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· Reading this post will save you ten bucks...
· National Treasure (2004)
· Become your own webhost.
· Mok-dong (Seoul) Immigration Office Hours
· Need to publish confidential documents? Microsoft Redaction tool may be for you!
· RSS and XML: Seoul Computer Club Presentation.
· Operations Guides
· Cool Optical Illusions
· Microsoft releases SNARF - an email relationship tool
· Link Dump / Exchange

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This blog is no longer updated.

Since I own the domain name for a couple more years, and the hosting was paid-in-advance, it's still here. But I've moved on to Hawaii, and no longer have the need to publish all the sorts of neat stuff that made up the contents of this website.

If you've linked to me, you are invited to unlink, as your readers will no longer be presented with new content. Thanks, Steve

  Reading this post will save you ten bucks...
Korea Issues ...because you won't have to go to the Navy Club for lunch to hear my farewell speech.

With Anteon starting work on the J6 Task on Monday, I anticipate that I'll be busy with transitioning incumbent duties and responsibilities to the new team next week. I've got a moment or two now to compose the all-to-common Farewell message, so I'd like to take a short amount of your time to say goodbye.

For the past 11 years, I've supported the two coalitions in Korea - the United Nations Command while on active duty and the Combined Forces Command as a contractor. I have learned the tremendous value of these organizations to defend the Republic of Korea against the ever-present-yet-oft-underestimated red menace.

There are quite a few people that have had a significant professional impact on me in the past decade, and I'd like to thank them publicly and hopefully not embarrass them too much:

The Other Steve taught me everything I know about both Koreas, the Armistice, and the United Nations Commmand. Tom let me run the show up north - undoubtedly to the dismay of the godforsaken communists. Another Steve and Robert made my transition to from active duty to contractor much easier - Steve, I appreciate the risk you took to hire me in the first place; Robert, I've learned more from you than I've ever given you credit. Tim and Scott taught me more about contracting, managing people, and "the bigger picture" than I hoped to learn. Rich gave me incredible latitude in the early days of the security division. Lastly, LCDR Wu not only shaped my (our?) vision for coalition C4I, he funded it as well.

As I transition to Hawaii for bigger and better things, I wish the best for the J64 and the Anteon team, and each of you supporting the Combined Forces coalition. I will return for a brief period in late February to finalize the lease on my apartment, ship out some household goods, and wander about Seoul like a tourist.

Those passing through Hawaii after RSOI are encouraged to shoot me an email at the address at the top right (you can figure it out). At a minimum, I'll buy the second round.


Reprinted from an "all-hands" email sent earlier this evening.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Friday, January 20, 2006
 

  National Treasure (2004)
General Stuff about Stuff National Treasure, 2004, Nicholas Cage (it's on "CatchOn" now, sue me.)

According to the IMDB trivia page, "Good guys in the movie use Google and bad guys use Yahoo! search engines."

Art imitating life, no doubt.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Monday, January 16, 2006
 

  Become your own webhost.
General Stuff about Stuff
One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting. With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host.

75 very detailed steps to install FreeBSD, PHP, mySQL on your own.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Monday, January 16, 2006
 

  Mok-dong (Seoul) Immigration Office Hours
Korea Issues The Seoul Immigration office (in Mokdong) is open Monday-Friday from 0900-1800. Their phone number is (02)650-2650/6339 SOFA: (02)650-6224, General affairs: (02)650-6212, Information: (02)650-6331/2/3.

You know, just in case you need to run down there next week...

Update 2006.01.03: Maps and directions added below...

Read more...     20 Comments |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Friday, December 23, 2005
 

  Need to publish confidential documents? Microsoft Redaction tool may be for you!
Microsoft - Servers. So, you're tooling along, writing some document that will eventually be in the public domain (e.g. a contract, a lease, some Privacy Act document) and you need to "black out" parts of the document to protect the names of the innocent.

Back in the old days, you'd redact the document with a big black magic marker, and then photocopy them to make it difficult to decipher. Nowadays, you may be tempted to convert the background text to black (printing black on black). These solutions only work on printed copies - what about the electronic version?

Enter the Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction plug in.
The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.
Please note that:
In a redacted document, the black bar that replaces the redacted text takes up the same amount of space as the original text so that line spacing and line breaks are unaffected. As a result, readers may be able to determine the length of a redacted word based on the size of the blacked out area. To help protect your redacted document from attempts to recover information by using word length, avoid redacting single words. If you need to redact a single word, you can replace it with a longer or shorter word before you select it for redaction.
What this means - if you're redacting a Social Security Number, the length is fixed and a black bar that's exactly 11 characters wide will be inserted. However, if you're discussing two employees or companies, and one's named "Jim Doe" and the other one is "James Smith-Jones", the size of the bar may indicate who you're talking about. It's better to replace all instances of "Jim Doe" and "James Smith-Jones" with a single word ("REDACTED TEXT") and then redact that text, so that each black bar is exactly the same length.

