Chromium OS

So, I've intended to make another post for awhile now, but finals were this week and I have been very busy. During the break I hope to study several new topics, broadening my horizon and giving you folks something to read about. One side project I did succeed at during these busy weeks was building the new Google Chrome OS(Chromium in it's open-source state) and getting it to run on my laptop. I inevitably chose to do the whole thing in Sun's Virtualbox, which is a pretty good virtualization tool except for the difficultly I had using my USB drive(which I never did get to use).
I was going to do a step-by-step , but there are several websites which already do this, including Google's own project website. Instead, I thought I'd just briefly mention the issues I encountered while building it, and my personal observations about running it the first time.
First, after spending quite some time trying to build the chroot environment that is used to configure and build the packages and kernel with no success, I learned that you MUST run the whole process as a regular user, not as root. You should use sudo where appropriate and enter the password but do not login as root with the sudo -i command. If you do this and follow all of the instructions properly, there should be no problem on most systems. When building the packages and the kernel, the script copy_chrome_zip.sh will cause the build to fail because the URLs used in the script are outdated. Typically, the instructions you are using should tell you about this. Now, the operating system is not much to look at. The concept itself is very interesting, and although it may be a revoutionary idea in the future, at the current moment, the features of Chromium OS leave a lot to be desired. More later.


Questions or Comments? E-mail me at timadennis@gmail.com

Windows 7 Exploit

So, by now I'm sure you've heard of the new Windows 7 exploit that involves outbound connections on TCP ports 139 and 445. The SMB protocol can be exploited to crash the victim's system. There won't be a security update until next month, so Microsoft has advised blocking outbound connections from these ports. Naturally, I went directly to Windows Firewall and set rules blocking those ports. What I forgot was that file and printer sharing needs port 139 to function so no one on my home network can use my USB printer anymore. Luckily, there is no reason to block these ports on computers in the LAN, as long as your gateway router has those ports specifically blocked. That way, your LAN can still use NetBIOS, but you don't have to compromise security.

Windows 7 Explorer: Open in same window

I didn't find any sort of registry fix for this, but I did notice that if you use the hierarchy sidebar to change folders instead of clicking on the folder's icon, the new folder will open in the same window.

Edit: I apparently never posted the original topic. I was referring to a problem I was experiencing in Windows 7: Professional where I had set the folder options in Windows Explorer to open in the same window, but every time I opened a new folder, a new window would open to accommodate it.

Acrobat and Windows 7

I have been using Windows 7 professional for a couple of weeks now and I've noticed one particular problem with opening pdf files inside of Firefox. I have Firefox 3.5.3 but it is not installed on my Windows 7 partition. It is running off of my Windows XP partition. I have installed Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.1 as a plugin for Firefox but it will not open PDFs in the browser. I have to save to file and then open it with the standalone program. I'm not sure what the problem is.

Windows Powershell: Windows 7 Pro

Although I have only been learning about Windows 7 for a few weeks now, I have already stumbled upon an amazing new feature that comes packaged with the operating system. Although it has already been available for other Microsoft OS's, the second version of this tool has only been installed by default on Windows 7 and Server 2008. I am speaking of PowerShell. This scripting tool has more than I can think of what to do with. It seems that Microsoft has finally come up with a replacement for the old, weak batch scripting system. It also accepts a number of Unix commands, such as man, ls, cp, and mount. You can control processes from the server and manipulate the GUI, all in a command-line environment. Also, it uses a system of certificates and policies to determine which scripts should be allowed to run. An administrator can write a script and sign it themselves, but downloaded scripts or similarly suspicious scripts cannot run without being signed. It is a boon to Microsoft system administrators everywhere, but then, I'm sure you already knew that.

