Talkwards

I recently lost the password to the MS SQL Server installed on my local machine. A search on possible solutions returned the usual business B$ about paying for software to do the job. However, browsing a little deeper and asking a colleague gave me the following handy solution:

1. Log in to the machine where the SQL Server is installed via Remote Desktop (not needed in my case, since it was my local machine).
2. Start SQL Server client (Microsoft SQL Managment Studio) and log in to the local machine using Windows Authentication.
3. You’re in.
4. (Optionally) With your admin account you can now change the password to something you’ll remember this time! ;o)

1) You find Remote Desktop on the Start Menu in “All Programs > Accessories > Remote Desktop Connection”. Most windows servers will have Remote Desktop installed from the start. If, however you are refused a connection because too many people are logged in, see my previous post about how to solve that problem.

Logging in to the local database using Windows authentication in SQL Server Management Studio.

2) To log in on the local database first open SQL Management Studio (All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > SQL Server Management Studio), select the name of the local computer in the “Server name”-text field and select “Windows Authentication” in the “Authentication”-text field. Your user name (the one you used to log in via Remote Desktop) will be displayed in the “User name”-text field and this field and the “Password”-text field will both be disabled. Click connect and you should be logged in as an administrator.

The 3.0 version of the open source office suite OpenOffice is now out.

Download it on their home page: http://www.openoffice.org/

I’ve just had the total pain of trying to get files (a lot of files, in a lot of directories) via a musty old FTP client (in Linux/Ubuntu).

The problem is that the FTP client (ftp) doesn’t offer much to help (like recursive downloads, or mapping up the directories on the client side with those on the serverside, etc).

I searched and I found this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-378221.html

…with this excellent snippet (posted by Mr. C.):

wget -r –ftp-user YourUSERNAME –ftp-password YourPASS ftp://FTPSITE//dir/’*.html’

If you want to download something other than *.html, you can change the file name pattern as you would expect.

If you want to add more directories, simply add them, but keep track of the number of slashes (”/”).  There should be only one after the new directory names (at least that’s how I made it work.  It may work wonderfully regardless of the number of slashes, but then again, why challenge fate?)

Happy FTPing!

Professor Avishai Wool presents a system that protects GNU/Linux machines from intrusion and malicious program code by using statistical analysis and policy files defining a programs normal behavior, and if that program deviates from said behavior the system stops it.

Since the analysis is hooked into standard GNU/Linux build tools and uses the source code to derive the policy the system is said to guarantee zero false positives. A system of this type is cited to be able to perform protection from threats long before traditional anti virus solutions has categorized them, and with far less penalty to system performance.

Here’s a list of links for further reading:

• http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080909111037.htm
• http://ols.fedoraproject.org/OLS/Reprints-2008/bencohen-reprint.pdf

Electronic Art’s game Spore was on September 22nd hit by a class action lawsuit because of its DRM (Digital Restrictions/Rights Management). Or actually the fact that the DRM was secretly installed and made uninstallable.

However, I am fairly certain the lawsuit wont fly. EA told those buyers there was a DRM involved, and they have since then provided an uninstaller for the DRM.

I think we, consumers, should stop buying games with DRMs, and instead protest against the use of DRMs. If we don’t we’ll end up in a world where every software we run are for hire and nothing, not even the contents of our own harddrives, are our property. That would be a bit like hosting a virus or a parasite… unwanted, unpleasant and uncalled for.

Here’s some other reports:

http://hothardware.com/News/Spores-DRM–ClassAction-Lawsuit-for-EA/

http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/ea-faces-class-action-lawsuit-over-spore-drm-470850

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170131

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/09/25/ea-facing-class-action-lawsuit-over-spore-drm/

I’m all for Linux. Really. I love it, even though it’s from time to time a hate-love. However, I just realized one thing Linux has done to me that isn’t so good when you are forced to work and live in Windowsland.

I’ve become totally naive when it comes to certain aspects of the Windows world.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a program to help me keep my local hard drive synchronized (or in fact, backed up) to the network drive. A few factors have made this an issue for me, bad network performance but also the ability to just pick up your laptop and not worry about network connection to mention a few.

Anyway, I browsed around, moderately annoyed trying to avoid all the $oftware in favor for something simple that could do the job but wouldn’t cost money… just like home in Linuxland, right?

So I came a cross one really promising piece of software (no need to mention which since they’re not lone sinners :o), downloaded, tried it out and thought… hey this works! It had good integration with the desktop and a clean and simple UI and simple yet powerful features.

Great. Then today I spoke with a colleague who had been on the same mission and told him this was good software. He was rather surprised, since he had long ago figured out the software was not at all free (even though it’s listed as free software on several places, and they say it is free). The surprise will come after 30 days when the software stops working, for all intents and purposes unless you pay them money.

