Information Technology

Tips on subjects related to Information Technology.

Multiple Antivirus DoS During Processing of Malformed Compressed Archives

While scanning compressed files, several Antivirus, Trojan and Spyware scanners might suffer from a denial of service condition while attempting to extract an archive that contains intentionally malformed content in it.

Details Vulnerable Systems:
* Norton Antivirus 2002
* Norton Antivirus 2003
* McAfee VirusScan 6
* Network Associates (McAfee) VirusScan Enterprise 7.1
* Windows XP default ZIP manager (report's wrong size of compress ZIP files.)
* F-Prot 4.4.2 for Linux
* Panda Antivirus
* Linux uvscan scan engine 4.3.20 (McAfee)

It is possible to construct an archive containing a file or files that will cause a denial of service condition when a scanner attempts to extract the contents of the archive. Usually files within archives are completely extracted before scanned, which gives rise to this vulnerability.

The Handspring Visor, Wireless Swiss Army Knife !!

My Handspring Visor Deluxe finally died after a long spiel of 3 years getting trashed around. I also used it as my cell phone with the Springboard module, Sprint Wireless Digital Link attached to it. So, I was cut off from the World without my Wireless swiss army knife!! I had to act fast... Got a sweet deal on eBay and upgraded myself to a brand new "Visor Neo"! The seller aparently found it after a year in hiding, when the wife bought it, opened it up... read through the manual and decided that it was too dificult to set it up and use it, so put it aside. Lucky Me!!

Become a shell script expert !

The Unix shell is the main scripting environment of every Linux, Mac OS X and Unix system, whether a rescued laptop or a million-dollar mainframe. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts gives you the tools to solve common Linux, Mac OS X and Unix problems and personalize your computing environment. Among the more than 100 scripts included are an interactive calculator, a spell checker, a disk backup utility, a weather tracker, and a web logfile analysis tool. The book also teaches you how to write your own sophisticated shell scripts by explaining the syntax and techniques used to build each example scripts. Examples are written in Bourne Shell (sh) syntax.

Cerberus Helpdesk

Cerberus Helpdesk is an email response system built to diminish the need for redundant, time-consuming human interaction with your customers. The system is built to allow your support/sales/billing/etc. department to react quickly to inbound customer email inquiries. It was written originally as a trouble ticket system.

Cerberus delivers a highly-customizable, intuitive interface packed with an abundance of powerful features, such as:

  • an exceptionally adaptive anti-spam system
  • comprehensive search and customer history functionality

WiX - Microsoft's first OSS project

The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The project, originally developed internal to Microsoft, was released under the Common Public License (a first for Microsoft). With this release developers outside Microsoft can take advantage of the same toolset being used today to create the installation packages for products like Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server, and many others. More information about the toolset and its OSS release can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/

Mondo to the Rescue

Mondo is reliable, comprehensive and free (GNU Public License) disaster recovery software and backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data (or as much as you want), from bare metal if necessary. Mondo runs on all major [Linux] distributions and is getting better all the time. You may even use it to backup non-Linux partitions, such as NTFS.

Windows XP Internet Connection Sharing with Linux

On the XP box, you need to enable Internet Connection Sharing. This should be in your network connections, and probably in the properties of your Dial Up connection. Once this is done, then you need to make sure that both computers have network cards installed and working. After enabling ICS, it should set your Network card to a static IP address of 192.168.0.1 . This is a private IP (doesn't get routed over the internet) and is used for internal networks.

The next step is to configure your linux box. You need to have router or a share hub, but if you only have 2 computers and wanted to connect them up and share the internet connection, you need to use the twisted/cross cable to connect them up. Then configure the network information as follows:

IP Address: 192.168.0.x (where x is any number between 2 and 254)
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.0.1

The gateway is very important as it tells the linux how to find the route through to the internet.

Resources For High-technology Entrepreneurs

The STVP Educators Corner is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning in engineering and the sciences. The mission of the project is to support and encourage faculty around the world who teach entrepreneurship to future scientists and engineers.

Get rid of those Banner Ads and increase your browsing speed ;-)

If you're looking to block online site ads and offensive Web content, you don't need to buy special software. Instead, you can use the HOSTS file built into Windows.

Few web sites host their own banner ads. Typically they sign up with ad servers that deliver content and track views and clicks. Thus you can block most web site ads by blocking a fairly limited number of ad servers. HOSTS files can block web ads by blocking access to these ad servers. Similarly, you can also block other sites serving objectionable content.

What Is the HOSTS File?

Unless a computer is configured to use a proxy server, the HOSTS file is the first place a browser looks for an IP address when you type in a URL such as www.permutations.com. Only if the domain name is not found in the HOSTS file does the browser then query the DNS server. It is this fact that makes the HOSTS file an effective means for blocking web site ads.

Google Plus E-Mail Equals Gmail

Google plans to offer an e-mail service, called Gmail that would give account owners 1GB of free storage. Gmail would also offer search capabilities allowing users to find specific pieces of information buried within tens of thousands of e-mails. Read more...

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