S.M.A.R.T Made Easy

S.M.A.R.T stands for Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. S.M.A.R.T is a set of technology standards for monitoring hard drives for problems. S.M.A.R.T can report on hard drive performance and can be used to predict if a hard drive is going to fail. Most if not all newer hard drives are smart compatible.

Here is a small little tool that will monitor your hard drives S.M.A.R.T data in real time and alert you of any problems.

Get S.M.A.R.T

Text Messaging For Free

Text messaging is not cheep, and if you use a work phone chances are that it's even blocked.
Here are a few ways to send and receive text messages for free.


Send via an SMS Gateway.

Every phone carrier has whats called an SMS Gateway that you can use for free. Basically its a way of sending and email to an address which then converts it to an text message. My phones are on Verizon so an example of how to send me a text message would be to send an email to MyPhoneNumber@VText.com

Below is a list of SMS Gateways for the major phone carriers.

Sprint phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon phonenumber@vtext.com
T-Mobile phonenumber@tmomail.com
AT&T phonenumber@txt.att.net


Send via Gmail or AOL instant messenger

Another way to send and receive text messages for free is to use a Gmail or AOL account. Basically you assign a phone number to a contact and you can send and receive text messages in a chat window. Very easy and its free.


Use txtDrop.com

txtDrop.com is a free service that allows you to send and receive text messages a few different ways. You can use their website or you can install a little app on your computer that acts like a chat window to send and receive.

Blackberry Enterprise Server Install Links

Useful Links from my last Blackberry Enterprise Server install.

Exchange Permissions

Local and AD Permissions

Install Guide

Tapping Cell Phones

Sometimes innocence IS bliss......

I came across and interesting article this week talking about how easy it is to tap cell phones. You can see all text messages, hear every call, and track where the phone is at all times using it's internal GPS. And the scariest feature of all? The internal speaker phone mic on the cell phone can be activated and the hacker/stalker can listen to what the person is saying at any time without the person knowing about it.

VERY scary stuff! If you do a little digging there are a ton of sites with programs to do this type of thing.

Here are two short videos from news stations doing a report on this type of thing.

Video1
Video2

My parents got a puppy this weekend

TS Web Access -- IE ActiveX Problems

Came across a problem today where I had an Windows XP computer that was trying to connect to our TS Web Access site and could not get past the "You must install the ActiveX control". The XP workstation was SP3 and had RDP Client 6.1 installed. Looking in the Manage Add-On's in IE there was no RDP or Terminal Services Add-On.

Turns out to fix this problem all you have to do is delete two registry keys.....

Below are the steps to fix this problem .


1. Open Regedit and find the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings

2. Within the Settings sub-key, delete the following sub-keys:

{4eb89ff4-7f78-4a0f-8b8d-2bf02e94e4b2}
{7390f3d8-0439-4c05-91e3-cf5cb290c3d0}

Free Data Recovery Tools

Recovering deleted files from Windows

When a file in windows is deleted its not really deleted, at least not right away. When you delete a file in windows, windows hides the file from view and marks the space on the disk where the file is as writable space. What this means is that your file is still on your hard drive until windows writes over that space with a new file. Sometimes this process can happen immediately other times it could be months or years.

There are a bunch of tools on the market that you can use to recover files that have been deleted.
Most of them cost money but there are few free ones. I have added a few links to some of the free ones.

One note I have had different results from different programs so sometimes you might have to use more than one program to find what you need.


Recuva
Windows tool that can also recover files from Hard Disk and Removable Media like MP3 players, cameras, and flash drives.

Undelete Plus
Windows program that run on Windows 95 through Vista.

Testdisk
Its a dos based tool so there is not windows GUI, but if you can find your was around the DOS commands its one of the most advanced free recovery tool out there.

Restoration
Another windows tool

Quote of the Day

"Encryption is like a huge spike in the middle of
the road. Very impressive, but most will drive right around it..."