There’s nothing bad with companies asking for money. After all, I ask for money for working for a company, so the company should ask for money for selling my work, right? However, the serious problem is the lying part of the deal, where software companies say they are delivering free software where in fact they aren’t. In my case it ended up wasting several hours setting up the sync for real and would have wasted even more time had I been caught unaware when the 30 day trial was up. This, the lying seems, to me, to be a direct symptom of the software development model used…

There are no such thing as a free lunch, not even in the Linux world, but there you pay with time, and your apps aren’t programmed to stop work after 30 days. They might, because you’ve downloaded beta software, but that’s because some one did not program, or program right, not because someone did.

Anyway, I was baffled, totally unprepared and realized Linux naivized me! Wooh!

Ever been turned down by a Windows machine over Remote Desktop because it already had too many connections?

Even though there are no way to connect using the standard remote desktop program you can still “hack” a connection. Sure the limitation exists, probably to sell more licenses or to protect the host server from getting too many connections, but to get past it you do the following:

mstsc /v:myhost.com /F /console

Where myhost.com is the name or ipnumber of the server you are trying to remote to. /F means a full screen connection, /console means to connect to the “console session of the server” (whatever that means, it anyhow results in you getting in although the server would otherwise refuse you).

The full format of the MSTSC command call are:

MSTSC [<Connection File>] [/v:<server[:port]>] [/console] [/f[ullscreen]]
[/w:<width> /h:<height>]

<Connection File> refers to an rdp file to be used with the connection (good if you need to make local drivers or other resources available or set up the connection otherwise).

You can also call MSTSC with the “/edit” switch if you wish to edit a connection file:

MSTSC /edit <Connection File>

Finally you may also migrate files by using the “/migrate” switch (not 100% sure how this is done though since I don’t have an older version file to test with).

I have the somewhat dubious pleasure of working at a place where the migration from Office 2003 to 2007 is halfway done. Now, usually this should be no problem, but a couple of factors have cooperated to make it one.

Office 2007 uses a new (and improved?) format (they added an x to all their file name extensions, read more about them here). This could be all good and well if it had not been for the fact that new versions of Office now uses these formats per default. Okay, a user a bit savvy might sooner or later notice the “x” at the end of all filenames… but only the users that have disabled the setting in Windows to hide these formats…

This leaves us with senders, running Office 2007, unable to tell if they saved the file in docx or doc format, and the recipients with Office 2003, unable to read these files. Even though there is an update, a lot of users aren’t comfortable with doing that… heck, I’m scared of doing unneccessary stuff to my wobbly M$ installation!

The end result becomes pretty predictable: chaos, disillusioned users, and … a great day to start talking about OpenOffice.org? (even though it does not yet support the Office 2007 format).

It took me some time to find out the equivalent of Window’s checkdisk/scandisk/chkdisk on Linux, but trust me, there are several.

For starters I am going to take a look at badblocks, a command that as the name implies, looks for bad blocks.

The basic format of badblocks are:

badblocks [options] device

If you have a fresh drive with no data or data that can be deleted on it you can do:

badblocks -s -w /dev/sdb

Note however, the -w command will erase all existing data on the drive so do not use it for drives with existing file systems on them. You cannot use -w on a mounted drive, unmount it first. The -s flag makes the command show a progress bar. This could come in handy when you are testing larger drives since even the fastest systems will take at least an hour to test an average sized drive (my 400GB took about 2 hours on a SATAII system).

If you want to test the drive without deleting data you can use the -n switch which will use non-destructive write-read mode, however, this switch can, for obvious reasons, not be combined with the -w switch.

badblocks -s -n /dev/sdb

Links:

• http://linux.die.net/man/8/badblocks
• http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl8_badblocks.htm
• http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/BadBlockHowTo.txt

Moblock (moblock-deb) is a so called traffic blocker. It prevents connections from certain IP numbers (defined in block lists) to gain access to your computer. The whole purpose is that the blocked IP numbers usually belongs to this or that organization that wishes to find out more about your Internet habits and other information they have no reason to get their noses into.

Moblock has a big brother called Peerguardian by Phoenixlabs but development on this program seems to have been discontinued, and unfortunately at a stage where the program doesn’t work (at least for me it doesn’t). I am also sure there are some Windows variants of an IP-blocker (I’m guessing Bluetack is the right place to go).

Installing Moblock on Ubuntu turns out to be a very simple affair. Mainly do two things: Add moblock’s repository to your repository list, and run an apt-get command. (Here’s an even better instruction for installing Moblock on Ubuntu).

The installation takes care of setting up cron-jobs to update your block lists every day, installs moblock as a service started every time the machine is started, and makes the first download, after which the program (or in fact, demon) is started and you are safe.

The above link is a very good instruction on installing moblock, and it even have instructions on how to perform some simple troubleshooting.

If you run linux I suggest you take a look at moblock’s home page, or you can check out it’s project page on sourceforge.