I started blogging for That Damn PC four months ago and I have now decided to leave because of personal reasons, especially related to time management. I hope at least a few of my posts have helped someone sometime. They have helped me learn a few things so as to share them here, and I know one place where to look for specific tips that I may forget in the future.

That Damn PC will soon get another blogger, so keep coming back. Even better, subscribe to the site and you will be notified once activity resumes here. I will continue to drop by once in a while. You can also check out the other sites on the b5media Technology Channel and the favorites I linked to in the sidebar below for news and nuggets.

I thank b5media for this opportunity. In particular, I thank Kori Ellis, the Technology Channel Editor, and Rachel Segal, the Content Director, who were always there to listen to my problems and made it easier for me to blog here.

I will keep in touch.
Sravan

Post from: EveryJoe

Bidding Farewell

For a system A to connect to a remote system B through SSH, A needs a SSH client (like PuTTY for Windows) and B needs a SSHD server running all the time so as to accept incoming connections.

SSH is a proprietary software offered by SSH Communications Security, and as an alternative the open source version OpenSSH is being widely used. On all Unix-based OSs, the OpenSSH SSHD server is installed by default during the installation of the operating system. On Windows, however, it is not the case.

You can install it on top of Cygwin very easily. You will need administrator access with a password set for the account. When you run the Cygwin setup to download or install various packages, select openssh which will select all the other packages it requires.

Once you complete the install, to configure SSHD run $ ssh-host-config –y from the terminal. This will automatically answer ‘yes’ for the yes/no questions. Give an appropriate password that follows your system rules if an sshd_server is being created or ignore this step. Specify the value of the environment variable CYGWIN as “ntsec tty” for WinXP and Vista and “binmode ntsec tty” for Windows 2003 Server (without quotes). At the end of this process, the sshd service will have automatically started and placed itself among the Windows startup list.

If you have any problems, try following this article for WinXP and Vista and this one for Windows 2003 Server or drop me a message.

Post from: EveryJoe

Installing and Configuring SSHD Server on Cygwin

Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.)

Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives.

Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set.

Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”.

Defragment: Using the disk defrgamenter ($ defrag –a <drive>), I first analyze all the drives and if necessary defragment the recommended ones.

Updatedb: I update the Cygwin file index.

Backup: I take a backup of all important data on my Transcend Extensible Hard disk. A good idea, don’t you think?

Image Sources: CCleaner, Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter.

Post from: EveryJoe

My Weekly Scheduled Jobs

In one such recent attack, Robert Graham, the CEO of Errata Security, came to a few startling conclusions based on the passwords published showing what should not be your password:

• 16% of passwords matched a person’s first name
• 14% of passwords were patterns on the keyboard
• 4% are variations of the word “password”
• 5% of passwords are pop-culture references
• 4% of passwords appear to reference things nearby
• 3% of passwords are “emo” words
• 3% are “don’t care” words
• 1.3% are passwords people saw in movies/TV
• 1% are sports related

You can read the complete report here.

Password management is a big hassle that every Internet user has to deal with today. Apart from the regular ones that I use, I try out new products and services all the time and have over 50 different accounts as I speak. So I use a password management software called KeePass, which is open source. In the past, Jesse suggested several others like Billeo, Vidoop and Passpack. These softwares usually are also capable of generating strong passwords or you can use an online service like the Strong Password Generator to generate a password for you.

The most basic rule is to use a long combination of small and capital letters, numbers and symbols. Read this Microsoft Security article about how to create and use strong passwords.

Post from: EveryJoe

Strong and Weak Passwords

%APPDATA%\\\\Microsoft\\\\Internet Explorer\\\\Quick Launch

\\r\\n\\r\\n(APPDATA is an environment variable which can be found by typing echo %APPDATA% at the command prompt.)\\r\\n\\r\\nI checked it on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server, but it is possible that this location is preserved across OSs. I can’t fathom the reason behind placing quick launch icons in the APPDATA folder belonging to the Internet Explorer. Some might consider it harmless, but say when a custom slipstream installation of Windows is made where the Internet Explorer is not installed, it is possible that Quick Launch is also gone. The location is senseless and a bug, whatever maybe its priority. It is just a tiny example of bad software.\\r\\n\\r\\nWhile there are tools that can help you clean your quick launch cache, etc., if you are not a complete newbie the best way would be to navigate to the Quick Launch folder and see the various files present in that folder (mostly .LNK or shortcut files). You could see for yourself if the files are wrongly pointing to any dead or moved links and update them if necessary. You can also add your own shortcuts directly using Right Click –> New –> Shortcut.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Obscure Location of Quick Launch

One of the best things about Cygwin is that these commands useful for “quick and dirty” work on large chunks of text data are easy to learn, are consistent across all Unix-based OSs, have a number of options, and are quite extensive. When used in combination, they can save a lot of programming.

