JiggletheCable.org

Twitter agrees to adopt Do-Not-Track privacy option | Reuters

2012-05-18T09:01:00.001-05:00

Twitter agrees to adopt Do-Not-Track privacy option | Reuters

OS X Versions

2012-05-16T12:08:00.002-05:00

For those of us with older Macs...

10.0.x Cheetah March 24, 2001

10.1.x Puma September 25, 2001

10.2.x Jaguar August 24, 2002

10.3.x Panther October 24, 2003

10.4.x Tiger April 29, 2005

10.5.x Leopard October 26, 2007

10.6.x Snow Leopard August 28, 2009

10.7.x Lion July 10, 2011

10.8.x Mountain Lion ?? (summer, 2012)

CBORD Steps into the 21st century!

2012-05-11T08:27:00.001-05:00

Well, it looks like CBORD has taken a big step here... they are going out on a limb and offering SECURE FTP for file transfers, OMG!

CBORD now offering Secure FTP

I know, I know... it's a risky endeavor but someone had to take the lead and offer this service to their customers. After all, it's 2012 and we need to start thinking about the future. No more of this waiting around for integral services to be vetted by the rest of the software development communities. They are taking the bull by the horns and rolling out this service as quick as possible.

Apple Releases iOS 5.1.1

2012-05-07T14:26:00.001-05:00

Apple Releases iOS 5.1.1:
Only 50 MB. Hurrah for incremental updates.

Monitoring VMWare logs, (Wed, May 2nd)

2012-05-06T09:39:00.001-05:00

Monitoring VMWare logs, (Wed, May 2nd): Virtualization is so popular today that there is almost no company that does not use a virtualizatio ...(more)...

Facebook Says It's Filtering Comments For Spam, Not Censoring Them

2012-05-06T09:36:00.001-05:00

Facebook Says It's Filtering Comments For Spam, Not Censoring Them: bhagwad writes "Apparently Robert Scoble tried to post a long comment on Facebook only to have a message pop up saying 'This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can't be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.' If true, this is huge. For one the self-moderating system of comments has always been the rule so far. And with countries like India rooting for the pre-screening of content and comments, is Facebook thinking of caving into these demands?" Facebook says there's a more innocuous explanation: namely, that the comment triggered a spam filter.

Microsoft and Internet2 to provide Windows Azure platform to universities | Comcast.net

2012-05-02T07:11:00.001-05:00

Wow, this could be really cool.

Microsoft and Internet2 to provide Windows Azure platform to universities | Comcast.net

EMC Celerra FileSystem - Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management

2012-05-02T07:04:00.001-05:00

Need to get this working today as well.

EMC Celerra FileSystem - Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management

Deploying Lync Jump Start Video Series - NextHop - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

2012-05-02T07:00:00.001-05:00

Really need to figure this out for my Partner Services account.

Deploying Lync Jump Start Video Series - NextHop - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Proper Prior Procedures Prevents Piss Poor Performance

2012-04-25T08:46:00.001-05:00

I've said it a million times: "Proper prior procedures prevents piss poor performance." Each and every day you should consult your procedures prior to performing any task. If not to make sure you are doing things correctly, then to make sure the procedure hasn't been updated in some way.

I work in Information Technology and each and every day I do something that I have done at least a dozen times before. If it's not submitting a firewall rule, it's assigning an IP address. If it's not cloning a system, it's adding something to Active Directory. We all do things every day that are repeated over and over again. We kid ourselves that we could do these things in the dark, or blindfolded. Most of the time the tasks get completed in the required time frame and done properly.

But, when was the last time you consulted the procedures for the task and verified that you aren't missing something? When was the last time you had to go back and "re-do" something on systems that had been missed?

I try my hardest to document everything that I do. If your job requires you to repeat several tasks throughout the day and you find yourself repeating these steps and double-checking your work more than you think is necessary, I suggest you get a good documentation system, or "wiki", learn how to use it, and consult that documentation regularly!

E-mail shines in Windows 8 with radical overhaul of mail client

2012-03-01T20:03:00.001-06:00

E-mail shines in Windows 8 with radical overhaul of mail client:

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview comes with a pre-installed e-mail client for webmail and Exchange. While it's designed with the touch-friendly Metro interface in mind, it's quite usable even in traditional desktop mode, at least for the basic tasks of reading and writing messages.

Windows 8 Mail is an alternative to the mail client in Windows Live Essentials, a free productivity suite for download on the stable versions of Windows in use today. Microsoft has not yet released a Windows 8-specific version of Outlook, the fee-based, business-class e-mail client that is part of Office. A beta version of "Office 15" is expected this summer, Office President Kurt DelBene said this week.

How to test OS X Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper in Lion, (Wed, Feb 22nd)

2012-02-23T08:08:00.001-06:00

How to test OS X Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper in Lion, (Wed, Feb 22nd): While I started working on comparing various OS X hardening guides (see the prior diary from a coupl ...(more)...

The Ultimate OS X Hardening Guide Collection, (Mon, Feb 20th)

2012-02-21T17:55:00.000-06:00

The Ultimate OS X Hardening Guide Collection, (Mon, Feb 20th): Many security professionals tend to use OS X systems. Maybe for the nice and shiny looks, or the Uni ...(more)...

An Early Look At Mac OS X 10.8

2012-02-19T15:51:00.001-06:00

An Early Look At Mac OS X 10.8: adeelarshad82 writes "Earlier today Apple announced their next OS, Mountain Lion. According to an early look, OS X 10.8 does more to integrate social networking and file-synching into a personal computer than any other OS. It tightly integrates with the whole Apple ecosystem that includes iOS devices and the free iCloud sharing service. Moreover Mountain Lion adds a powerful new line of defense against future threats where a malware app is prevented from running even if it is deliberately downloaded to a computer. Even though Apple's clearly got a lot of fine-tuning to do—and possibly a few features to add, there's no doubt that Mountain Lion already looks very fine." Update: 02/16 15:04 GMT by T : New submitter StephenBrannen writes with some more details culled from CNET. The newest OS X has now been released to developers, with an official release date planned for this summer. "Mountain Lion, as it is called, will further blur the lines between iOS and its Mac OS. iOS features that are being ported include: Messages (replacing iChat), Notification Center, Game Center, Notes, and AirPlay mirroring. Also new to Mac OS is the addition of Gatekeeper, which should help prevent malware attacks on Apple products. Not announced is whether Siri will be ported to the Mac."

Impressions: Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference

2012-02-17T14:18:00.000-06:00

Impressions: Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference: Mark Russinovich and Aaron Margosis have written another awesome addition to the Microsoft Press catalog, Windows Sysinternals Administrator's Reference. Per my policy, because I did not read the whole book I am only posting "impressions" here and not a full Amazon.com review.
In brief this book will tell you more about the awesome Sysinternals tools than you might have thought possible. One topic that caught my attention was using Process Monitor to summarize network activity (p 139). This reminded me of Event Tracing for Windows and Network Tracing in Windows 7. I remain interested in this capability because it can be handy for incident responders to collect network traffic on endpoints without installing new software, relying instead on native OS capabilities.
I suggest keeping a copy of this book in your team library if you run a CIRT. Thorough knowledge of the Sysinternals tools is a great benefit to anyone trying to identify compromised Windows computers.
Tweet

Windows Log Parsing

2012-01-23T10:27:00.000-06:00

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=24659 – logparser 2.2 from MS

http://martin77s.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/evtlogparser/ - someone wrote an overlay for logparser

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=18465 – EventCombMT is what I used to use.

http://www.eventid.net/ - this is good if trying to find esoteric event codes

Thanks Charles!

Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users

2011-12-24T13:05:00.001-06:00

Sorry, IT: These 5 Technologies Belong To Users: GMGruman writes "The BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon hasn't been easy on IT, which has seen its control slip. But for these five technologies — mobile devices, cloud computing services, social technology, exploratory analytics, and specialty apps — it has already slipped, and Forrester and others argue IT needs to let go of them. That also means not investing time and money in all the management apps that vendors are happy to sell to IT shops afraid of BYOD — as this post shows, many just won't deliver what IT hopes."

Windows 2003 Server Domain Time

2011-12-20T11:14:00.000-06:00

I have a system with a 5 minute time delay. It's domain joined but for unknown reasons it has a 5 minute delay. Now being an e-commerce system this is a bad deal. Credit Card companies don't like it when transactions are delayed by 5 minutes (can you say "man-in-the-middle"?).

Now I just need to figure out why it was off in the first place.

Here is the command to reset the time to the Doman time.

C:\Documents and Settings\wal>net time /?
The syntax of this command is:

NET TIME
[\\computername | /DOMAIN[:domainname] | /RTSDOMAIN[:domainname]] [/SET]
[\\computername] /QUERYSNTP
[\\computername] /SETSNTP[:ntp server list]

C:\Documents and Settings\wal>net time /domain:your.domain.com /set
Current time at \\server.your.domain.com is 12/20/2011 9:56 AM

The current local clock is 12/20/2011 9:51 AM
Do you want to set the local computer's time to match the
time at \\server.your.domain.com? (Y/N) [Y]: y
The command completed successfully.

C:\Documents and Settings\wal>

About Damn Time: Microsoft Will Silently Upgrade Everyone To Latest Version Of IE | TechCrunch

2011-12-15T10:30:00.000-06:00

About Damn Time: Microsoft Will Silently Upgrade Everyone To Latest Version Of IE | TechCrunch:

'via Blog this'

Verify Email with Telnet

2011-12-12T15:08:00.000-06:00

Stolen from: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/

We have all been doing email address validation for a very long time to make sure that the email is correctly formatted. This is to avoid users entering wrongly formatted email address but still they can accidentally give us a wrong email address.