Windows 7: Pleasant surprise

I have installed the release candidate of Windows 7 Ultimate Build 7100 on my system, which is running a 2.6 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 and 1.5 GB of RAM. I also have a GeForce FX 5200 PCI card with 256 MB of video memory. I am cautious to make substantial claims until I've run it for awhile and installed more applications but Windows 7 runs exceptionally well on my system. There have been no problems so far. Although I honestly believe it will begin to run slower if I install more applications and add media to the drive, I think what 7 brings to the table may be the best things Microsoft could have presented at this point. Personally, I think it's been weeks since I've run any application(for non-research purposes) other than a media player, a word processor, or a web browser. Practically everything can be run from a browser these days. Windows 7 is a fast and efficient version of Windows that is perfect for the computing future. Granted, Google's Chrome OS will probably be a worthwhile competitor, especially at the price of free, but 7 is probably the best Microsoft could have done while retaining it's identity.

VMware Server 2 Resize partitions

I discovered that on VMware Server 2, you can resize a SCSI drive after you have already set up a Virtual machine, but cannot do the same with an IDE drive. I suppose this is more of a mini-blog.

Ubuntu 9.04 Device Manager

I recently noticed that all relevant documentation I've seen refers user to either System>Preferences>Hardware Information
(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=472267)
or
System>Administration>Device Manager (Beginning Ubuntu Linux 4th Ed.)

when referring to the location of the Device Manager. I currently have a standard installation of Ubuntu 9.04 and the Device Manager was not installed. You must install it by accessing Synaptic Package Manager and selecting gnome-device-manager. It will also prompt you to install the libgnome-device-manger0. Then, after the package has been installed, it will be available in Applications>System Tools. Another option for accessing this information is the command lspci at the command line.

More on VMware Server 2 and Network Adapters

After posting my last blog yesterday, another problem presented itself. While all the systems in our lab are essentially identical, some other factor caused problems on a number of the dual-boot installations in VMware. In the process of correcting the problem with Vista and it's network adapter, the emulated Intel adapter was not detected by XP. The student who was having the problem attempted to fix it by adding the line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "vlance"

in addition to the line:

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

However, the two commands conflict with one another. Eventually, I realized the solution was to add a second network adapter, ethernet1. By doing this each operating system recognizes one of the two NICs, the one that is compatible with the operating system. When completed, the segment of the .vmx configuration file dealing with the network adapters was as follows:

ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.allowGuestConnectionControl = "FALSE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.features = "1"
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet0.networkName = "Bridged"
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet1.present = "TRUE"
ethernet1.allowGuestConnectionControl = "FALSE"
ethernet1.virtualDev = "vlance"
ethernet1.features = "1"
ethernet1.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet1.networkName = "Bridged"
ethernet1.addressType = "generated"

I only tried this with two adapters, but presumably this could be done for all 3 available virtual adapters so that any operating system with a supported adapter would detect 1 of the 3 possible network adapters.

VMware Dual Boot

I created a Virtual Machine in VMware on Monday and installed Windows XP onto it. Afterwards, I added a second hard drive and installed Windows Vista Business on that drive. I then booted up Vista and had an unexpected problem. The network adapter wasn't working! I had installed Vista on another Virtual Machine last week and didn't have any problems, so I was wondering what the problem was. As it turns out, it was as simple as changing the Guest OS option in the Virtual Machine configuration. Unfortunately, before you power on, you have to set this option to correspond with the OS you are going to use. Other people had problems with their network adapter in Vista but it was for a different reason. A solution was presented by our instructor. If you cannot get the network adapter to work, try shutting down the console, opening the .vmx file that corresponds with it and look for a line that says 'ethernet0.virtualDev' If it does not exist, you can write it in. There are three types of network adapters recognized by VMware: e1000, vmxnet, and vlance. Try each one. The complete line should look like this: ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

Disabled .exe files

If you suspect that you are infected with malware and you can't run antivirus or malware removal software, try changing the extension of the executable file(.exe or .com) into a screensaver(.scr). Screensaver files can run as executables and it may circumvent the malware's attempt at disabling your software.