February 11, 2009, 9:06 pm
Windows Defrag does a fairly decent job of keeping your drives defragmented and running smoothly. But sometimes, it has problems with large files. I usually run into problems with virtual machine drive images, once they get over about 2-3GB, they just don’t seem to defrag anymore.
Fortunately thanks to yet another Sysinternals tool called Contig, you can clean up those large files easily. Contig is a single-file defragmenter that uses the existing defrag API within Windows. After running it on a couple of my drive images, it took them from over 400 fragments each to less than 20. I did find it helpful to run a defrag pass on the drive before running contig on the large files.
February 10, 2009, 10:43 am
If you have a domain hosted on Smash right now, head over to the SmashHost site for some important information regarding changes to your hosting.
February 4, 2009, 8:55 pm
The Panda GateDefender 8100 is a Linux-based filtering, AV, and intrusion prevention system. The system I have to work with has a P4 3.4GHz CPU, 1GB of DDR400, and an 80GB SATA drive. It has one available PCI slot, 2 unused SATA ports, and a CF slot.
While you can get a display on the VGA connector, its not an actual console. To get a console, you’ll need a serial cable. Open up a terminal emulator and set the port to 57600,8,N,1, then power on the machine. To get into the BIOS, press the tab key when prompted.
If you look at the motherboard, you’ll see JP1 is labeled CMOS Reset. I’ve tried this, and it did not seem to actually reset anything, nor did JP8 (NMI) or JP2 (???). I used a tool called CmosPwd to recover the actual password (its ‘adnap17′). Once in the BIOS, you can move on to getting more access to the box.
Continue reading ‘Hacking the Panda GateDefender 8100’ »
February 2, 2009, 1:16 pm
Certain files from Microsoft (in particular, things such as PowerPoint Viewer and the Office 2007 Compat. Pack) are provided as .exe files. If you’re looking for something a little easier to roll out via Group Policy, you can extract the archive files to a folder of your choice by adding the /extract or /c command line switches. Which switch to use depends on the package, but you can usually do /? to get an explanation of all the options. The files Microsoft provides usually contain some MSI files you can then add to a Software Policy.