Font gurus: I understand that SSN 111-11-1111 takes fewer pixels in proportionally-spaced fonts than SSN 888-88-8888, ergo the blacked-out bar would be shorter. Yes, it's probably feasible to meaure the exactly length in pixels of a word, figure out the font in the surrounding text, and then run some sort of dictionary attack against the black bar to see what matches would make sense in context. That's why I suggested changing all redacted text to a common phrase with a single length.
     20 Comments |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Monday, December 19, 2005
 

  RSS and XML: Seoul Computer Club Presentation.
XML and the like The slides from my presentation to the Seoul Computer Club (their homepage here) (and .gifs of all the slides) are available for your review.

     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Saturday, December 10, 2005
 

  Operations Guides
Microsoft - Servers. · Active Directory Product Operations Guide
· DHCP Service Product Operations Guide
· DNS Service Product Operations Guide
· File Service Product Operations Guide
· Print Service Product Operations Guide
· WINS Service Product Operations Guide
· Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Operations Guide
· Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 SP1 Operations Guide
· Microsoft SMS 2003 Operations Guide
&middot; <font face="Verdana">Microsoft SMS 2.0 Operations Guide
&middot; Monitoring Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server with MOM 2000
&middot; SQL Server 2000 Operations Guide
&middot; SharePoint 2003
&middot; MIIS at a Glance
&middot; ISA Configuration and Administration
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Thursday, December 08, 2005
 

  Cool Optical Illusions
General Stuff about Stuff A couple neat optical illusions under "Read More"...
Read more...     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Tuesday, December 06, 2005
 

  Microsoft releases SNARF - an email relationship tool
Microsoft - Servers. Microsoft Research released "SNARF" - the Social Network and Relationship Finder.

SNARF (ugh!) "...was built around the notion that social network information that is already available to the computer system can be usefully reflected to the user: a message from a manager might be seen differently than a message from a stranger, for example. SNARF applies this idea to email triage: handling the flow of messages when time is short and mail is long."



Apparently threads your email ala GMail, which I find pretty annoying.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Friday, December 02, 2005
 

  Link Dump / Exchange
Microsoft - Exchange Tips for Disaster Recovery: From the EHLO team, a couple of tough questions to ask:
1) Which one is more important to my users: Restoration of Mail Flow or Recovery of Historical Data?
2) How long can we afford to be down with out any Mail Flow?
3) How long can we afford to be down with no Historical Data Recovered?
4) If Historical Data is our top priority at what point does Mail Flow become more important and vice versa?

Send an email to all users created today: From the ExchangeCookBook site - lots of great scripts over there.

Exchange Dump tutorial from MSExchange.org. ExchDump can be downloaded from Microsoft.com (here) for free.

WINS and Exchange: Scenarios where Exchange 2003/Exchange 2000 still require NetBIOS/WINS name resolution:
&middot; The Exchange Server 2003 Setup program and the Exchange 2000 Server Setup program, especially on clustered servers.
&middot; Exchange Mailbox Merge Wizard (ExMerge) on an Exchange 2003 computer and on an Exchange 2000 computer.
&middot; Changing a password for an Exchange 2003 mailbox or an Exchange 2000 mailbox through Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA).
&middot; Exchange System Manager on an Exchange 2003 computer and on an Exchange 2000 computer.
&middot; Microsoft Outlook clients that are earlier than Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 also require NetBIOS name resolution.

Exchange 2003 SP2: Unless you were buried under a rock, you already knew this was published. Make sure to check the release notes before installing.

Hidden Features of OWA: More from the EHLO team. Favorites:
&middot; Putting an = in front of the e-mail alias that you are trying to resolve when composing a mail will automatically resolve it to any exact matches.(Outlook, too!)
&middot; Sort on multiple columns at once by holding down shift and clicking on the column headers you want to sort on.

Exchange Server Management Pack: "Provides a graphical user interface to configure Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 Management Pack, including test mailboxes, message tracking, and monitoring services." Nuff said.

Exchange Disaster Recovery Analyzer (ExDRA): "...designed for administrators who need to troubleshoot database mounting issues."

Exchange Performance Troubleshooting Analyzer (ExPTA): "...designed for administrators who need to determine the root cause of Exchange Server performance issues"

MS Webcast: Setup and Deployment Changes "...discuss the changes made to the local computer and to Active Directory by the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 setup process, and how its deployment differs from Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server." Includes link to download (rather than stream).

Exchange 2003 Common Criteria Certification: EAL 4 + Systematic Flaw Remediation. If your eyes just glazed over, don't bother clicking.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Monday, November 28, 2005
 

  Clustering with Virtual PC
Microsoft - Servers. Practicing cluster management is difficult unless you've got the hardware to support. Microsoft Virtual Server supports virtual clusters, but Virtual PC doesn't. A hack from "zdzichu" in the microsoft.public.virtualpc newsgroup (via Google) demonstrates how:
The procedure is as follows:

