Ever so often you need to test your Internet speed (for debugging speed issues or maybe to determine the actual speed of a new line or a customers line), in Denmark people often use the test page at www.tdc.dk (the largest telecommunications provider in Denmark) however sometimes, during my work, I need to test the Internet speed from other countries and a Danish test page does not give a reliable result in other countries.
Today I stumbled across what appear to be a very neat test page, it offers nice graphs and customization of the test.
Just finished installing a few patches to a Windows 2003 box and was puzzled about one of the updates “Windows Powershell 2.0 and WinRM 2.0″, now Powershell I knew about but what is this WinRM (Windows Remote Management) all about.
Well from what I can tell it’s rather basic, it’s more or less the corporate (industry standard) replacement of PsExec.exe from Sysinternals, a way to launch commands, scripts etc. remotely. WinRM (Windows Remote Management) offers some additional features and can be used in scripting, from what I can tell it may also work on hardware devices that support WsManagement.
I have just had a few servers that somehow has failed to update their Forefront Client Security client software The problem seem to be that Forefront cannot seem to stop the FCSAM service while updating, the service is stuck on “Stopping” and neither taskkill og any other utility seem to be able to kill it.
The errors in the eventlog go something along these lines;
Microsoft Forefront Client Security Antimalware Service
Error 1921. Service 'Microsoft Forefront Client Security
Antimalware Service' (FCSAM) could not be stopped.
I have tried uninstalling, rebooting and reinstalling but this did not help.
The workaround suggested is to set the service FCSAM to manual, reboot, upgrade and then setting the service back to automatically – however this only works for now and thus only postpones the problem.
I have found this article on a similar problem which I will try tomorrow, this includes some additional cleanup steps;
Eg. issuing the command; sc delete fcsam
I will also try to slipstream the installation of Forefront Client Security before I retry the re-installation, description on how to do here (mind you use the latest update and not the one the article refer to);
If you live in Europe you are bound to have experienced being rejected, when trying to watch your favorite TV show on a US web-site – something in the line of “We are sorry but your IP seem to come from a country outside the USA” bummer – this is annoying as some US TV stations have cool tv shows available for free viewing (but restricted to the US).
So, as I have mentioned before you can use the TOR network (http://www.torproject.org/) to proxy around this problem – but TOR is an install package that may not always be appropriate to install on a company/school pc etc, along comes UltraSurf (http://www.ultrareach.com/) a simple little portable application you can put on your USB stick.
UltraSurf will once it is started open a browser and you can browse the net with a US based IP (by proxying your traffic) thus giving you access to US based webservices. Speed is not great but seemed acceptable and I managed to get an ok mediastream from ABC (note you may have to restart the browser when installing activex components).
A word of caution, I would not share creditcard or other confidential information on a proxyed connection, you never know who/what is inspecting your HTTP traffic, HTTPS/SSL/TSL traffic should be secure though (but still think about what you are doing).
If you have ever worked with Microsoft ISA server you may have heard of “GFI WebMonitor”, “GFI WebMonitor” is an add on to the ISA server (it does also exist as a standalone server application) that will allow for Malware, Virus scanning along with traffic analysis and extended logging of HTTP traffic thus protecting workstations against ‘drive by infections’ and other script dangers while surfing.
The news part is that GFI now offer a freeware version, the freeware version is however limited to logging and statistics thus the Malware and Virus protection is turned off in the freeware version after 30 days. But still the logging and statistics functionality is not half bad for free.
So if you are looking for traffic logging and analysis this may be worth a look.
Is your harddisk working overtime and you have no idea why!? We all know the sittuation, especially Windows Vista and Windows 7 seem to spend a lot of time working on your harddisks without no apparent reason, and it is very hard determining what process it is that is actually causing all the disk/processor activity. Well one way of debugging this is to download procexp.exe from http://live.sysinternals.com, another approach is to try a utility I just got hold of that offers an easier overview “What is my computer doing” http://www.itsth.com/en/produkte/Whats-my-computer-doing.php
Ever so often (or in my case ever so seldom) you need a TFTP server for some equipment that need updating (firmware etc), and as I do so seldom I keep forgetting whitch software I need for this.
Well here is the link you need, a mini server software for not only offering TFTP but also DHCP, TFTP, DNS, SNTP and Syslog ; http://tftpd32.jounin.net/
How neat is this, the A-Team series from the 80’s (1983) will be ‘revieved’ for a movie, sadly not with the original actors (most known is likely Mr. T., but also Dwight Schultz is very well known for his roles in Star Trek) but with a new cast and perhaps with a newer up-to-date finish ala 2010..
I for one found the show very entertaining, it was so quirky and fun – no one ever got hurt in the show, and the ‘punchline’ was always the same – build something out of nothing (a bit like McGyver) and help the underdog..
For those of you that has been using PeerGuardian 2 in the past (PeerGuardian 2 is a Firewall / blacklist that can block certain IP’s based upon lists you subscribe to) here is some good news
As you may know PeerGuardian 2 has not been supported for the past 1-2 years, and is (to say it mildly) not very stable on Windows Vista/7 etc. Well some nice people has decided to continue the project under a new name Peerblock, and I do mean continue as the first version is based upon the source from the last PeerGuardian.
As with PeerGuardian the Peerblock application is free (although donations are greatly appreciated).
The A5/1 encryption used to protect GSM phone conversations has long since been broken, actually just last year it was made possible to eavesdrop encrypted GSM in realtime – hence GSM telephony is today to be considered utterly insecure. Scientists have thus begun working on the 3G variant A5/3, and it would appear that a “breakthrough” has been made, not quite allowing for realtime decryption but weakening the cipher quite considerably.
Ever so often you need to test your Internet speed (for debugging speed issues or maybe to determine the actual speed of a new line or a customers line), in Denmark people often use the test page at www.tdc.dk (the largest telecommunications provider in Denmark) however sometimes, during my work, I need to test the Internet speed from other countries and a Danish test page does not give a reliable result in other countries.
I have just had a few servers that somehow has failed to update their Forefront Client Security client software 
The problem seem to be that Forefront cannot seem to stop the FCSAM service while updating, the service is stuck on “Stopping” and neither taskkill og any other utility seem to be able to kill it.
So, as I have mentioned before you can use the 
If you have ever worked with Microsoft ISA server you may have heard of “GFI WebMonitor”, “GFI WebMonitor” is an add on to the ISA server (it does also exist as a standalone server application) that will allow for Malware, Virus scanning along with traffic analysis and extended logging of HTTP traffic thus protecting workstations against ‘drive by infections’ and other script dangers while surfing.
and Windows 7 seem to spend a lot of time working on your harddisks without no apparent reason, and it is very hard determining what process it is that is actually causing all the disk/processor activity. Well one way of debugging this is to download 
Ever so often (or in my case ever so seldom) you need a TFTP server for some equipment that need updating (firmware etc), and as I do so seldom I keep forgetting whitch software I need for this.
How neat is this, the A-Team series from the 80’s (1983) will be ‘revieved’ for a movie, sadly not with the original actors (most known is likely Mr. T., but also Dwight Schultz is very well known for his roles in Star Trek) but with a new cast and perhaps with a newer up-to-date finish ala 2010..
The A5/1 encryption used to protect GSM phone conversations has long since been broken, actually just last year it was made possible to eavesdrop encrypted GSM in realtime – hence GSM telephony is today to be considered utterly insecure. Scientists have thus begun working on the 3G variant A5/3, and it would appear that a “breakthrough” has been made, not quite allowing for realtime decryption but weakening the cipher quite considerably.
