And this time, it's bringing a worm. At this point, the estimate of infected systems is at around 8 million according to F-Prot. I've not seen an infection yet myself, knock on wood, but considering:
A.) That there was more than enough warning with Microsoft flailing their arms over a serious out-of-band patch on 10/23/2008, plus at least one, probably two Patch Tuesdays since the patch was released.
B.) This worm only spreads over corporate and local networks -- networks that are supposed to be managed by professionals.
The numbers are disheartening to say the least.
--
Edit: Microsoft has a helpful portal for this worm. Ars Technica also has a great article, quoting an infection rate of around 1.1 million PCs for the last 24 hours.
Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label software. Show all posts
Friday, January 16, 2009
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Windows XP domain migration tip: Overwrite the Default User profile
For all of you guys out there tasked with migrating users from a previous authentication domain (or workgroup) to a new domain know that when a user logs in with the new credentials, a new profile will be created and all of the user's previous settings and files will remain in the old profile.
You can go in after the fact and clean this up or use some other tricks (like using the FAST wizard, treating the old profile as the old computer and new profile as the new) but I've found something faster. I'm probably boneheaded for not hearing of this sooner, but I did a 7k workstation migration at an old job and they never tried anything this simple and relatively foolproof.
Go into Documents and Settings (typically on c:) and locate the Default User profile. It's hidden with stock XP settings, so you need to turn on the option to show hidden files and folders. Under normal circumstances, this profile gets stamped out as a template for new users. You can twiddle with this to make bulk changes to new users, but we'll use it for a slightly more nefarious purpose.
Go ahead and back up Default User, as we'll be replacing the entire profile. You never know-- you might want it later.
Take the user's existing profile and copy it, renaming it as... you guessed it, Default User.
Now go ahead and perform your domain migration. Upon first login, the user's old, familiar profile will 'stamp' itself into the new one. The only 'gotchas' are that you can only do this for one account per computer and if your users have limited drive space and large profiles, you might run short on hard drive space with essentially 3 copies of the profile hanging out there. Still, this is a very easy migration method, and you can remove the old copies once you're sure the user is happy with the migration.
This should work just fine on Windows 2000, and I assume Vista as well. I just haven't tested it.
You can go in after the fact and clean this up or use some other tricks (like using the FAST wizard, treating the old profile as the old computer and new profile as the new) but I've found something faster. I'm probably boneheaded for not hearing of this sooner, but I did a 7k workstation migration at an old job and they never tried anything this simple and relatively foolproof.
Go into Documents and Settings (typically on c:) and locate the Default User profile. It's hidden with stock XP settings, so you need to turn on the option to show hidden files and folders. Under normal circumstances, this profile gets stamped out as a template for new users. You can twiddle with this to make bulk changes to new users, but we'll use it for a slightly more nefarious purpose.
Go ahead and back up Default User, as we'll be replacing the entire profile. You never know-- you might want it later.
Take the user's existing profile and copy it, renaming it as... you guessed it, Default User.
Now go ahead and perform your domain migration. Upon first login, the user's old, familiar profile will 'stamp' itself into the new one. The only 'gotchas' are that you can only do this for one account per computer and if your users have limited drive space and large profiles, you might run short on hard drive space with essentially 3 copies of the profile hanging out there. Still, this is a very easy migration method, and you can remove the old copies once you're sure the user is happy with the migration.
This should work just fine on Windows 2000, and I assume Vista as well. I just haven't tested it.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Admin Tip: 24 Free/OSS Admin Tools
Download Squad had a great article recently listing 24 open-source, free tools for admins and technicians. I'm already sold on PuTTY, DBAN, Memtest86/Memtest86+ and 7-Zip, but there are some real gems out there that I hadn't even heard of.
WCD in particular scratches an itch I've had since giving up Norton ncd many a year ago and being spoiled by locate under *nix. You do need to know how to manually set a Path variable, but otherwise it works as advertised.
They did have one recommendation that is good, but I think you can do better... Visualization tools for data are invaluable in giving you a meaningful picture (literally) of what is and is not taking up space. They recommend a product called WinDirStat.
WinDirStat looks like a re-working of the same concept that was pioneered by SequoiaView: "Cushion Treemaps" to visualize data. The strength of this method is that it can show individual files and folders easily by size and type, and groups them together, but the weakness is that it lacks a true hierarchical view. It's also a very busy interface which makes it hard to tell usage in terms of rough percentages or amounts. Unfortunately, SequoiaView lacks any type of obvious licensing. You're probably safe to use it for any purpose, but it's not OSS. It's also rapidly aging, so WinDirStat looks like a great replacement.
There are times when it is the best tool for the job, but for a first-pass on a Windows system I prefer an application called Scanner, written buy a guy named Steffan Gerlach. The licensing is also unclear, but presumed freeware with the source supplied. This app has the strength of being able to show disk usage as a pie chart, with a hierarchical view. It lacks color coding by file and doesn't show individual files at all until you drill down into that directory. It is, however, nice and portable, so you can run it from a USB drive or a network share.
Between the two, you should have pair of complementary products that'll allow you to better manage your storage.
WCD in particular scratches an itch I've had since giving up Norton ncd many a year ago and being spoiled by locate under *nix. You do need to know how to manually set a Path variable, but otherwise it works as advertised.
They did have one recommendation that is good, but I think you can do better... Visualization tools for data are invaluable in giving you a meaningful picture (literally) of what is and is not taking up space. They recommend a product called WinDirStat.
WinDirStat looks like a re-working of the same concept that was pioneered by SequoiaView: "Cushion Treemaps" to visualize data. The strength of this method is that it can show individual files and folders easily by size and type, and groups them together, but the weakness is that it lacks a true hierarchical view. It's also a very busy interface which makes it hard to tell usage in terms of rough percentages or amounts. Unfortunately, SequoiaView lacks any type of obvious licensing. You're probably safe to use it for any purpose, but it's not OSS. It's also rapidly aging, so WinDirStat looks like a great replacement.
There are times when it is the best tool for the job, but for a first-pass on a Windows system I prefer an application called Scanner, written buy a guy named Steffan Gerlach. The licensing is also unclear, but presumed freeware with the source supplied. This app has the strength of being able to show disk usage as a pie chart, with a hierarchical view. It lacks color coding by file and doesn't show individual files at all until you drill down into that directory. It is, however, nice and portable, so you can run it from a USB drive or a network share.
Between the two, you should have pair of complementary products that'll allow you to better manage your storage.
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