TTC Shelbyville – Technical Blog

OS X Lion accepts any LDAP password, creates enterprise network nightmare-

LDAP servers often contain sensitive enterprise data, so a successful attack on one of the servers is a bonanza to hackers. For some reason, Macs running Lion that use LDAP to authenticate users to shared resources work just fine for the initial login. After that point, Lion users can use any password and still log in.  Read more

Here’s an excellent way to grab information on the go.  Turn your phone into a scanner.

Want an inexpensive network area storage device?  How about $7 for the enclosure from Geeks.com?   Add a $50 1 terabyte ide drive and you have an excellent fast NAS that can be networked to your PC or MAC.    For Windows 7 or MAC you have to download the latest software.  Unlike a traditional NAS, this device uses software to communicate across your LAN providing a secure way for only devices with the software to talk to the device thus keeping your files secure.    Ximeta’s NAS uses the LPX protocol to communicate.

Another great advantage to this method of using a mounted NAS…. you can defrag and scan the drive keeping it optimize.

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Network Steve (not me) has great tips on how to accelerate your IT career.  Many students who leave for an IT career will find their place in IT and will not continue to study or learn new skills.  Here’s some great tips on what you can do to move forward.  An excellent read.

Accelerating Your IT Career

 
Note: Also begin to do research and write whitepapers…publish original articles.

Stanford University recently began offering an open registration for their AI classes.   With two of the most renown professors leading this bold experiment in distributed education (online),  Stanford takes a leap in offering a quality education to 10′s of thousands (more than 70000+ at last count) of online students.  So did I enroll? Of course.  Free is free – and the opportunity to participate is a great way to expand your mind.

Sebastian Thrun is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. 

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Basic – Basic Introduction to AI

Advanced – Exams, Homework – Full class

400+ Free Online Courses

Get free online courses from the world’s leading universities. This collection includes over 250 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.

RC enthusiasts looking for a computer simulator can download AeroFly 5.   AeroFly 5 is an excellent program that is as real as it gets.  This 1.5 Gb download has dozens of models included with the simulator.

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Turn your phone or tablet computer into a walkie-talkie with Loudtalks.

The fastest way to communicate online. Don’t type or call — just push F7 and speak! Reply, when convenient, talk to all people in a group at once or anyone individually, re-play the entire conversation later from voice history. It works on your mobile device too.

Loudtalks app

Loudtalks webpage

• Blackberry
• Android
• Windows Phone

ADrive offers 50Gb of online storage for free.

ADrive’s Basic plan offers individual users 50GB of online storage and backup for all file types including access to our basic service features, all for FREE.

Back in 2006, Google began work on an internal project codenamed Platypus. The core of the program was to provide every Gmail user with a cloud-based hard drive akin to Microsoft Skydrive or Dropbox. It was later revealed as GDrive, but it never launched. ..Could Google be Resurrecting GDrive?.

One of our staff member’s email began to send attachments as winmail.dat files.    There is an easy fix that keeps your attachments in their original form. We have tested this Microsoft’s Fix-it against Outlook 2010.   Here’s the  link that has the Fix-it for this problem.

If you are an experienced user, you can enable the deep scan feature (if you download the program, the feature is disabled by default for safety reasons I’m sure) of DiskMax by creating a blank notepad file named EnableDeepScan.txt and placing it in the users|current user|AppData|Roaming|kosyjohn.com|DiskMax folder.

DiskMax is an excellent utility that cleans your hard drive of unneeded temp files and other files that may clutter your drive.  I like to use ccleaner but DiskMax will really clean your computer like no other utility when you need to do a thorough cleaning.

Note: Only use deep scan if you are an experienced user.

It has to be fellow blogger week…Rick at What’s On My PC gives a tip at a command line you can run to get information from your hard drive and/or system. Working in IT, we are pulling drives or chasing vendor utilities that give back the data you need (serial number, bios info). Rick gives an excellent command line that helps you find out this information.

The following may or may not work for you; however, I found it to work on Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Did you ever run into the situation where you needed the serial number on your computer? The serial number is often required when you contact the vendor for support.  Read more at What’s On My PC.

I recently ran into the error MMC class not registered error when right clicking Computer and going to manage this also happened when trying to get into the device manager.   The internet including Microsoft’s Fix-it Utilities and several forums did not produce a solution.  Ironically I had forgotten about a post I made less than 48 hours ago that featured a link to Bill Mullins’ review of Tweaking.com’s repair utility for Windows.  In order to fix this error on a known virus free computer, I simply let the program perform a SFC / scannow and went to Start Repairs (skipping the other steps), Custom and selected to register system files.  Once I let the utility finish and rebooted, the MMC’s worked great.   The utility currenty registers the 1000+ files thus fixing many problems.