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barrytone

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Everything posted by barrytone

  1. Awesome :D It's great to see goverments talking sense. It's bugged me for too long that offical documents are often stored in proprietary formats. We use standards for HTML and CSS etc (granted Microsoft still have their own 'take' on some of these standards)... So why not documents? With the focus on web based applications for creating documents getting bigger, it makes complete sense :) I actually hope Microsoft decide to implement support for the ODF. As much as people bash them, they do make some good software, and it would be a shame to see them fight against harmony.
  2. I'd guess it's a dude considering it's name is technoBOY. Unless this is sometype of cyber cross dressing wanna-be-a-man girl. Or perhaps due to them being blond, they are un-aware of the masculine and feminine variations of the word :P
  3. I'm no good at putting things into order, so I shall just list 10 :) Vim - Great console based text editor for windows and linux Thunderbird - Good e-mail client Firefox - Neat litle browser X-Chat - I prefer it to mIRC EditPad - Great little text editor for windows and linux FileZilla - One of the best FTP Clients VLC - Probably the best video player Smart Draw - Awesome for flowcharting and the like SDP - Cool little program for recording video streams Sysinternals PSTools - Great little suite of programs. Really handy for windows network administration. Honorable mentions: FL Studio / Fruity Loops - Great fun and powerful music studio thing Electronics Workbench - Damn handy for designing circuits and pcb layouts XP PowerToy Calc - Much better than the standard windows calculator Winamp - Awesome music player. Love the jump facility Unlocker - Damn handy for deleting those in-use file Putty - The best SSH / Telnet client
  4. I've seen better :P From a forum I admin:
  5. Racer X Official Forums (racerxband.com) SecurityForums (security-forums.com) Hak5 Forums (duh)
  6. Mine is my name... Actually, It's not my name at all. It comes from my love of baritone guitars :) I go by my real name plus a prefix, or sometimes two prefixes elsewhere on the internet... The Initials for my handle with two prefixes are in my avatar
  7. that didnt work... i reboot and it comes up with Installing "File Name" andthen it goes to CTRL ALT DELETE to begin, and i login and then it doesnt show that its installed. Sounds like it's not one of the nice MSIs :P What piece of software is it? It may need a few settings changed or an answer file :)
  8. There are a few bits of info here: http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msi/authoring.htm Here: http://users.cyberone.com.au/dbareis/makemsi.htm And here: http://www.dalun.com/wix/wix.htm Some programs are a little more diffuclt to distribute than just dropping the msi into a group policy object... They need 'answer files'... I'm considering doing a tutorial on remote installation etc. So if there is the demand for it... If there's no msi for the application you may still be lucky... if the application uses no registry values or files outside of it's program directory, you can run a script from the server to 'push' the program's files onto the c$ share of the workstations. I've done it a bunch of times with older bits of software across entire networks... Works great. I had an idea a while ago for a sort of 'sandbox' system that you could install an application to, and the sandbox would record all files that were installed, registry settings that were changed etc, and create a script to push the application out to workstations.
  9. Thats what ive told him i think 3-4 times.... He still thinks that he is going to get caught. As a school admin, If I got an anonymous e-mail telling me about a vulnerability on one of my networks, I would be thankful and not try to trace who sent the e-mail. Provided the e-mail was polite, of course. If I did know who who sent the e-mail, I would only approach them to say thank you and ask them if they new of any other vulnerabilities. Sometimes it can take the mind of a kid to get past security. Without much prior knowledge, they'll sometimes try things that those with superior knowlede would not.
  10. Perhaps it means.... "Not'chaw cheese straws, beef woman!"
  11. I'd love to give one a try if you've got one going spare... £12,336 seems to be the RRP for it :shock:
  12. Agreed. There is spam, and then there are pointless posts. From what I've read, this wasn't really either. The links had gone by the time I read it. I'd like to see what they were :) As a side note... If I'm on a power trip: color 0c prompt How can I serve you, master?
  13. I thought he meant because of a Windows repair, although you would think moving a file would be less likely to cause data loss than reinstalling the OS. I did mean file loss due to using the repair :roll: Always do a backup first, but a windows repair using a legal cd and key is far and away the easiest way of making the installation legal.