Example of a correctly formatted email address but still wrong:
mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com [VALID email format but it does not exist]

Above case specifically happens when you take important customer email on phone and you type in the wrong email. So is there a QUICK solution to really check the email without sending a test message to the user? Yes.

The solution
A quick & simple check below can be implemented in most programming language including PHP, Python etc. It relies on using the same SMTP which is used to send emails.
To check if user entered email mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com really exists go through the following in command prompt.

First - Find mail exchanger of reddit.com
COMMAND:
nslookup – q=mx reddit.com
RESPONSE:
reddit.com MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.reddit.com
mail.reddit.com internet address = 208.96.53.70

Second - Connect to mail server mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
telnet mail.reddit.com 25
RESPONSE:
220 mail.reddit.com ESMTP Postfix NO UCE NO UEMA C=US L=CA Unsolicated electronic mail advertisements strictly prohibited, subject to fine under CA law CBPC 17538.45. This electronic mail service provider’s equipment is located in the State of California. See http://www.reddit.com/static/inbound-email-policy.html for more information.
COMMAND:
helo hi
RESPONSE:
250 mail.reddit.com
COMMAND:
mail from: <youremail@gmail.com>
RESPONSE:
250 2.1.0 Ok
COMMAND:
rcpt to: <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>
RESPONSE:
550 5.1.1 <mailbox.does.not.exist@reddit.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table
COMMAND:
quit
RESPONSE:
221 2.0.0 Bye

NOTES:
1) the 550 response indicates that the email address is not valid and you have caught a valid but wrong email address. This code can be on the server and called on AJAX when user tabs out of the email field. The entire check will take less than 2 seconds to run and you can make sure that the email is correct.
2) If email was present the server will respond with a 250 instead of 550
3) There are certain servers with a CATCH ALL email and this means all email address are accepted as valid on their servers (RARE but some servers do have this setting).
4) Please do not use this method to continuously to check for availability of gmail / yahoo / msn accounts etc as this may cause your IP to be added to a blacklist.
5) This is to supplement the standard email address javascript validation.

Importing Ringtones to iTunes

2011-12-01T07:10:00.001-06:00

After you convert the song/sound to the AAC version (m4a), make sure to delete the AAC version of the song/sound in iTunes (while keeping the file). Then, after you rename the file to the Ringtone (m4r) version, you can import that file back into iTunes. Otherwise it won't show up in the "Tones" section and be 'syncable' to your device.

Microsoft Store Online

2011-11-23T14:52:00.000-06:00

Download Windows 7 Media!

Microsoft Store Online:

Download: FSCT - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details

2011-11-23T12:03:00.000-06:00

File Server Capacity Tool!

Download: FSCT - Microsoft Download Center - Download Details:

Lion, iTunes, Airport Express, IPv6 Bug

2011-11-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

I have a stumbled upon a problem with iTunes, Lion, IPv6 and using an Airport Express.

It seems that when upgrading to Lion you lose the ability to "disable" IPv6. After upgrading to Lion your IPv6 config will still be set to "off", but if you change it, that choice goes away. You are only left with Link-Local, Automatic, and Manual as choices. None of these will allow you to connect to an Airport Express.

According to this post on the Apple forums, setting it to "Link-Local" will disable it. However your iTunes doesn't think so. So following these instruction from that same post you can return it to the "off" setting that allows iTunes to work properly with your Airport Express.

I had to change both the Airport and the Ethernet configs to __INACTIVE__ before it would allow me to connect to my Airport Express.

Hello,
Here is what worked for me in Lion.
I edited /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
and changed the IPv6 ConfigMethod's string to __INACTIVE__ manually for the appropriate adapter. This is what I believe the GUI would change in SL10.6. Looks like it still accepts the option, Just dosen't provied it.
sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
The section under your unique adapter key will look like this when you're done.
When completed reboot. Your inet6 address should not show for that adapter in ifconfig anymore.
Hope this helps.
<key>IPv6</key>
<dict>
<key>ConfigMethod</key>
string>__INACTIVE__</string>
</dict>

3.5 Million People Are Still Using AOL Dialup (!!!) [Factoid]

2011-11-03T14:18:00.001-05:00

Too scary.

3.5 Million People Are Still Using AOL Dialup (!!!) [Factoid]:

EEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRNDguzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzdungahdungahdungahhhhhhh. That sound you hear isn't a 56k modem, it's the sound of my brain collapsing upon itself as I read AOL not only has 3.5 million dialup users, but added 200,000 since last year. How can this be? More »