average admins

A man who said he bought a device that let him change traffic lights from red to green has received a $50 ticket on suspicion of interfering with a traffic signal.

Jason Niccum of Longmont told the Daily Times-Call that the device, which he bought on eBay for $100, helped him cut his time driving to work.

“I guess in the two years I had it, that thing paid for itself,” he told the newspaper Wednesday.

Niccum was cited March 29 after police said they found him using a strobe-like device to change traffic signals.

“I’m always running late,” police quoted Niccum as saying in an incident report.

The device, called an Opticon, is similar to what firefighters use to change lights when they respond to emergencies. It emits an infrared pulse that receivers on the traffic lights pick up.

Niccum was cited after city traffic engineers who noticed repeated traffic-light disruptions on certain intersections spotted a white Ford pickup passing by whenever the light patterns were disrupted.

City traffic engineer Joe Olson said traffic engineers plan to update the city’s Opticon system this year to block unauthorized light-changing signals

I don’t do a lot of remote tech support, but for those of you that do, this might come in handy.

Basically, it’s UltraVNC packaged into a single .exe file that, when ran, loads itself into memory and sends a “Help me!” request to the IP or domain name you specified when you built the .exe. When the session is disconnected, the VNC server unloads itself from memory. You host the VNC file you created on your website and then instruct your “clients” to download and run it.

Here’s the link to the article: http://ajaxtricks.blogspot.com/2005/11/put-geeksquad-out-of-business.html

Do any of you guys that do this on a regular basis know of any better programs out there?

Some of us have Mont Blanc pens … well, ONE of us has a Mont Blanc pen and the rest of us are jealous!

http://www.instructables.com

Now we can ALL have Mont Blanc pens, even if they do say Pilot G2 on the outside.

If you don’t like Mont Blanc or Pilot G2’s read through the comments as there are a few other pens posted that other people prefer.

I saw this on another blog, geeksaresexy.com, and thought it was hilarious. Apparently, there’s a lot of these homeade Firefox ads over at YouTube.com.

Since I can’t embed the video here, here is a link to it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=M9BON5nd8Fg&search=firefox

I have wanted to install some sort of emulation application that would allow me to run different “guest” operating systems on my FreeBSD laptop for testing purposes. VMware is not an option for me due to the fact that the most recent port of the VMware Workstation software is version 3. I have been looking at Qemu as an alternative and finally had a chance to install and begin testing it this evening.

I will post more on how I installed Qemu and how I configured it for my use later, but I wanted to go ahead and get the ball rolling on this by putting a screenshot up here for everyone to see my progress thus far. So, here it is:

Again, I will post more on this when I have everything figured out and Windows XP running fairly well.

This past Wednesday and Thursday I attended a banking related conference hosted by our core processor in Dallas, Texas. One of their employees gave a presentation on trends of the financial industry. There was one aspect of his lecture that I found extremely interesting. He stated that more and more people are shying away from using Internet related services because they are afraid that their information will fall in to the wrong hands and they will become a victim of identity theft.

We hear a lot on identity theft these days. This particular speaker stated some statistics from different sources on identity theft. The most impressive is that about 90% of identity theft cases take place through traditional offline channels rather than online via the Internet. For instance, the Better Business Bureau Online documented the following statistics:

• Lost or stolen wallets, checkbooks or credit cards continue to be the primary source of personal information theft when the victim can identify the source of data compromise. (30 percent).
• Almost half (47 percent) of all identity theft is perpetrated by friends, neighbors, in-home employees, family members or relatives - someone known - when the victim can identify the perpetrator of data compromise.

The speaker also mentioned the following statistics related to identity theft cases where a customer is compromised:

• 9% of cases originate from stolen mail
• 9% of cases relate back to a compromised home computer or phishing attempt.

The speaker went on to discuss that 15% of customers affected by identity theft were due to employees of a business exploiting their confidential information and only about 6% of cases were due to an actual data breach, lost or stolen backup tape/laptop, etc.

This article offers additional statistics. According to the article, the average financial damage a fraud claim related to identity theft costs $6,383, but the out-of-pocket expense the customer is responsible on average is now $422. The article also states that the age group most targeted, and that fall victim to identity theft, are 25-34 year olds.

Ok, so enough with the statistics… I am surprised to see these numbers coming out. You never hear of a person’s wallet being stolen. You never hear of that mail that was taken out of someone’s mailbox being the source of identity theft. You only hear that “such-and-such” company’s backup tapes were lost in transit and “so-in-so” company’s laptop was stolen with thousands of credit card numbers and SSNs on it unencrypted.

I am a proud supporter of the Internet and doing business over the Internet. Sure things can happen, but by looking at these statistics, your chances of falling victim to identity theft via electronic channels is not as high as you leaving your purse or wallet at Applebee’s tonight and having someone walk off with it. This sounds familiar. Have you ever heard the old saying that you’re more likely to die in a car crash than dying in a plane crash? Yet, most people are terrified of flying but hop in an automobile and think nothing of it.

