If you use the excellent “Free downloadmanager” (FDM) you should make sure you have the latest version and patches installed, a serious security bug was discovered on feb 2nd 2009 by Secunia.com
Well this is cool, I only have 2-3 lp’s lying around for sentimental reasons, but in case you got the basement full of old LP’s this is a must have..
A week ago or so someone via Google Earth located what could have been the greatest scoop of – well I guess ever – the possible remains of the lost city of Atlantis (see picture), it was a large man made structure like shape in the ocean.
Sadly Google has come up with a different less exotic explanation, stating that its actually sonar tracks (yeah, I know sounds strange, but take a look at their blog for a more detailed explanation).
Bummer, it would have been cool finding Atlantis.
If you have ever had problems with autorun files in Windows (within a corporate environment) here is some good news for you.
If you, in your environment set up a GPO to disable autorun.inf to combat the spread of virus/malware you were likely dissapointed, yes the setting was propogated to the pc’s but it did not stop all autorun.inf’s from executing. The problem (among other things) had to do with complexities of autorun introduced with of USB devices (before it was only cd and disks).
Anyway, FINNALLY Microsoft has come up with a patch, lets just hope it works out 
I have not had the opputunity to test it yet.
Patch should be introduced via Windows Update, for more details look here;u
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/967940.mspx
Update March 8th 2009, I tested the patch, and it DOES now work on network shares as well, excellent
Unless you live under a rock (on the moon), you should have heard about the court case against “The Pirate Bay” a torrent tracker site in Sweden, charges are piracy and aiding in committing piracy (well more or less).
If you find the case interesting you can follow it here;
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/yo_ho_ho/index.html
and here
http://live.piratpartiet.se/ (Swedish)
It is an interesting judicial dilemma, and I am quite entrigued in regard to what the outcome will be.
I was patching a newly installed Win 2003 server, and the first thing I was met by was that the Windows Update web site could not be opened unless it was added as a Trusted site, however when trying to add the site http://update.microsoft.comI was met by a dialog box stating that “”There was an unexpected error with your zone settings. Unable to add site.“. On this server Internet Explorer Enhanced security had been uninstalled.
Solution;
So if you are bored during lunchbreak direct your browser towards; http://www.quakelive.com/ and take Quake Live for a test spin.
It’s based upon the popular Quake games from the past, but it looks like computers now are so powerfull that a simple browser is enough to execute a cool fps game.. neat..
It’s free which is my favorite price for fun..
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Are you as tired as I of the Aurora logon background every time you logon to Windows Vista, its just so darn depressing.
Well the nice people at Stardock to the rescue with “LogonStudio for Vista”, install and select your new logon background – that’s it clean and simple (is likely to work also on Windows 7).
Get it here;
http://www.download.com/LogonStudio-Vista/3000-2072_4-10696252.html
So, I had this server where I enabled Shadow Copy on the D: volume, and I could create snapshots just fine however the scheduled shadow copy jobs never ran. If I looked in “Control Panel”, “Scheduled Tasks” I could see that the job had never run, and if I tried to edit the schedule I got an error “0×8007000d: The data is invalid“. I suspected the scheduler to be the culprit, but after trying whatever I could think of and google I ended up with nada..
In the end, all I had to do was to delete one single file and viola everything works.
What Microsoft claim is that I enabled Shadow Copy before running dcpromo on a memberserver, and that thus the service (Shadow Copy) would try to use an old local account (which is deleted as the server is promoted) to schedule the jobs and subsequently fail. This in my case however was not true, however as the server was installed in Russia over our wan lines the thing might be that the server had not completed a full replication before I enabled Shadow Copy..
Anyhow, the solution can be found here;
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822904
And to break it down, all I needed to do was to delete the one file that was in;
%SystemDrive%\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18
(in my case there was only one, but according to the MS site you should only delete files that begin with “d42″.
So you need to fiddle a bit with Windows Update, the reasons can be many;
Well, for help on how to launch it on different remote machines I suggest you visit Dave’s Blog;
http://skatterbrainz.blogspot.com/2009/01/script-code-batch-running-wuauclt.html
A Desktop shortcut;
You could also simply create a desktop shortcut linking to
wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow
This would force a Windows Updates detection to run upon clicking the shortcut, somewhat easier than launching the website.
The script you would need locally could look something like this;
@Echo off Echo Stopping Windows Update Service net stop wuauserv Echo Starting Windows Update Service net start wuauserv Echo Forcing Windows Update detection %windir%system32wuauclt.exe /detectnow
I also stumbled across some neat commands to try in case you are debugging Windows Update (update not working);
http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/279270-automatic-update-not-started-error-1058-a.html
net stop wuauserv del /f /s /q %windir%SoftwareDistribution*.* net start wuauserv wuauclt.exe /detectnow _____________________ net stop bits net stop wuauserv %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32atl.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32jscript.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32msxml3.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32softpub.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuapi.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuaueng.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuaueng1.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wucltui.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wups.dll %windir%system32 egsvr32.exe /s %windir%system32wuweb.dll net start bits net start wuauserv wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow _____________________________ net stop bits net stop wuauserv regsvr32 /u wuaueng.dll /s del /f /s /q %windir%SoftwareDistribution*.* del /f /s /q %windir%windowsupdate.log regsvr32 wuaueng.dll /s net start bits net start wuauserv wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow
PPS. Vista/Win2008 users beware.
Stopping services etc under windows vista/2008/7 require the scripts to be run as an administrator.
