Sunday, May 03, 2015

Sysadmin Linkfest Extravaganza

Like I said, I’m opening up the floodgates…again for my personal reference but there is the off-chance you might find something useful in here.

Network Stuff

Vivaldi Browser News/Releases

Firefox/Mozilla News

Google Account Protection for Chrome (sort-of)

The point of the bypasses (to me) isn’t so much that Goggle’s effort is a fruitless effort, but that the noble cause demonstrates the challenges of password security monitoring and the (relative) ease of exploiting/bypassing such attempts.

Chrome Web Browser News and Tips

Internet Explorer 11 and Enterprise Mode

Critical Updates…better late than never…

I note that on at least one Win 7 Professional system I support (x64) KB3046269 continues to present itself as needing to be installed after it installs and the system reboots. This seems to be reported by others as well. It’s not fatal but is a nuisance.

Samsung SSD EVO 840 Firmware Released (+ other SSD news & Tips)

Previous details:

The Samsung Magician software update (v 4.6)and then followup firmware update (EXT0DB6Q) went smoothly on my EVO 840 SSD drive. The only special thing I had to do was first to disable RAPID mode, reboot, apply the update, reboot, enable RAPID mode again, then reboot.

New and improved utilities

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Update

General Security Bits for Sysadmins

I have always liked using Stinger as an alternative malware scanning tool to get an additional opinion on a system’s state of cleanness after a malware infection. I also like the features that Raptor provides. However I’m not sure I like it being bundled in with Stinger; particularly since it actually installs into the system and you need to know in advance it does this…and how to remove it when done. Count me undecided for now…

So, have you seen that new Age-Guesser App from Microsoft? Guess what…

IANAL and there is some conflicting commentary about the TOS noted on the page link and the “P.S. We don’t keep the photo” statement also on that page. I’m just saying…

Update 05/04 - per the Observing Virality in Real Time article post, they have provided the following statement:

Updated 5/2/2015

We've had some questions so we updated this post to be more clear. To answer the top one: No we don't store photos, we don't share them and we only use them to guess your age and gender. The photos are discarded from memory once we guess. While we use the terms of service very common in our industry, and similar to most other online services, we have chosen not to store or use the photos in any way other than to temporarily process them to guess your age.

Tips, Tricks and Tools

I really like the OffCAT tool. It is awesome for diagnostics and configuration troubleshooting and assessments. This new version looks even more feature-packed!

Ubuntu 15.04 Released

It took forever to download and upgrade my previous Ubuntu install to 15.04. Sure I made the mistake of doing it over WiFi rather than a wired connection. And I didn’t stick with it so it hung up on some packages that needed my express confirmation and I had stepped away (slept overnight) so it couldn’t continue till I discovered the pause in the morning. I was running it in a Virtual Box session and it crashed a couple of times booting up after the upgrade process completed. However I kept rebooting and eventually it cleared the errors itself and continued on to a now stable state again. Upgrade was good.

Surface Pro 3 Admin

Microsoft Visual Studio Code release - Cool factor +10

Notepad++ works good enough for me for my humble code editing needs (XML/HTML markup mostly). However this also has syntax highlighting for a ton of languages.

Note per the project page fine print:

By downloading and using Visual Studio Code, you agree to the license terms and privacy statement for Visual Studio Code. When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don’t want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install this tool.

So if that bothers you, be warned that here could be privacy dragons. Or just don’t crash their code.

Topics still to be posted from the bookmark hopper..

To name just a few…

Cheers!

Claus Valca

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