The bottom line is this: be careful! The Internet is not a bad place to conduct business. Continue to use and support your FI’s electronic services. Continue to buy and sell goods and services over the Internet. The Internet and the global marketplace it provides isn’t going anywhere so we might as well do the best we can to protect ourselves physically, like shredding credit card and account statements, and electronically, like ensuring you are communicating over encrypted channels when necessary and that you’re talking to the host you expect to be talking to at all times.

For all you Internet Exporer fans, here’s an IE7 site thats worth a real quick look….

www.ie7.com

I have been very lucky because I am able to use my favorite PHP IDE of choice, the Zend Studio Client, on FreeBSD. I was able to get a special Linux version working on FreeBSD because the Zend developers packaged version 4.0.2 of the Zend Studio Client without a Java Virtual Machine built in. You can grab the tarball from the Zend web site by using this link. I have had the client working with the following JDK ports: java/linux-sun-jdk14, java/jdk14, and java/jdk15. It also works well with the recently released native JDK binaries available from the FreeBSD Foundation.

A while back, I started messing around with the Linux Binary Compatibility that FreeBSD offers. During that time I tried a few different Linux base ports for testing and also setup my fstab configuration file to mount the Linux proc file system, linprocfs on FreeBSD, at boot. Well, it was around this time that the Zend client stopped working for me. I assumed it was because I had changed the Linux base from what it was when I originally installed the application, so, I reinstalled the linux_base-8 port and everything was good again… until I rebooted.

I could not figure out what was going on. I tried reinstalling Zend, I tried another version of Zend that I had used prior to 4.0.2 without a VM and it still didn’t work. I then tried reinstalling the linux_base-8 port again and once again, everything was okay, until I rebooted. It got to the point that every time I rebooted my machine and got back in to FreeBSD (it’s the only OS I boot into these days) I would reinstall the linux_base-8 port first thing. This worked like a champ! Zend would work fine for the entire session as long as I didn’t reboot. When I rebooted I would have to follow the same ole’ reinstall linux_base-8 song and dance before using Zend. This was frustrating!

Last night, while reinstalling linux_base-8 I noticed that the install process would unmount my linprocfs file system. Could it be?! Were my issues caused by me auto-mounting linprocfs at boot?! Was this the issue all along?! Well, unfortunately, the answer is “yes”. I had brought this all on myself. I removed the line from my fstab file that auto-mounted the Linux proc file system, rebooted, fired up the Zend Studio Client, and there it was! Version 4.0.2 of the Zend Studio Client was up and running on my FreeBSD laptop just as it should. No reinstalling, no trying different versions of Zend, no nothing. Just Zend working as it should be!

So, the moral of this story is to document the configuration changes you make to your machines hardware or software. You never know what wrenches those changes may throw into the loop or the amount of time you’ll spend troubleshooting them! Next time, I’ll roll back the configuration changes and start from there when a known working application decides to quit on me and you should too!

I just talked about finding system information remotely, now let’s touch on findning out who’s logged in to a specific PC and/or to what PC a specific user is logged in.

You’re going to need the PsTools software for this. If you don’t have the PsTools kit, you definitely have to get it as it’s one of those “how did I ever live without it” kind of tools.

You only need one tool to not only search your domain to see where a certain user is logged in, but to also see who is logged on to a certain computer.

psloggedon.exe

To see the help, type psloggedon.exe /?

C:\Chris\PsTools>psloggedon.exe /?

PsLoggedOn v1.31 - Logon Session Displayer
Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Usage: psloggedon.exe [-l] [-d domain] [-x] [\\computername]
or psloggedon.exe [username]
-l Show only local logons
-d Search the specified domain
-x Don’t show logon times

Most of the time, you’ll only want to show local logins, which is the -l flag.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to see who’s logged into computerA.

C:\Chris\PsTools>psloggedon.exe -l \\computerA

PsLoggedOn v1.31 - Logon Session Displayer
Copyright (C) 1999-2003 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Users logged on locally:
NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE
NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE
DOMAIN\userA
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM

As you can tell, userA is logged on to computerA.

Side note: This is also possible from a Linux box using the nmblookup tool.

But what if we want to see where userB is logged in?

C:\Chris\PsTools>psloggedon.exe -l userB

DOMAIN\userB logged onto computerB locally.

Psloggedon will scan the entire network, computer by computer, looking for this user. It’s pretty quick, too, it had to check about 80 computers before it scanned mine and it found me in just under 10 seconds.

Last month I posted an article titled An Affordable Surveillance System about a project I have going on at work where I am capturing images from surveillance cameras and storing them to a centralized server via FTP. This post will be a brief “How-To” for installing Apache 2.0, MySQL 5, and PHP5 on FreeBSD. This will be part 2 of my project, as the last will require writing a PHP application to parse the FTP directories to display images from a web browser. I was extremely impressed with how easy this installation went on FreeBSD.

I have installed Linux based web servers in the past using various versions of Red Hat Linux but always found that if I didn’t install everything I wanted in the beginning, as in, when the OS is being installed, I would have issues later when trying to add new modules, upgrade, etc. I am sure this is easy for “Super Linux Gurus” out there, but it never worked very well for me. I always had issues with RPMs and already installed binaries and their dependencies, so I eventually gave up and turned the web server administration here at my job over to Chris. I am sure he appreciated that! So, on with the how-to…

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