One of my friends was having an issue passing specific traffic on a network he was using and came to me for assistance (all web traffic was allowed, but certain ports were blocked to specific hosts). I couldn’t duplicate the problem on my home network so we went over the various options that were successful in passing the traffic as desired. Connecting via an Open Wireless network in the area allows him to bypass the issue entirely. Being that this was non-sensitive information, this could provide the path to creating a happy environment for his applications. I’m being purposefully vague here. The gist is that while connected to one network he couldn’t access non-standard port services, but while on the open wifi connection he was unable to access LAN services. He wants to be able to access both at the same time, and doesn’t want to bother the firewall administrator every time there’s a new port change he needs to make to continue using the corporate network.

We first attempted a metric change to the wireless adapter to have higher priority, thinking that it would fall back to the wired interface for anything inaccessible by the wireless adapter (similar to a load balancer – of sorts). That didn’t work as I expected so we were back to square one.

The solution I am cooking up is an attempt to remedy that. (more…)

If you followed the methods in my earlier post, upon unplugging the hard drive from the computer’s USB port you would have been unable to boot to the newly installed Operating System. Keeping the drive tethered to your computer is probably not what you had intended. There’s a simple procedure that fixes this!

In my example, the USB Installer is on Drive D:\, and the operating system is installed  to the desired Drive C:\.

Step 1 — Open a command prompt with administrative privileges. To do so, open the Start Menu, and type “CMD” in the search prompt. Right-Click on the resulting program and “Run as Administrator”. This will invoke UAC as configured.

Step 2 — In the command prompt, type the following command:

bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:

Step 3 — Open up Disk Manager. To do so, right click on the “Computer” hotlink in the start menu (or your “My Computer” if you’ve added it to the desktop) and select “Manage”. Again, this will invoke UAC as configured. On the Explorer Window you are presented with, the left pane will contain Disk Manager. Click it once to open it to the main pane.

Step 4 — Mark the C:\ Partition as Active by right clicking on the graphical map and selecting “Mark Partition as Active..” from the context menu.

Step 5 — Unmount the USB drive (Eject first), and reboot. All Done!

If you don’t have a DVD drive in your computer you might have a hard time converting that .ISO into a usable method to install Windows 7. Fortunately, I have a method that works using a USB-connected Hard Drive.

Step 1 – Collect the iso images.

Step 2 – Install Virtual Drive that can read .iso images. I use VirtualCloneDrive from Elaborate Bytes. Freeware that works well. I’ve also used Daemon Tools in the past.

Step 3 – Partition and format your hard drive. Partition an 8GB section of the hard drive you’re planning to use and format it with the FAT32 file system.

Step 4 – Mount the ISO and copy the files to the newly created partition using XCOPY

xcopy [SOURCE]:\* [DESTINATION]:\* /e

Step 5 – Mark the partition as active. Right click on your Computer and select “Manage”. Go to Disk Management, right click on your new partition, select “Mark Partition as Active”.

Step 6 – Reboot and select your USB Hard Drive as your boot device. All BIOSes are different so the process is not documented here.

You will need to follow up with my next post to complete the whole process and be able to disconnect your hard drive.

Admit it, a lot of your traffic is spambots. I know I see a lot of traffic from other countries to my blog for various reasons, and a good portion of them are SPAM. Blogging aside, what if you’ve got a community site that only a limited number of users will need access to? Well what about using that .htaccess for the purposes of keeping everyone else out!

That was the problem I ran into with one of my community sites. I was getting daily notifications of “new users” most of which were obvious combinations of a first-name/last-name dictionary attack, using out-of-country email addresses or free domain email addresses that require no invite, from IP addresses of non-community origin. I needed to remove the annoyance of these persistent email notifications. The solution was to eliminate access to the site from outside my community. (more…)

TFTP, or Trivial File Transfer Protocol is a relatively lightweight protocol used for transferring single files at a timewithout the bulk of the massive capabilities of FTP. TFTP is used most often with embedded devices for firmware updates, or VoIP phones to get the latest configuration. Today, I ran into the desire to upgrade some firmware on the DRAC-III device in my Dell PowerEdge 1650 that I just bought on EBay. After gaining access to the embedded web server’s firmware update page I found that it required a tftpd server to pull firmware images from. So, I began to deploy one here at the house for firmware updates I’ll undoubtedly need in the coming months as my home infrastructure grows.

After some searching across the web I found that there wasn’t a very good write up on the step by step procedure to enable a TFTP daemon on Ubuntu (my choice for linux servers). (more…)