Andy
http://absoblogginlutely.pip.verisignlabs.com/

Windows XP

Desktop Remote Control

By on Wednesday, August 13, 2003

Pieter mentioned UltraVNC which is his preferred method of remote control, even over xp’s Remote Desktop. Now if that is the case then UltraVNC must be very souped up performance wise. We already use VNC (in different guises) for control of remote client desktops and sometimes the performance of the desktop refresh is awful – especially over a dialup connection where we can never get higher than 28.8 out of the office! Remote desktop/Terminal Services has always given us better performance, unfortunately its just limited to xp and W2k machines. I’ll be checking out Ultravnc later today.It certainly looks good with work done on the bandwidth,file transfer ability and integration with nt usernames to control who has access.

PS – Hope your wife (I presume its not the cat) gets better soon Pieter and your comments have disappeared from the site overnight.

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Windows 2000

Unusual Windows Update message

By on Tuesday, August 12, 2003

After installing some patches on one of the servers I got the following message – “Your updates have been installed successfully. To complete installation you must restart your computer. Do you want to restart your computer now?” Nothing wrong with that – the weird thing is that the YES button was greyed out….I’m just wondering if its because I was using terminal services to do the upgrade but very strange.

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Shopping

Think Geek T-shirt

By on Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Thanks to Neil I read about Ryan s post about the No I will not fix your computer t-shirt. Like I said on Neil’s comments I’m tempted to put a “unless you pay me loads of money” comment on the back of it. This is the second or third link I’ve read in the past couple of weeks that has talked about going freelance for tech support……the only thing is I don’t think the town I live in has enough people to keep me in business. It is very tempting though.

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Wireless

Wireless Update

By on Tuesday, August 12, 2003

After taking the wireless Access Point into the office and not getting it picked up on the lan at all with the snmp manager or my network scanner I sent an email off to Netgears Technical Support department yesterday requesting a RMA number. As yet I’ve not heard anything back (apart from an auto acknowledgement with a ticket number and a list of frequently asked questions, all of which have nothing to do with my problem). I took the unit back home to triple check on the original lan and it still didn’t work there either – in fact it doesn’t even light up the led on the hub to say there is an active connection (and yes I’ve tried a different network cable).

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Virus

New Worm does the rounds.

By on Tuesday, August 12, 2003

From the email that I received from eeye:-
A worm began spreading on the Internet early Monday morning that exploits a recent vulnerability in Microsoft Operating Systems. The worm, dubbed Blaster, takes advantage of a known vulnerability in Microsoft RPC DCOM that affects all current versions of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.
The worm begins by targeting Microsoft systems that have not been properly patched for the known RPC DCOM vulnerability. Once the worm detects an unpatched system, it will attempt to download and run a file called msblast.exe. If successful in infecting a system, the worm will propagate itself, modify Windows registry settings, and initiate a SYN flood denial-of-service attack on windowsupdate.com.
The worm payload does not contain any additional malicious content; however, because of the nature of the worm and the speed at which it attempts to impact systems, it can potentially create a denial-of-service attack against windowsupdate.com.
For further information and a technical description of the Blaster worm please visit:
eeye. They also have a free tool you can download (reg required) to see which machines are vulnerable…but then again you should have done that a long time ago, especially with running Windows Update! Their full suite of programs will also tell you if you are unlucky to have it running around your network.

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