Messenger Spam is Evil
Wow, I'm out of
touch with every day users. I've been
running on
properly firewalled network now since the
summer of 98' and on Linux for over a year now. Consequently, I
completely missed one of the nastyest side effects of
having your computer plugged straight into the Internet.
If you've got a WinNT/2k/XP machine and aren't behind a firewall, you'll
be barraged by so called "Messenger Spam" which pops up real looking
windows message boxes as if they were coming from a system
administrator. This is because they use the same exact interface as
admins would use inside a private network. Yes, I know this is old news,
but I'm just catching now as I work on a friend's PC which is, *gasp*,
out on the net without a firewall. (Yes I'll be fixing that too, don't
worry.)
The idea is simple, I just can't believe Microsoft left this glaring a
hole
in their product. You should at least have to be authenticated to the
same domain to send a message like this. Ug.
Anyway, the fix is easy - just disable the "messenger" service. (not to
be
confused with Windows Messenger, which is another ball of wax entirely
with it's own bugs and spam). To disable the service, just go into the
services console in "Administrative tools" and change the messenger
service from "Automatic" to "Disable" and then right click and stop the
service.
Oh yeah, while you're at it, you'll probably want to update
to keep out
nasties like the new sasser
worm.
1:52 pm | permalink |
/technology/microsoft |
0 writebacks |
Using the screen Command with SSH
I've been using SSH for years to connect to various Linux boxes; first
just this web server, now also my home PC and MythTV DVR box.
If you don't have any Linux experience, think of it like this: the Linux
command line is much like the DOS box in windows.
You can run all sorts
of programs from it, edit files, administer your system, and so on, but
it can seem a bit clunky if you don't know what the commands are.
4 years after starting with Linux I'm still learning them because there
are literally thousands.
The cool thing is, using SSH I can connect to that command prompt from
anywhere on the net. I use Putty
on windows (free!), and there's tons of
other cool tricks you can do like tunneling ports through firewalls and
more, but I won't get into that here.
The only problem is that often when you close that SSH window your
session ends and the programs you were running die. If I'm running a
long or complicated update, a bittorrent download, or even serving DCC
files on IRC using bitchx, I needed a way to connect, start a program
and then "disconnect" without shutting my session down.
I could of course use VNC to connect to the GUI on the machine, but this
often fires up another session of KDE and I'm still locked out of my
main desktop. It's also a bit bandwidth heavy. X0rfb is beginning to
fill this gap by allowing you to connect to your desktop "Remote
Desktop" style, but it's not really standard and a bit complicated to get
working.
Enter screen.
See more ...
1:32 pm | permalink |
/technology/web |
3 writebacks |
