All PCGamesHardware provided was a ZIP file to download which contains a cfg.xml file. As far as I know, ESET products are activated based on username and password. Every subscriber has their own unique username and password that can be used to download the installers and also to obtain the latest ESET virus definition. So I opened the XML file with notepad, took a quick look and found the username in clear text but the password is encrypted. Normally NOD32 username would start with EAV- followed by 8 random numbers and Smart Security with ESS-.

Continue reading on how to license ESET NOD32 v4 with the cfg.xml file provided by PCGamesHardware.

At first I didn’t know what to do with the XML file but after a while I found out that ESET supports importing and exporting settings via XML file. Just follow the few simple steps on how to get your free 6 months ESET NOD32 license.

If this is you don’t have ESET NOD32 installed on your computer:
1. Download NOD32 v4 cfg.xml file provided by PCGamesHardware and extract.

2. Download the latest version of ESET NOD32 v4 trial. For 64-bit users, you can get it from here.

3. Install and follow the on screen instructions.

4. At the bottom left area where it says Display: Standard mode, click on the Change… link and click Yes button.

5. Click on Setup at the left pane and then click Import and export settings.

6. Make sure that “Import settings” is selected and click on the … button to browse for the cfg.xml file.

7. Restart your computer and update virus signature database. NOD32 will download around 21MB to upgrade from trial to licensed version. If ESET fails to upgrade, try updating again. I had to update twice in order to get it right.

If you already have ESET NOD32 installed on your computer, you will only need to download the cfg.xml file and import it at Advanced mode. I tried using Nirsoft’s Asterisk Logger to reveal the asterisk behind the NOD32 password but it doesn’t work. However when I tried using Password Viewer which also does the same thing as Asterisk Logger, it worked perfectly by showing the hidden password!

Looks like ESET has blocked Nirsoft’s Asterisk Logger but not Password Viewer. I could just provide the ESET NOD32 username and password that I’ve decrypted from the cfg.xml file here but I don’t think it’s appropriate because I believe the license can get blacklisted very quickly. This license valid until 4/21/2010 which is less than 6 months because the promotion started on October.

Here are some unrelated information to today’s topic. There seems to be quite a lot of free license promotion going around. I will list them out here so you won’t wake up to another article of “Free this and free that”. ZoneAlarm and F-Secure offer has just expired…

1. McAfee VirusScan® Plus3-User with SiteAdvisor for 12 months
http://us.mcafee.com/en-us/affiliates/vmware/landingpages/16288.asp?cid=48523

2. IObit Advanced System Care Pro Edition
http://db.iobit.com/license-free/asc-free-license.php

3. a-squared Anti-Malware 4.5
http://www.emsisoft.com/en/order/24h/

Technorati Tags: eset, nod32, xml, license, antivirus

One of my client’s website that regularly requires updating is quite troublesome because it involves uploading at least 10,000 small files. What I normally do is compress all the files into one single ZIP file, upload and then use DirectAdmin’s built-in File Manager to extract it. I had to do that because when I try uploading a lot of small files, the FTP connection will timeout (TM Net, our Malaysian ISP is to be blamed) but weirdly when I upload a single big file, I can get a constant 40+KBps upload speed and never gets timeout.

Recently I’ve been very busy and can hardly spend any time to update my client’s website. So I intend to hand over everything to my client so that I can have more free time to myself. Before that, I will have to make sure that everything is in order and the steps to update the website are all written properly in step-by-step order.

One of the problem that I am facing is I cannot allow my client to use the DirectAdmin’s built-in File Manager because my webhosting subscription account is not a reseller type and I cannot create an account for him nor I can give him my existing username and password. A normal FTP client can do mostly what a PHP File Manager does except that it cannot command the server to extract an archive file that is already uploaded on the remote server. Fortunately I am able to install other third party PHP File Manager to replace the DirectAdmin’s File Manager.

If you do a search on PHP File Manager, there are actually quite a lot that you will find. What I am currently using now and I can say that it works is eXtplorer. It is a free PHP and JavaScript based File Manager that is able to:

Copy & Move Files and Directories by Drag&Drop

Dynamic Directory Tree with on-demand loading of subdirectories

Edit Files (with Syntax-Highlighting thanks to EditArea)

Rename, Delete or Create new Files and Directories

Access Files through FTP or directly (using PHP) to totally overcome permission and file ownership issues

Upload or Download files just as you like

Create and Extract Archives (ZIP, Tar, Tar/GZ, Tar/BZ)

User Management with different permission levels like “View only” or “Edit” and “Admin”

Installation is pretty simple. Just download, extract and then upload to your webserver. You will need to allow write access (chmod 777) to /extplorer/ftp_tmp/ folder and /extplorer/config/.htusers.php file. Then just login, right click on the ZIP file and select “Extract Archive”. eXtplorer needs at least PHP 4.3 on the server and an up-to-date browser with Javascript enabled to run. Do take note that eXtplorer can only extract ZIP, Tar, Tar/GZ and Tar/BZ archives only.

