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Windows XP High-Security Configuration
Update: I found out that SRP has some rather nasty limitations (including the ability to circumvent it even as a limited user) which makes much less effective than I initially thought. I still thing it is very useful, but please read the linked article and make your own judgement call. As I mentioned in a…
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Two quick tips
Via the .:Computer Defense:. blog: the Windows command prompt has a history feature: just press F7 in a command window. One of the great features of Firefox 2 is the session saving (I know, there were extensions before that to do the same thing, but they somehow never worked for me). If you want to…
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Cleaning it all up – temporary files in Perl
One of the most frustrating things in programming is doing all of the extra plumbing. You can just say (if you are trying to create a stable product): open file A, read a line, transform it and dump it to file B. You have to think about all the error conditions which may appear: what…
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TT – Treacherous Technology
So, after a failed upgrade to Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn I was left with no choice but to boot into my Windows 2003 partition. (To Ubuntu’s defense: 7.04 is clearly marked as beta software and I was doing the update on my own risk). Just to be clear: this Windows 2003 SBS is a 100%…
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Using rsync on Windows
First of all, what is rsync? It is a protocol and an implementation of it for bandwidth efficient file synchronization. In a nutshell it can synchronize two directories (one local and one remote) while making sure that only the minimal amount of data is transferred. It accomplishes this by breaking the files up in blocks…
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Perl, Windows and File Locking
For some Perl scripts you want to make sure that only one instance of it is running at the same time. So you use lockfiles, in a way like this: open(LockFile, “>$lock_file”) or die(“Failed to lock file $lock_file, error: $^E”); flock(LockFile, LOCK_EX) or die(“Failed to lock file $lock_file”); The idea being that the OS guarantees…
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Perl and Windows
Perl is a nice scripting language, but originally it wasn’t designed for the Win32 OS. There have been many improvements over time however (the greatest of them all being ActivePerl with PPM, which – as opposed to CPAN – doesn’t require you to have all those command line tools which you have on 99.9* on…
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Offline updating of Windows
When re-installing Windows, you should always do so without any network physical connection (meaning unplugged network cables) or you risk infecting yourself via various exploits (for example there is at least one virus which scans the LAN for PCs to infect). Now heise security has put together a tool to download the security updates on…
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“not a valid win32 application”
An interesting difference between the loader of Win9x and WinNT line (tested with Win98 and Win2K SP4): if SizeOfImage is bigger than the sum of the header sizes and section sizes, Win98 will happily load it, while Win2K will complain that it’s not a valid Win32 application. The tricky part about this is that you…
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The hidden capabilities of windows firewall
Windows, beginning with XP SP2 contains a decent firewall. It doesn’t have leak prevention or outbound connection filtering. However it does have: inbound connection filtering, ICMP filtering, a default deny policy, GUI and command line interface, configuration using group policy and something I discovered only recently: limiting a certain rule with multiple IP / netmasks…