IgnoranceIsFutile.com

 I recently encountered a problem where a user was using a Mac (Lion) and was unable to access network resources when connected via the VPN.  Initially the user was able to correct this by checking the option that says "Route all traffic through VPN" on the VPN connection itself, but as expected, this resulted in very slow web access (as it was being routed through the VPN).  After doing some digging, a solution to the issue was located in the form of a script.

I wanted to take a moment to promote a great free tool called TestDisk.  TestDisk has saved me twice now when I've had disk related issues.

I encountered this error on a Windows 7 machine with Office 2010 Pro Plus installed. I searched around for a while and was unable to immediately find a fix, however doing the following seemed to correct it.

• Open Programs and Features and select Microsoft Office 2010 Pro Plus
• Click Change
• Choose Add or remove features
• Verify that all components are set to run from the hard drive.
• Click continue and wait for the installation to finish.

Publisher worked fine for me after this.

When working with Snort, a lot of people can get confused between suppression and a BPF filter.  I wanted to take a quick moment to explain the two of them and give examples on how they are used.

First a BPF filter...

I was recently looking for a way to remotely administer my linux box via the GUI instead of the command line and after some googling, I found this guide to setting up VNC on your CentOS box and tunneling it through SSH.  This is a great guide on how to securely configure VNC, the explanation on how to connect to VNC via an SSH tunnel doesn't work for a windows box. 

This article briefly (or maybe not so briefly) covers how to create a CentOS virtual machine and install Snort on it.  You will need:

• VMWare 2.0.2
• CentOS 5.4
• Snort 2.8.6.1

First we need to create our virtual machine, so we're going to create a new VM with the following specs:

Cleaning up old files that are generated on a daily basis can be an important, but easily missed task.  IMHO the best way to have old files cleaned up is to have it done automatically by the system.  This eliminates the chance for user error, as well as creates a constant, reliable scheduling of this cleanup.  Recently I configured a few jobs to do automated cleanup using the "forfiles" command.  This is a great one in windows, especially for this particular task.

I had been seeing this message occuring regularly on some Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers whenever the GPO was applied (Event ID 1202).  All of the policies seemed to be applying just fine, but this error message just got annoying.  It turns out this is an issue, at least in my case, of Windows not being able to locate the Wdiservice account. 

To see which account is causing the issue run the command

find /i "cannot find" %SYSTEMROOT%\security\logs\winlogon.log

And you'll get some output similar to below.

After applying any GPO, you usually want to verify that it has been applied by looking at the setting you are trying to change, or by running a GPResult and getting  resultant set of policy information.

Problem: You have administrator level privileges on the machine in question and when you type in "GPResult /R /SCOPE Computer" you receive Error:Access denied.

Solution: When opening the command prompt, right click on it and say "Run as Administrator"

Problem: You have a GPO applied to a particular OU that defines the accounts that are allowed to logon as batch jobs.  You also have a server in that OU that requires the use of a local account to run a batch job, or an IIS application pool.  After applying this GPO you see one of the following error messages: