for keeping track of my digital experiments

I installed Windows XP Home on some leftover space on one of my CentOS OpenVZ machines that I use for development purposes. It is nice to have a ready to go system for when friends come over and we get to hankering for some LAN gaming. So install my Windows to the leftover space and of course it wipes the Master Boot Record. Bah! So I get out my CentOS install disk and type in “linux rescue” at the install prompt. From there I was kind of lost, so I searched around and found a short guide to restoring the GRUB boot loader. After that everything was smiles.

My process:

1. Get a linux install disk and type “linux rescue” at the install prompt
2. The rescue process should mount any of the found linux systems. (It did in my case.) The rescue process mounted my linux installation to “/mnt/sysimage“. I then chrooted into my system: “chroot /mnt/sysimag“.
3. My main hard drive in said machine is named “hda”, so I reinstalled GRUB to /dev/hda with the command: “grub-install /dev/hda“. My original GRUB configuration was restored successfully.
4. I then added the boot entry for the new Windows XP Home installation. I had installed it to the 3rd partition on the main hard drive so I added the following entry to my GRUB menu.lst file (/boot/grub/menu.lst).
   

   title Windows XP Home
root (hd0,2)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1

   (hd0,2) = (the first hard drive, 3rd partition). Thus, (hd0,0) would be the first hard drive and first partition.

5. Just remember to exit the chroot’ed shell before you reboot. Otherwise everything we just did goes to pot.

And everything was working spiffy after that.

I logged into my blog today and found the usual players in the blog spam market, filling up my Akismet quarentine area. For the past couple of days now, it seems like the same guys have been hanging out on my blog. If they really wanted to make some money, they should post legitamate comments with one website link, or just contact me directly and make some money doing different things … but that’s another story.

So anyway, I’ve gotten so sick and tired of these same folks posting on my blog that I decided to investigate. Low and behold, it appeared that the spammers are no longer cracking into unix/linux machines much, but are instead brute-forcing their ways into Windows machines. Why someone would want to run a Windows box as a dedicated server is beyond me.

I decided to investigate the Windows Server brute-forcing methedology for myself. And thankfully one of the first hits I got was this helpful video about tsgrinder, tscrack, and rdesktop. In the video they don’t show where to get the first two programs, roboclient or probets. You can find more information and the downloads on the Hammer of God website (downloads).

Well hope things work out for the best. ;-P

For those of you who don’t know about DirecTV2PC … check it out! It’s pretty awesome (if you have a Windows PC and a DirecTV DVR).

Here is what I did to get DirecTV2PC working in my Local Area Network with two HR20 set top boxes.

1. Go to http://www.directv.com/directv2pc and click the Download Beta button on the right side of the page
2. When the pop-up comes up, click Continue to Beta download
3. Click Download Now to download the DirecTV PC Playback Advisor application to see if you pc is up to running the DirecTV2PC application.  Once you finish the download run the installation and then run the application. The application sometimes falsely identifies your system specs. As long as your PC is running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, a 2Ghz processor, and 512MB ram you should be good to go.
4. If you PC passes the application or you believe it should be able to handle the application according to the rules of thumb  I laid out in the previous step, then enter your name and email on the page and click the Submit button. The DirecTV2PC application download will then start. It is a 32 MB file, but it may take awhile to download. The average speed I rolled for the download was 20kb/sec. It took about 30 minutes to download … atrocious! Once your download completes, you will be sent an activation code to the email you provided earlier. Edit (1/22/2009): You only have to start the download, then you will be emailed an activation code. I put the application up on my data server, and you can download the DirecTV2PC app here. You will get a better download speed than 20kb/sec!
5. Run the installer and fill out the various fields.
6. Now run the application, for the application to properly activate you will need to:
   • be connected to the Internet
   • open TCP port 443 (incoming and outgoing) on your router’s firewall
   • open your PC’s firewall for the DirecTV2PC application (you should be automatically prompted by Windows)
7. If the application still does not activate properly, that means that your ISP’s DNS servers have not updated Cyberlink’s new IPv4 address for the A record activation.cyberlink.com. (Or Cyberlink is jerking around with their IPv4 addresses again … bah!)
   Here is what you do:
   add exactly what is in quotes: “203.73.94.101 activation.cyberlink.com”
   to the file “c:/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts” (if your main hard disk drive is lettered “c”)
8. Enjoy your DVR’s movies!