1. Download wintarget trial from http://www.stringbeansoftware.com
2. Download iscsi initiator from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12cb3c1a-15d...
[sdc note: link is here.]
3. create guest machine with 2 virtual disks
4. install and configure it to be a dc for cluser domain. Create and format
partition on second drive. It will be our shared disk
5. Install wintarget on dc
6. create and install another virtual machine. It will be node1 of our VPC
cluster
7. add it to domain created in step 4
8. install iscsi initiator on it
9. repeat steps 6-8 for node2
10. On node1 and node2 run iscsi initiator and add target portals
11. Run wintarget management console, create new win target disk pointing to
second virtual drive
12. add both node1 and node2 initiators that will be using that drive
13. turn off node2
14. run iscsi initiator, point to available targets select one, press logon
and check "automatically restor..."
15. run computer management select disk management initialize wintarget
disk, create partition, format and assign Q letter to it
16. shut down node1 and run node2
17. run iscsi initiator, point to available targets select one, press logon
and check "automatically restor..."
18. run computer management select disk management and change wintarget
partition letter to Q.
19. turn off node2 and run node1 again
20. run cluster administrator and create new cluster
21. turn on node2 run cluster administrator and join to the cluster
22. test failover

Thanks for the link, Robert.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Tuesday, November 08, 2005
 

  Poor Man's BCWipe
Security So, you've got some sensitive data on your computer, and you want to get rid of it. Tossing it in the "Recycle Bin" is insufficient - you want it gone.

[Shift]+[RightClick] the file and select delete - it bypasses the recycle bin and it's gone.

Well, sort of. You haven't done anything to actually change the data string (0001 0010 0000 0010 0100 1000 1101) , you've just notified the disk that "Sectors 724-773 are available as free space."

When you deal with sensitive or classified data, there's a whole Mil Spec on how to destroy the remnants of that binary stream. They call it a seven pass overwrite - where all the empty space on the disk is written with all zero's, and then all one's in seven cycles. (The science behind this is fascinating to about three people in the world, and they don't read this, so I'll spare you.)

Several companies offer DoD Spec file shredding programs, disk erasers, pagefile sanitizers, and the like. It is not the intent of this post to endorse any single one of those products, even though the title of this article may appear otherwise.

(We've used "BCWipe" so often and for so long that it's (probably improperly) become a verb - "Yeah, and when you're done BCWiping that box, toss it over there.")

But if you're not going to shell out the thirty or fifty bucks (or however much it costs), but still want to get rid of those sequenced ONEs and ZEROs on your Windows box, here's the cheap way to do it:

C:\>cipher /w:c:\

Naturally, cipher /? will tell you what the heck cipher.exe does: "Displays or alters the encryption of directories [files] on NTFS partitions."

Wha Huh? Read on...

" &nbsp; /W &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Removes data from available unused disk space on the entire volume. If this option is chosen, all other options are ignored. The directory specified can be anywhere in a local volume. If it is a mount point or points to a directory in another volume, the data on that volume will be removed."

In essence, forget all of the encryption switches that you can use with cipher.exe - if you just want to remove data from a disk, cipher's the way to go.

Here's why you still need a commercial product: Cipher doesn't sanitize the pagefile, and if you move the pagefile from C:\ to D:\, clean C:\, move it back from D:\, clean D:\, you're going to have problems.

Additionally, cipher does NOT do a seven pass write of the disk as required by the MilSpec. I suppose you could run it seven times, but really, I bet you'd forget around the fifth time or so which pass you were on.

Here's a screenshot of cipher blasting all zero's to my hard drive:


Here's the next step - all one's to the disk:

There's a third pass where it writes random numbers, but I think you get the idea (hint: ..................................)


"Cipher /w" is a good tool if you're not too paranoid (single pass vs. seven pass). Naturally, it works much better if you clean up your windows session first (delete temp files, clear browser cache, toss your cookies (heh), and burn your taxes to CDR).

I highly recommend this tool for use prior to disposing of your hard drives, selling them on eBay, or generally losing physical control of the platform.

It is not, and let me repeat that, not, not, not, not, an approved DoD tool for declassifying data storage devices. (Is that clear?)
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Monday, November 07, 2005
 

  Soldiers Angels - Project ValourIT // Team Navy
US Issues

Soldiers Angels provides voice-controlled software and laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at major military medical centers.

Their current fund drive is pitting the services against each other - all in good fun, of course. (Totals here.) All of the funds collected are going towards purchasing voice activation software and cheap laptops for the major military medical centers.

While I'd certainly appreciate you clicking the "Make a Donation" button above and helping Team Navy beat the other guys by a large margin, you can click here to donate to the team of your choice.

Soldiers Angels is an IRS-registered 501(c)(3) non-profit charity, so your donation helps you out too...
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Friday, November 04, 2005
 

  1 TB drives, next month
General Stuff about Stuff ExtremeTech is reporting that Maxtor will begin selling 600GB and 1TB drives in December, for $549 and $899 respectively.

Sweet.
     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Thursday, November 03, 2005
 

  Misc eBooks to peruse
General Stuff about Stuff A couple of books to read:

NAVFAC P301: Navy Railway Operating Handbook, June 1999.

I did not know the Navy ran her own railroad. Of course, I've never been in the munitions business, so cut me some slack. I'm not surprised there's a manual about it.

HP Color Laser Jet 4500: Operators manual.

This thing is 6 years old? No wonder it's making so much noise.

     comments? |  Permalink |  Mail this... | Thursday, November 03, 2005
 

  What I'm Reading
What is this?

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