Kon-Boot CD

Came across a great little program today. Kon-Boot Booting to the CD allows you to log into any profile on a computer without knowing the password for that profile. It works on Windows XP through Windows 7 and Windows 2003 to 2008.

There are two very cool things about this program that is different from older password reset tools like Offline NT Password and Registry Editor.

1. Kon-Boot does not reset the password. When your done, just reboot and no one is the wiser. The old password still works on the profile.

2. Unlike Offline NT Password and Registry Editor you can access Local and Domain profiles.
Accessing the domain profile on a computer is very cool. Even though you can log into a domain profile you still will not have access to any network recources until you re-authenticate with the domain. Buy hay you still have access to everything on that profile, which can come in very handy if you need to get to a profiles offline files.

Mapping ports to processes

Using security scanners like GFI LANguard or Super Scanner you can port scan the computers on your network for open ports. Say you find a computer with port 25 (email server) open, how do you find out what program has that port open? Here are a few ways to map a port to a process.

1. Windows has a built in program called NETSTAT this program shows what TCP and UDP ports are open on your computer. From a DOS prompt run NETSTAT -ano this will list all ports and the Process ID associated with the port. Open Task Manager to map the Process ID to the Process.


2. FPort is a command line program you can download from Foundstone that will map ports to processes

3. TCPView from Sysinternals. This tool unlike the other tools had a GUI Interface.

The Conficker Virus -- How to protect yourself

By now I’m sure most of you have heard of the virus Conficker. It’s been on 60 Minutes, CNN and about every other NEWS source over the past week. I have had a lot of questions about how to secure home computers against the Conficker virus so here’s a list of a few things that you can do to help protect yourself.

1. Make sure that you have Anti-Virus software installed on your computer and that it’s up-to-date. The up-to-date part is just as important as having the software on your computer. If your computer doesn’t have an Anti-Virus program installed there are a few free ones out there.

http://free.avg.com/
http://www.free-av.com/
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

The above free Anti-Virus programs aren't to bad but if you can afford the money I would highly recommend the following two products. They are top notch and unlike AV programs like Symantec, McAfee and the above free ones they will not slow your computer down.

http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/home-home-office/vipre/
http://www.eset.com/

2. Make sure that your computer is up-to-date on patches. Microsoft releases updates every month to patch holes in its software. Virus exploit those holes to get on your computer.


The easiest way to patch your computer is to open Internet Explorer, Click the Tools Menu then choose Windows Update. Follow the prompts to update your computer.


3. To quickly test if you have to Conficker virus open a web browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox and go to www.symantec.com or www.McAfee.com. The virus will not let you go to those sites. if you have problems getting there, there is a good chance that you have the virus.


4. If you think that you have the virus the follow website has a list of tools that you can download to run and clean your computer. http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=ANY.RepairTools


60 Minutes had an interesting segment on the virus. I have attached a link to the video if your interested.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=3036


If you have questions email me at mplahtinsky @ gmail.com

DNS Tools

I use to use dnsstuff.com to do external DNS testing. About a year ago they started charging for their services.

Here is a list of sites that offer similar tools.

http://www.iptools.com
http://www.sort-dns.com
http://www.nwtools.com

http://www.mxtoolbox.com/

Download Manager

Ever have problems downloading files from the net. I recently had to download a program from a bad connection that kept dropping. Every time the connection dropped I had to restart the download from the beginning.

Get it right has a great download manager. It's not free ($19.99) but if you do a lot of downloading and are having connection problems you should definitely check it out.

http://getright.com/

RichCopy

A GUI version of Robocopy written by microsoft.


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx?pr=blog

Make your own WiFi Directional Antenna

http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/index.html

Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes is one of the best free tools out there to clean virus and malware off of infected computers.

Download link -- http://www.malwarebytes.org/
Definition db link -- http://www.gt500.org/malwarebytes/database.jsp

Free CD Burning Software

Both of these should work with all 32bit and 64bit versions of windows.

CDBurnerXP - http://cdburnerxp.se/

ImgBurn - http://www.imgburn.com/