I see that there’s now a UK version of the “PC vs Mac” adverts. These are pretty similar to the original American versions, although there are fewer UK ones so far. Still, I think that they’re quite funny, and I actually prefer the UK ones, mainly due to the actors involved (Mitchell and Webb); the …
Category archives: Uncategorised
Anatomy of a hack: SBS 2000
A few years ago (August 2002), my home server got hacked. I dealt with it fairly quickly, but it took me a while to really understand what had happened, because I was more naïve about security in those days.
Windows Vista: first impressions
Two weeks ago I went off to a Microsoft event in Reading: “Ready for a New Day: Microsoft’s Launch of Exchange, Office and Vista”. That was quite interesting, and I came away thinking that there are enough useful features to justify an upgrade. They gave me a freebie copy of Windows Vista and Office 2007 …
Printer feed
People often approach me about IT problems (either at work, or friends/relatives outside work). However, sometimes I find out about these problems by chance: I’ll see something odd, and the person will say “Oh, yeah, that always happens”. I was chatting to someone recently, and while I was there I saw that they had a problem …
RAM upgrade
I installed some extra memory in a PC this evening, which turned out to be a bit more interesting than I’d expected. The initial status was that it had 128Mb of RAM. I had a 256Mb chip, which would increase it to 384Mb. Windows XP was running very slowly, so I figured that tripling the …
Upgrading to Visual Studio 2005
Today I got my copy of Visual Studio 2005 through the post, so I’ve been having a play with that, by upgrading some of my VB.NET 2003 projects. Unfortunately, I got a rather confusing error message from them, and I couldn’t find much info on the web, so I’m documenting it here for other people’s …
Anatomy of a hack: mail server
Today I’ve been fixing a problem with my mail server after someone “hacked” (cracked) it. I’m reconstructing the chain of events as best I can, but the causality wasn’t obvious at the time. Background: this machine is running Windows Server 2003 SP1 with Exchange Server 2003 SP2. A few weeks ago, someone gained unauthorised access …
Firewall blacklist
One of my current projects is configuring ISA 2004 as a firewall. Without wanting to get sidetracked into advocacy debates, all I’ll say is that: a) It’s a lot better than ISA 2000. b) It’s annoying that it doesn’t support more than one internet connection, so hopefully they’ll fix that in ISA 2006. Anyway, today …
HP printer drivers
Here’s an obscure problem that had me banging my head against the wall until I figured out the solution. If you add a printer to Windows XP/2003 (and possibly other versions too), and choose to share it, there’s an option to install additional drivers. That way, someone running NT4 can connect to it, and automatically …
Make-shift repairs
“The three most dangerous things in the world are a hardware engineer with a software patch, a computer programmer with a soldering iron, and an end user with an idea…” (Anon) Back in my undergrad days, there was one fine Sunday morning when I needed to swap a couple of hard drives around, i.e. the …