  14. What makes you think that? :?
  15. Always back up just to be sure, of course. But it's a damn sight better than a full re-install. I've never had a file go missing in at least 100 windows repairs on various machines. If anyone has experienced file loss, I'd be interested to hear about it. Where were the file(s) etc?
  16. If she does buy a legal copy, just do a windows repair using the legal disk / cdkey... Hurrah! No data lost :)
  17. I agree! That is, in fact, one of the main reasons I dislike offsite filtering. I'm not sure I understood all of that, but I'll do my best to answer :) It is connected to the net, yes. But because the networks only physical connection to the internet is through the cache box, there is no way to bypass it. You could crack your way into it and change the IP tables to allow whatever you want, but otherwise, you're a bit stuck. I'm not sure what you're refering to with the notepad thing though. winchat has been removed, and the services required for both winchat and net send to run are disabled. As for ftp: it isn't disabled unfortunately. We're looking at a good way of blocking access for any students or teachers, but still allowing the system and admin accounts access. "We're" is the company I work for, if you're wondering :P Awesome, thanks! I'll be sure to check my spelling and neaten things up a bit for ya :)
  18. I am one of the school admins of which you speak :P How they are set up is a big question. The short answer is: it really depends on the school; where it is, how big it is, how much funding they have and how much the school's head/principle likes IT The following is based ONLY on the networks I administer. It does not by any means apply to schools in other areas or countries. The majority of school networks that I work on are split up into two parts. The admin network (as in the admin people who deal with the kids' files and the finances of the school, rather than network admins), and the curriculum network. For a small school, as most of mine are, there is a single server running windows 2000 server or server 2003 for the admin network, and another for the curriculum network. The reason for these networks being 'seperate' is obvious (to me at least). The is no way any kids should even have the remotest chance of gaining access to the schools financial records and the student's records etc. Admin Network The admin network isn't of much interest to most people who ask about school networks, but here it is briefly anyway... The admin network generally consists of around 3-10 machines depending on the size of the school. Everything is Ethernet and is usually (but not always) wired back to a switch located in the server room, rather than having a single cable running to a switch in the admin offices. The reasons for this are numerous, but usually focus around cost and speed. I.E. when ghosting/RISing all of the admin workstations from the admin server, it can be a really slow having everything running down one or two bits of cat5. Also: it's often cheaper to run 5 cables than run 1 and buy a switch + 5 cables from there to the workstations. The admin machines are usually running win2k at the moment. Almost completely because the most common version of SIMS (The School Information and Management System) isn't to friendly with XP. New versions are being tested with XP machines at the moment, but it's a tedious process. It is pretty common practice for 'mission critical' systems to be running 'tried and tested' software. On a side note, an example would be that some banks still use NT4 clients, and still use programs written cobol in the 1980's for processing. Curriculum Network As mentioned, the curriculum networks in small to medium school generally have one server. It’s usually a little more powerful than the admin server, and for one reason: more clients. The schools I work in have between 30 and 100 workstations. A usual setup would be one or two IT Suites, with 15-30 workstations, and one in each class room. There being anything up to 30 class rooms. The clients are now almost completely windows XP based. One or two schools that lack the funding of other schools still have some win2k clients that they can’t afford to upgrade / replace. The hardware for the workstations is kept as uniform as possible to make RISing (remote installation services) and ghosting (using Norton ghost) a lot less troublesome. Again, the workstations are almost always wired back to a switch (separate from the switch on the admin network) in or near the server room. IT Suites are usually situated close to the server room, but if they’re not: there is often a switch in the IT suite that has a connection back to the main switches in the server room. Restrictions and Filtering The restrictions and configuration on the local machines (such as, disabling display properties, control panel etc) are almost always done with Group Policies. Group Policies is a massively powerful thing, and incredibly useful. It’s used to distribute software in the form of MSIs, distribute new settings and restrictions… Pretty much everything apart from changing the screen resolution and colour depth :evil: Sorry… That’s my annoyance of the minute :P Internet filtering