Tech

With the release of new 'script kiddie' software such as XRumer which looks like it can detect and get past a lot of captcha's. What can you do against it? Remember to change the image dimensions and other attributes from their default settings - this simple step greatly reduced the amount of spam on some of my forums.

Hot on the heels of Intel acquiring a $218.5m stake in VMware, the register reports that Cisco is purchasing a $150m stake in the rapidly growing virtualisation company. Virtualisation it seems is going to be very, very big (and understandably so).

After playing about more with openVPN on windows, i've come up with some checkpoints that most users (i think) will come across:

• On the server, make sure you DO NOT have Routing and Remote Access enabled!
• Enable IP forwarding on the server so that your clients can access the rest of your network -
  1. Use Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) to view the following registry key:
     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
  2. Set the following registry value:
     Value Name: IPEnableRouter
     Value type: REG_DWORD
     Value Data: 1
     NOTE: A value of 1 enables TCP/IP forwarding for all network connections installed and used by this computer.

Also check that your LAN has an appropriate static route to the VPN address range!

I just bought a 2gb NW E015 from Comet (the display model, after them being unable to find a black model for 2 weeks...) and it's a great unit for £50. Whilst the display isn't quite as flashy as the OLED display on my old NW E507, the sound quality and build quality are top notch. The supplied headphones aren't bad, but most audiophiles will prefer something more expensive. It also has a sports mode (where you can set a timer and it will then play music for X number of minutes), and has the regular playlist/shuffle features. As with most sony walkmans, SonicStage is required to transfer music. The beautiful iRiver S10 has dropped in price to £89 but as I bought this to go in the car, the 30 hours battery life of the Sony swung my decision.

I finally got Office 2007 deployment working via group policies - turns out that the Domain Computer group wasn't allowed access to the 'SharedApps' directory on the server which is why the install was failing. Doh! I also made sure that I added the Shell MST file so that English (UK) was added instead of English (US). Why this would result in Office 2007 then being uninstalled from my Vista machine is beyond me, but it's all working properly now. Vista has a nice feature where it switches between your local desktop session and a virtual desktop session where the software is being installed, letting you reply to prompts and dialogs if needed without interrupting your main desktop session.

Sysinternals have just released Active Directory Explorer 1.0, an advanced AD explorer with snapshot and compare facilities.

I'd heard about TrueCrypt before and never got round to trying it out, but recently a client has requested need for such a program. Setting the program to run in 'traveller mode', you can 'install' the software to a USB key / external hard drive (so that you can use it on any computer without having to install software) and then create an encrypted volume file (of any size). This file can then be made to auto-mount whenever the USB key/HD is inserted (by way of a simple autorun.inf). I've just tried it out, creating a 512mb encrypted partition on my 2gb pen drive and it's flawless!

Giving up with SSLExplorer, I've installed openVPN and successfully got it working! I've also opened up the port on our public WiFi so that other users of openVPN can connect to their offices

Intel and VMware have announced that Intel is investing $18.5 million into VMware, owning about 2.5% of the company. That's a lot of money, showing that intel is seriously gearing up for the virtualisation market. Interesting times are ahead... Ars has some more info here.

[updated Friday 6th July] I'm going to be experimenting with SSL Explorer, a web-browser based SSL / VPN package. As I can't get our exisitng VPN client software installed on my laptop nor on Windows Vista, this looks like the best way for our staff to access files remotely over the net! As there is a VMWARE appliance available for it, i'm also taking the oppertunity to test out VMware ESX Server 3.0.1. ESX is quite different to standard VMware Server -

• It doesn't need an OS installed, it comes as an iso image which you install/boot from
• Processor, Network and Storage can all be limited, prioritised or shared equally between guest machines
• VLAN and Virtual Switches are available to partition your virtual network

Shame I can't get it to work - read on...

Symantec have a few public betas available, including:

• Norton Internet Security 2008 Beta
• Norton AntiVirus 2008 Beta
• Norton SystemWorks Beta for Windows Vista
• Norton AntiBot Beta (in-memory anti-spyware/malware protection)

I would've thought that AntiBot would be part of Internet Security...

The Intel Demoscene Competition 2007 has published this years entries, including quad-core optimised code, and other niceties. Nothing totally amazing, but still worth checking out.

For all you MySQL database developers, I came across this talk the other day on Democracy, it's a good (if slightly old now) talk on how to tune MySQL for performance gains. Most of it is common knowledge but there are a few gems, and it gave me some more insight into the inner workings of innodb! Most of what was said i've already applied to my systems at the University, but I can feel some more tweaking coming on!