($ <command> <option> <inputs> is the general format for almost any of these commands. $ <command> –help shows the usage information.)

Note that all the commands below work on text files, not just any files with text content in them.  e.g. a .DOC or a .HTML contains many other headers which are also taken into account when processed by these commands.

wc: wc is short for “word count”, but it counts more than just words. It can count chars (-m), lines (-l) apart from words (-w).

uniq: When files have a large number of lines with many identical ones, uniq returns only once all lines among the input files after discarding repetitions. –c also gives the number of times each line has been repeated, –u returns only the unique lines discarding any line which has been repeated more than once, –i considers two lines non-unique if they are only differing the case.

sort: Say you have several files with numbers or words that need to be sorted. Sort can sort a concatenation of several files at once, where each line is considered a separate value to be sorted. The sorting order can be specified as in –d means dictionary-order, –f means ignore case, –n means numeric sort, –u means sort only unique lines.

grep: Short for “get regular expression”, grep can be used to search for a specific string or string pattern (called regular expression) in given text. $ grep “grep” <this-post> shows all the lines with the string “grep” in them. –c is used to count the number of occurrences, –i is used to ignore case, –v is used to invert the result.

sed: sed is used primarily to find and replace a string or string pattern from files. The most common usage is $ sed ‘s/<find-string>/<replace-with-string>/g’ which replaces all occurrences of <find-string> with <replace-with-string>.

Post from: EveryJoe

Cygwin Commands for Text Manipulation

CCleaner’s primary feature is the Cleaner. First, it will analyze the system, fetch the files that it is going to delete from the recycle bin, browser caches, other application caches, and many other obscure locations. The user can choose which areas to scan for and which to leave alone. Then the files can be deleted using any of the four secure file deletion options, but be warned that the greater the number of passes the fewer the chances of recovery if needed. There are many other customizations that can be made, like specifying the files and folders to be deleted and those to be excluded (apart from the usual set), the cookies to be preserved, and running from the command line.

CCleaner also has a registry cleaner than cleans the registry for any old or unclean or deleted entries. I think this feature can be made more robust. Be sure to save the registry before editing it.

Two other tools that come along are the “Uninstall” and “Startup” tools. The former can be used to uninstall programs. It is faster than the conventional “Add or Remove Programs” in loading the programs and also loads most programs unlike the regular option. The “Startup” tool can be used to disable or delete various startup processes, equivalent to the options provides by msconfig.

One other (unnecessary) feature I like about CCleaner is the way it displays the OS and the processor details when opened.

CCleaner is a regularly updated free software with new versions released every now and then. Download the latest version from the official CCleaner website. It is hardly 3 MB.

Image Source: CCleaner on my PC.

Post from: EveryJoe

Use CCleaner to Clean Your Computer

The command env typed in your command prompt or Cygwin terminal will list the entire set of environment variables and their current values. My Computer –> Properties –> Advanced –> Environment Variables will also show you the Windows environment variables divided into two categories: System variables and User variables.

While on cmd each variable can be referred to using %ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE%, on Cygwin and all Unix-based OSs they are referred to using $ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE. ($ echo %ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE% or $ echo $ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE)

ALLUSERSPROFILE, APPDATA, COMPUTERNAME, HOMEDRIVE, HOMEPATH, PATH, PROGRAMFILES, SYSTEMDRIVE, SystemRoot, USERNAME, USERPROFILE, WINDOWS are a some important environment variables some of which may be modified and are usually quite useful while writing batch programs. OS, NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS, PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE, PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER, PROCESSOR_LEVEL are a few other interesting variables which are best left untouched.

$ set ENVIRONMENT-VARIABLE=value can be used to change an existing or define a new environment variable.

Image Source: Microsoft Windows on my desktop.

Post from: EveryJoe

Environment Variables

Post from: EveryJoe

The Pirate Bay Trial Begins

Especially in labs, for instance, all systems have similar account usernames and passwords for convenience. It is not uncommon for someone to accidentally log into someone else’s system and proceed as though it were his or her own. If you are an administrator of a system which needs restricted access, you can create a custom legal notice which warns other users from accidental misuse.

Open the Registry Editor (Ctrl+R –> regedit), navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, and you’ll find two registry keys called LegalNoticeCaption and LegalNoticeText. Create them using Right Click –> New –> String Value and modify them with the text you wish to include.

In UNIX-based OSs, a MOTD serves this purpose. Even the .profile may be modified to include the MOTD.

While you are at this, you may also change the registry keys DefaultDomainName, DefaultUserName, AltDefaultDomainName, AltDefaultUserName to suit your preferences.

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Set Windows Logon Warning Message