[ Download eXtplorer ]

Technorati Tags: php, file, manager, extplorer, extract

If you have a website, sometimes you would want to block visitors coming from a country. For example you are running a promotion for certain countries and you don’t want visitors from other country to see it. Other than that, many years ago when I was in the e-book selling business, there are two countries (I am not going to reveal) which has very high chargeback cases, meaning they buy with their credit card and then inform their credit card company that they did not authorize the charge. The credit card company will then reverse the charges, allowing the buyer to get the intangible product for free by cheating. No matter how much proof I provided to the company that charged the credit card, the buyer still gets the advantage of reversing the charges.

So my last resort was to block the whole country and sending them to a Forbidden page that says “You don’t have permission to access / on this server. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request”. It did reduced the amount of chargebacks significantly and I didn’t notice any drops on the sales because the legitimate buyers comes from other countries.

To block a country using .htaccess, you must first need to know the IP address range but Block A Country and Country IP Blocks simplifies all that.

Block A Country is a free service that automatically generates a .htaccess with countries that you want to block. All you need to do is select the countries from the list and click the “Go” button. You will then need to create a .htaccess file at the root of your public html folder and paste the codes to that file. Do take note that the default code generated by Block A Country redirects the unwanted visitor to http://www.blockacountry.com/blocked.php

[ Visit Block A Country ]

Country IP Blocks is similar to Block A Country but it allows you to choose CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing), Netmask, IP Range, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, Decimal/CIDR, or Hex/CIDR. It will also tell you what’s the ISO code for the country, total networks and subnets in the list.

[ Visit Country IP Blocks ]

Once in a while the forum will be disturbed by a person named Gurjeet Singh Komal from Meerut, Uttar Pradesh India. He was probably the biggest fan of this website but backfired and turned into the biggest enemy because he was banned for not following the forum rules even after several warnings. He’d sign up a new account and start creating new threads by posting nonsense. It’s definitely unfair to block India from this site just because of him. As far as I know, there are many nice people from there too! Moreover it is also easy to get around this country banning restriction by using web proxy.

Technorati Tags: block, htaccess, country, ip, deny

I have my own private RapidLeech server which is hosted in Malaysia and it’s very useful whenever I am downloading a file at a very slow speed. I can make use of the server that has a very fast connection to download the file for me and save it to the server and then I will download it from the server. Since the server is located in the same country as I currently am, I am able to achieve maximum download speed. The only thing I have to worry is I have to make sure that my hosting does not run out of the given bandwidth which is 200GB. Once I exceed the bandwidth limit, all websites will be suspended until it reset in the new month.

I’ve updated to the latest Rapidleech v42 pr-t2 because the v41 wasn’t working very well. After the upgrade, I am seeing an error message at the footer of the rapidleech page which says “getCpuUsage(): couldn’t access STAT path or STAT file invalid“. I have tried installing RapidLeech on another server and there’s no such error message. It is supposed to display a nice information on server space and CPU load.

That error is not a big deal but I don’t want that error message to show. There are 447 files in RapidLeech archive and I am certainly not going to edit one by one with notepad and search for the getCpuUsage keyword. So I use TextCrawler to automatically help me find a keyword across multiple files and folders.

TextCrawler is a free tool for searching and replacing over multiple plain text files. It can search for straight text and supports advanced search/replace via regular expressions.

TextCrawler Features:

Find and Replace across files

Fast searching, even on large files

Simple to use interface

Flexible search parameters

Text Extractor – rip text into a new file

Search and replace using Regular Expressions. Create sophisticated searches

Regular Expression test tool

Regular Expression library – Save your searches

Create backup files

Highlighted search results

Export Results

Batch find and replace operations

To use TextCrawler search for a word, I first select the folder (Start Location) that I want to search in. Then set the Filename/Filter as *.* so it will try to search all files in that selected folder. At Find, I entered the word getCpuUsage and then clicked the Find button. In less than 3 seconds, TextCrawler is able to let me know which text files contains the word “getCpuUsage” and at which line.

In another scenario, during software giveaways, there are more than 1000 entries and copying every single email address to a text file to randomly select a winner is tough. So I hacked the Wordpress core file to set it to display 300 comments for an article. Then I saved all the contents to a text file, and use TextCrawler’s Regular Expressions to easily extract all the email addresses.

[ Download TextCrawler ]

Technorati Tags: textcrawler, grep, search, replace, extract

Few days ago there was a newly signed up user in forum requesting for help. Initially his computer had some error messages that pops up during Windows startup and he tried using some third party software to fix it. However it ended up making his computer unable to run any exe programs at all including the icons on desktop. He was very sure that he only changed the ProgramFilesDir value from C: to D: in registry. From what I know, this only changes the default location of Program Files where software are installed but no matter what, we all tried to help him undo the changes he made. I showed him how to run registry editor but he wasn’t able to as he kept on getting the error message “This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action“.

After spending a few hours trying to help and without any success, then I started thinking maybe this problem is caused by another factor which I’ve encountered before in Windows XP. Somehow a virus managed to corrupt the .exe association in registry causing the user unable to run any programs. I used TeamViewer to remotely connect to his computer and tried running this command “assoc.exe=exefile” in command prompt which should fix the problem but don’t know why this command has been denied. I checked his user account and he is an administrator. I then tried to use DougKnox’s EXE registry fix but that failed too because I wasn’t able to import the .reg file since it requires regedit.exe. I also converted the .reg file into .exe file which can imported into registry without using regedit and that too didn’t work.

After 2 days, I am glad that I finally managed to fix the problem.

It turns out to be a corrupted .exe association and the reason those steps I taken didn’t work is because the Windows Vista registry location for exe association is different from XP. Obviously using the XP fix cannot work on Vista!

When you have a corrupted exe association, you definitely cannot use any registry editor to fix it because it is impossible to run it in the first place. So here are a few methods you can try:

1. Run command prompt and type assoc.exe=exefile (If you get access denied error, try step 2)

2. Download this .reg file and run it. Make sure you right click and select Save As. (If you cannot import the .reg file because Windows cannot find the registry editor, then try step 3)

3. Open command prompt and type the following command REG IMPORT vista-7-fixexe.reg. Make sure you’ve already CD to the directory where the .reg file is. (If you have problems getting this to work, try step 4)

4. Download the EXE compiled version of the registry file above and run it. Although it doesn’t make sense to run this exe file since most of the exe files are blocked, but this is the one that fixed the user’s computer. (If this couldn’t fix it, try step 5)

5. Microsoft Fix It has an automated way to fixing the exe association problem. Simply download this MicrosoftFixit50194.msi file and run it.

If done correctly, it should fix the problem instantly and no reboot is required. Now I will always remember that whatever works in XP doesn’t necessarily works on Vista and 7.

Technorati Tags: exe, association, vista, windows, virus

There has been quite a lot of complaints about Avira recent updating problem that hangs and counts time elapsed endlessly. Check Avira forums and you will see how many people are complaining over it. Honestly I do not use Avira even though I say that Avira is the best free antivirus because I have commercial license for Kaspersky and Norton. If compared between a paid and a free software, I prefer to use paid because I am eligible for prompt support. So I installed Avira on my test computer and researched for a few days on what’s happening to Avira’s update servers. I wasn‘t very sure at first but now I am confident to share with you on my findings and also the temporary fix until Avira fix the problem at their side.

One of the main difference between the personal and premium edition is the premium edition gets to update the latest virus definition using Avira’s Fast Premium update server. This is true because the Avira AntiVir personal edition gets the latest virus definition from personal.avira-updates.com and the premium gets it from premium.avira-updates.com. There are only 4 premium servers and as for the personal update servers, there are 24 of them. I am able to download the virus definition at full speed from any of the 4 premium servers but as for the 24 servers that are used for personal edition, I get timeout most of the time on 20 servers and only 4 ipv6 servers are working.

I get to compile a list of Avira update servers by multi pinging Avira’s personal update server personal.avira-update.com. Do take note that the IP address could change if Avira decides to do that.

Personal
80.190.143.227
80.190.143.228
80.190.143.229
80.190.143.230
80.190.143.231
80.190.143.232
80.190.143.233
80.190.143.234
80.190.143.235
80.190.143.236
80.190.143.237
80.190.143.239
62.146.66.178
62.146.66.179
62.146.66.181
62.146.66.182
62.146.66.183
62.146.66.184
62.146.66.189
62.146.66.190
2a01:138:a001:201::21 (works most of the time)
2a01:138:a001:201::22 (works most of the time)
2a01:138:a001:201::23 (works most of the time)
2a01:138:a001:201::24 (works most of the time)

Premium
62.146.87.171
62.146.87.172
80.190.154.74
80.190.154.73

As you can see from the multi ping test, Avira randomly assigns an update server for you to download the updated definition. From what I’ve noticed, most of the time Avira will try to assign one of the 4 of the ipv6 update servers to personal users. Only sometimes you will directly get the ipv4 update server. I believe the reason they are doing this is because all of the 20 ipv4 servers are overloaded. I’ve used DownTester to try to download a 5MB definition file from all 20 servers with a setting of 50 retries if failed and guess what, NONE of the servers allowed me to successfully complete downloading the 5MB file.

It’s really a bad decision to use the ipv6 servers because by default Windows XP don’t have ipv6 installed and configured. Installing IPv6 in XP is easy but you still won’t be able to connect to the ipv6 servers as it doesn’t work right out of the box. Pardon me, I have no experience with configuring ipv6 nor could I get XP to connect the Avira ipv6 update servers. When Avira on XP tries to connect to the ipv6 servers, it hangs for a very long time until it times out and redirects you to one of the 20 ipv4 servers, and again, those are problematic slow servers. So, basically Avira users on Windows XP is pretty much screwed until Avira gets more servers or fix it. If you are using Windows Vista and 7, you shouldn’t have any problems because the operating system already supports ipv6.

If you are using Windows Vista or Seven and wants to manually select which Avira update server to use, then you can use your Windows HOSTS file to map personal.avira-update.com and personal.avira-update.net to any of the IP address. Unfortunately we CANNOT redirect and use the premium servers because the definition files being used are slightly different. When Avira couldn’t find the files that they are looking for, it will automatically redirect you back to any of the free servers.

Here is how to modify your Windows HOSTS file so that the Avira AntiVir Personal Edition can download the updates from working servers.

1. Simultaneously press Win+R on your keyboard and you should see a Run box.

2. Type this in the box %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc and click OK.

3. Open the hosts file with a text editor such as Notepad.

4. Copy the 2 lines below and paste it to the last line at the hosts file. Save the file.

2a01:138:a001:201::21 personal.avira-update.com
2a01:138:a001:201::21 personal.avira-update.net

It should look like the screenshot below.

One of the user from Avira forum suggested that Windows XP users can add this 2 lines to hosts file. I’ve tested it and ended up waiting for more than 20 minutes to download the updates but still stuck with the message “Files are being downloaded” with no progress at all.

::1 personal.avira-update.com
::1 personal.avira-update.net

5. Save the hosts file either by going to File > Save or just simultaneously press Ctrl+S. Now try to update Avira and it should work now.

Just for your knowledge, the HOSTS file can only map host names to IP addresses. If you haven’t noticed, all four ipv6 address are nearly the same except for the last character which is 21, 22, 23 and 24. You can try any of the four servers by changing the hosts file to find which Avira personal update server works best for you. Remember, the IPv6 servers can only work in Vista and 7. It doesn’t work on XP unless you’ve managed to install and configure IPv6 properly. I wonder if this is one of the Avira’s dirty tactic to make everyone pay and upgrade to Premium edition? They better fix it fast or else many people will start switching to Avast! or Microsoft Security Essentials.

Technorati Tags: avira, update, hang, definition, antivirus

As usual when I was screening through all the new posts in forum to see if there are any spam and also any computer topic that I can help, I saw an interest question asked by Rizzano. He wanted to know if there is anyway to make Firefox auto save password without clicking the Remember button. In Firefox, even if you have the option “Security Remember passwords for sites” checked in Tools > Options,the browser will still display a notification bar at the top that asks “Do you want Firefox to remember the password for “Username” on website.com?” with three buttons “Remember”, “Never for This Site” and “Not Now”.

The first thing that came to my mind was perhaps there is an addon that can do this but I couldn’t find any that can make Firefox auto save password without prompting. After spending nearly two hours researching on how Firefox saves the password, I managed to find a way on how to make Firefox save the login information to the Firefox Saved Passwords manager.

First, I searched some of the important keywords such as “Never for This Site” and “Not Now” on all the files and found that this function is controlled by a few javascript .js files. Then I was more confident in getting this to work since I didn’t have to go through the trouble of downloading the Firefox source code, modify and compile it.

When you submit a form with username and password, it will process the function:
1. _onFormSubmit() in nsLoginManager.js
2. promptToSavePassword in nsLoginManagerPrompter.js
3. _showSaveLoginNotification in nsLoginManagerPrompter.js
4. addLogin in nsLoginManager.js

1. Close Firefox
2. Edit nsLoginManagerPrompter.js with notepad which is normally located in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\
3. Replace the entire line 642 to 711 with the code below:

var pwmgr = this._pwmgr;
pwmgr.addLogin(aLogin);

Now whenever you login to any website, Firefox will auto save the site, username and password to the login manager WITHOUT showing the notification bar. You can access the saved password area by going to Tools > Options > Security and click the Saved Passwords button. There is one possible bug which is even when a user entered the wrong username or password, it will still be saved.

I am calling this a hack instead of customization because it’s not an included feature in Firefox. I had to manually modify one of it’s original core files to make this work. Thinking about this logically, obviously Firefox did not include such feature nor there is an addon for this because they don’t want the world’s favorite browser to turn into a keylogger. Use it with care and think twice before implementing this illegally as it can get you into a lot of trouble!

Technorati Tags: firefox, password, login, notification, save