the possibility that some web servers might not like the pipeline behavior and therefore stop responding to your requests (break the web page), to this day I didn’t have any such problems (am I lucky or good?).
Here is what you need to do:
1) In address bar write “about:config” then click on “I’ll be careful, I promise!”.
2) In filter box type “network.http.keep-alive”, if Value is False double click so it become true.
3) In filter box type “network.http.version”, make sure the Value is 1.1
4) In filter box type “network.http.pipelining”, if Value is False double click so it become true.
5) If you are on proxy or you are not sure In filter box type “network.http.proxy.pipelining”, if Value is False double click so it become true.
6) In filter box type “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests”, double click and set the value to 8 (you can set it to any number between 1 and 8).
That’s it, wear racing gloves and feel the speed!
Exclusive Download: SaveMydata2.0. Make reformating easier on yourself.
Mar 27th
I previously wrote an AskTheAdmin article about a tool I created called SaveMyData. This tool uses several utilities to export your important data (Passwords, Serial numbers etc..) to text files. Saving you the tedious time it takes to do this stuff manually.
Well AtA… I finally made SaveMyData2.0 !! It adds some cool new features:
- Outlook AutoComplete addresses (in text file and a data file for import later on..)
- Office Templates (it is nice to save those custom letterhead word templates you’ve made..)
- Outlook Signatures
- Windows Activation Files (use it after format to bypass activation)
- Windows Network Connections (VPN, Dialups, PPPoE connections)
- Wireless preferred networks profiles (Backup and restore after format)
- After you run the tool it creates a Backup folder in the root of your drive and save all the files inside it.
Some antivirus programs report that some of the utilites in use are “password stealing tools” so it is advised to temporarily disable it for proper running of the backup process. Think about it for a minute if this worries you – wouldn’t you want to know if someone ELSE was running this on your machine? Thought so :)
For Vista users: You should run the tool as an administrator. I haven’t tested it otherwise.
download from www.yaronmaor.net or directly from here.
if you have any suggestions for extra features or find any bugs – Let me know in the comments :)
Cheers,
Yaron Maor