is a weird one. For the schools I work in, they are all on a big network set up by Telewest. Filtering is done off site, and as a network admin, I have no control over it. Both the admin and curriculum switches are connected to a little box called a cache box. It’s basically purpose built pc in a box that acts as a firewall, and web proxy/cache server. Schools are almost always set up so that the only way to the net, is through the cache box. Stops people from hacking about and just removing the proxy server from the internet settings to get unrestricted net access. In general: all but the essential ports are kept closed in both directions. As for the question about if the filters in place for a reason: the answer is YES! To try and keep it brief (I’m not good at that ;) ) a kid getting onto porn can mean a teacher getting into trouble from their superior, and also myself getting into trouble for not keeping things locked down… At which point I call the filtering company and shout at them, but never mind that. One thing to think of is that not all the kids that end up on porn or snuff sites are there deliberately. A big part of having the filters is to help protect the “point and clickersâ€. I had one little girl searching for Dracula for a class project the other day that ended up on a goth dating site, and another seriously shocked young man that had been searching for “game boysâ€. So yeah, the filtering isn’t perfect, but it’s better than nothing. Another reason for the web filtering is: kids aren’t always the ones at fault. I got handed a teachers laptop to fix a few weeks ago that had about 90 pieces of spyware and 3 gigs of porn on it. Good job it actually belonged to them and not the school, really. I’m tired of typing for now… But if anyone has any specific questions other than “how do i get on myspaz LOL?â€, feel free to ask and I’ll try to answer as best I can. I’ll try to update this humongous chunk of text with anything I feel is important or interesting :P
  19. I'll try be as mature as I can ;) I think 81 is the best overall picture, but I think 45 would be very good if it were cropped to head and shoulders. I'm not a big fan of colour photos :roll:
  20. JUST what I need for all my forum and IRC needs! THANKS MicroShaft! :D But... Will it run Linux?
  21. Cool :) I'll give it a try when I get a chance. Here's a question for you, given that you seem to know your stuff... :) Would it be possible to store image data in a mysql database?
  22. I've not tried that personally, but it sounds like it would work :) Does that work like a redirection sort of thing, whereby: say I accessed avatar.png with a web browser, would the URL in my address bar change to avatar.php? Or does it work sort of like a symlink? Or neither?
  23. Correct :) Most forums check the file extension of the avatar you're linking to though. So you'll have to make sure the server you're running the script on has a handler set to parse the file as PHP. so in my case I have one set as: .php.jpg application/x-httpd-php And then save the script as something like avatar.php.jpg A lot of web hosts let you add your own apache handlers. So you don't always need your own server use the script. Just a hosting account with a reasonable amount of features.
  24. Thanks anyedie :) Good idea! I've edited the code a little... Here's version 0.3 :P <?php //Random Avatar 0.3 - SBT 2006 //Image types to use in CSV list $imgtypes = "jpg,gif,png"; //Pull apart image types string $imgtypes = explode(",", $imgtypes); //Start the pattern string $imgpattern = "(.+."; //Put img types into pattern string $imgpattern .= implode(")|(.+.", $imgtypes); //End the pattern string $imgpattern .= ")"; //Open the current dir $thisdir = opendir("."); //Create array for image file names $images = array(); //Read the contents of the dir while($fn = readdir($thisdir)) { //Check for images. Add images to $images array if (filetype($fn) == "file") { if (eregi($imgpattern, $fn)) { //Get filename of this script $thisfn = explode("/", $_SERVER[SCRIPT_NAME]); $thisfn = $thisfn[count($thisfn) - 1]; //Check img is not this file if($fn != $thisfn) { $images[] = $fn; } } } } //Get amount of images in dir, minus 1. $nimages = count($images); $nimages = $nimages - 1; //Pick Random image $rimage = rand(0, $nimages); //Get the file type list($filename, $extension) = split(".", $fn); //Form header string if ($extension = "jpg") { $extension = "jpeg"; } $headstr = "Content-type: image/$extension"; //Send header header($headstr); //Send img echo file_get_contents($images[$rimage]); //Close the dir closedir($thisdir); //Clear the stat cache clearstatcache(); ?> Changes: -It now outputs the conent type to the header. Will work with jpg, gif and png -It now checks to make sure it's not trying to display itself -I've changed the apache extension handler to ".php.jpg application/x-httpd-php"... That way, I can save the file as avatar.php.jpg, it gets parsed as php, I can use .png images as avatars, forums allow me to use it as an avatar, and it doesn't affect the images I use on the rest of my site :) It can be used between tags too... Handy if you want a random image in your signature...
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