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CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?

Being the badass network admin that you are, you try to keep your servers up to date with all the latest Windows updates, you run antivirus on all your machines on your network and scan daily, you have made sure that none of your users have local admin rights to their machines so they can’t install any software, and so you think you are fairly well covered when it comes to viruses and spyware, well think again.

My company just got hit pretty hard with this new CryptoWall 3.0 virus. If you are unfamiliar with it, basically it encrypts any user accessible data on local and network shares that it has permissions to and holds it ransom for BitCoin payments. Continue reading “CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?”

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Linux – Force Remote Reboot of System

I ran into a problem yesterday where I could SSH into a remote machine but a majority of the bash commands weren’t working and were giving an “Input/ouput error”, including the shutdown command. Upon further inspection, this particular machine, which was a thin client with 128 MB of flash storage, had run out of drive space. The suggestion on this stack exchange article worked perfectly so I just wanted to document it here for my own future reference.

As long as you have root access, you can run the following command to force a system reboot: Continue reading “Linux – Force Remote Reboot of System”

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VBScript – Get a Folder/File Size or Verify That a Folder/File Exists

Here are some snippets of VBScript I pieced together from various sources out on the web to be able to find the size of a folder or file or check that a folder or file exists. This is pretty handy because it also works for UNC path names or files and folders out on network shares, as long as your user has permission to access that path. Continue reading “VBScript – Get a Folder/File Size or Verify That a Folder/File Exists”

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MySQL Script – Alter/Convert All Tables in a Database from MyISAM to InnoDB

Pieced together from various tutorials on the web with a lot of my own additions, here is a snippet of SQL that will alter or convert all tables in a database from “MyISAM” to “InnoDB”. As long as your MySQL user account has privileges to create stored procedures, all you have to do is simply edit the @DATABASE_NAME variable at the top of the script and run it in PhpMyAdmin if you’ve got it. Enjoy! Continue reading “MySQL Script – Alter/Convert All Tables in a Database from MyISAM to InnoDB”

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VMware vSphere Client – Remove Cached Entries on Connection Screen

For a long time, I’ve just dealt with having a massively long list of old VM servers in my vSphere client but today I finally decided to take a minute to do something about it as it was just getting too ridiculous to navigate to find the servers I wanted to use. A quick scour of the web led me to the following registry key, all you need to do is edit the comma separated list, delete out the entries you no longer want, and be on your merry way.

HKCU\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\RecentConnections
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Batch Script – Ribbon UI Customization: Take Ownership and Change Permissions of the CommandStore Subkeys in the Registry

This is just a follow up to my experiences customizing the Ribbon UI icons in Server 2012 and where the path has taken me thus far. After many hours of research and development and a lot of head scratching, I’ve written several posts on how to disable the different icons in the Ribbon UI which requires the adding or editing of keys in the CommandStore section of the registry for Windows Explorer. For more information on how to disable the icons, see this post.

My whole goal as of late was to be able to add these registry items to the RDS server’s GPO to be able to deploy these settings to all 7 of my RDS servers but then I found out you can’t take ownership of the CommandStore subkeys with the local “SYSTEM” account. Yet another deliberate Microsoft setback meant to discourage people from editing the Ribbon UI, oh well, fuck ’em. I’ve encountered so many problems with this RDS server project it is unreal and this was just icing on the proverbial cake. Continue reading “Batch Script – Ribbon UI Customization: Take Ownership and Change Permissions of the CommandStore Subkeys in the Registry”

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Bash Script – OpenMCU-ru Service Monitor -OR- Monitor and Automatically Restart a Service Upon Failure

I threw this service monitoring script together because occasionally the OpenMCU-ru process in the developmental versions can crash out on my Ubuntu Server from time to time, so I wanted it to auto-restart. The script could easily be modified and used for any other service you like, but it was written specifically for OpenMCU-ru and Debian based operating systems.

There are two pieces to this puzzle (which makes for an awfully pathetic and simplistic puzzle), the “/etc/init.d/mcu-monitor” startup script to run the monitoring script as a daemon and the “/usr/local/bin/mcu-monitor.sh” monitoring script itself, both are fairly simple and straight forward. Continue reading “Bash Script – OpenMCU-ru Service Monitor -OR- Monitor and Automatically Restart a Service Upon Failure”

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Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy

Boy do I sure feel like a dumbass sometimes. I researched and wrestled with this damn issue for a week or more only to find out that I had come across the answer to this problem about a dozen times but was looking in the wrong freaking spot. For whatever reason, when people were referring to disabling the mouse pointer shadow, I immediately thought of the place in windows System Properties > Advanced Tab > Performance > Settings > Visual Effects Tab > “Show shadows under mouse pointer” but that wasn’t fixing my problem and now I know why. Here’s the whole story.

I’ve got a mix of around 100 Neoware CA19, CA21, and HP T5145 thin clients, all with 128MB of flash running HP ThinPro build T3X31012 and rdesktop version 1.6.0 that I’ve been testing with on Server 2012 and this was a major problem. I was just about finished locking down this 7 server RDS deployment I’ve been working on and when I had my first few users start to log in to test everything, they had no mouse cursor, fucking awesome!

At first, I thought this may have been a VMware tools problem, so I had reinstalled it and had scoured all the forums there, trying various different little tweaks, registry keys, and what have you, but that was only the beginning. Then I tried adjusting the various RDP settings on the thin client with no luck. I tried all the different things on the various Windows forums and still no luck. I got to know all the ins and outs of HP’s thin client architecture, their use of the Manticore registry, config files and everything that goes along with it and how it all works.
Continue reading “Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy”