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The Tech Help Thread

Discussion in 'Technical Board' started by rei, Oct 19, 2009.

  1. TJMax

    TJMax
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    I got this reply via rep:
    Confirmation/refutation? If this is the case, I might kick XBox Live to the curb.
     
  2. Binary

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    What the rep is referring to is the "homegroup" settings on Windows.

    That is not be necessary to share files in Windows, and would mean that the Xbox 360 would be completely incompatible with every single OS in the world except Windows 7, and that's simply not correct.

    I don't use the Xbox sharing so I'm not much use, except to tell you that not being able to set up a Homegroup should not prevent you from streaming media to your Xbox.
     
  3. Trakiel

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    Call me Caitlyn. Got any cake?

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    I really need some advice on an issue. What's a realistic expectation for malware intrusion prevention on an organization's computer systems? My organization has about 110 systems, and each year I have to manually clean of two, maybe three infections that our malware protection software & systems don't catch. And in the cases where I do have to do a manual removal the infection occurred because someone went to a website and clicked on something. In the seven years I've worked for my organization I've had one maybe two infections that occurred because someone opened an email attachment, so to me that says our email filter is doing its job.

    I'm asking because this morning the CEO was very angry because somehow she received an email from what she thought was a board member about a meeting invite but instead the email contained pictures from her [the CEOs] wedding. The CEO is convinced she has a malware infection, which of course could be true, but I just did a manual scan of her laptop on Tuesday and didn't find anything. Is there anything aside from malware that could cause something like that to happen? And how this relates to the first question I asked, the CEO says we should never get any malware infections because she's talked with other CEOs and was told that their organizations never get malware infections, so perhaps I should not be so satisfied with my organization's current malware protection and look elsewhere?
     
  4. Binary

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    For manual scans, I typically run at least two different pieces of scanning software.

    Sites like Virus Bulletin (http://www.virusbtn.com/) should help in determining if your antivirus is considered a good piece of software compared to other solutions on the market.

    Multilayered approaches are better. If you can swing it, a high end firewall that will scan incoming data for known malware is a good way to help lighten the burden on the local scanners. Obviously, also a comprehensive and regularly (automatically) updated list of known problem sites should also be filtered out to help prevent users from clicking bad stuff. Past that, on-demand scanning is good but is not a substitute for regular full system scans.

    Lastly, I don't work for a lot of fortune 500 companies or anything, but I've been in a fair number of IT organizations including contracting for a lot of small businesses, and I've never seen a 100% prevention rate for viruses. Ever. If that is what other CEOs are claiming, I'd have to wonder if A) their IT department is hiding the small stuff, or B) their web filtering is so draconian that the users can't actually get anywhere harmful.

    While there is a certain amount of merit in option B from a security standpoint (often this is done through whitelisting good sites rather than just blacklisting bad ones), it puts a large burden on users and in my experience, it encourages circumventing the system which is FAR worse than simply having reasonable measures to start with.

    Two or three localized infections a year out of over 100 machines doesn't seem outrageous to me. I sent a couple emails inquiring about this, since I'm not really in an IT support role now - I'll let you know what I hear back.
     
  5. Trakiel

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    Call me Caitlyn. Got any cake?

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    Thanks a lot for this information. I'm pretty much in agreement with everything you've said here, but hearing it from someone else at least gives me some reassurance that my perspective on the issue isn't out of focus.
     
  6. thabucmaster

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    Chalk me up for another IT person who agrees with everything Binary said. I work for an MSP, and we provide a full range of IT services to small to medium businesses. For each of our clients, we install GFI's Vipre antivirus, as well as Webroot's SaaS web filtering.

    GFI's A/V agent and software produces so many fewer false positives compared to Symantec and other major competitors, that we hardly ever hear a peep from our clients about the software picking up anything that it shouldn't have.

    As far as Webroot goes, they a phenomenal product. It is easily customized for any client, depending on what departments they have, and how they would like user access to be configured. Multiple policies and groups, as well as the ability to lock out users from even modifying the proxy settings for IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. This means that circumvention is very difficult for 99% of end users. You can even set up executives to be monitored only, but set the policy up to block known malicious sites.

    As far as what Binary said in regards to localized infections, I would say that out of the 300+ client machines that we monitor and support on a daily basis, that we have about 2-3 infections per year.

    If you want more details on Webroot, PM me.
     
  7. Binary

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    I just spoke with someone who was the director of IT for North and South America at a global business. He flatly stated that he was confident any CEO who said they get zero infections was either not telling the truth, or the truth was being hidden by their IT group (e.g. not reporting small events to keep management happy).

    He oversaw about 15k computers and said they got a couple infections per day - obviously with an infrastructure that large and distributed, you have far less control than <500 computers so your rate of infection goes up by more than just a multiple of the number of machines... but it goes to show that it doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem, the infection rate never drops to zero.
     
  8. Trakiel

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    Call me Caitlyn. Got any cake?

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    Thanks again both of your for your input. I've been speaking with my boss today on the issue and we're in agreement that most of the problem is the CEO's very limited computer skills, so we're brainstorming on how better to manage the CEO.
     
  9. TJMax

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    Okay, forget about my posts on the previous page: I decided to go with an Apple TV, jailbreak it, and install XBMC. Jailbreaking it is simple enough, but every time I try to install XBMC, following the many guides available, I get error messages basically saying the package isn't there (this is SSHing into the AT2 using Putty). My last two attempts have hosed it, necessitating a complete reset with iTunes and starting from scratch.

    So... Anyone know of a source (awkwardtv, bigboss, etc) that will work for installing XBMC? Thanks!!
     
  10. TJMax

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  11. thabucmaster

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    Hardware: Droid X running Android 2.3.3 non-jailbroken.

    So, last night while watching TV, my phone made a noise like it just received an update... When I unlocked it, I found that the SD card was now letting me know that 'SD card blank or has unsupported filesystem.' From what I have researched, it looks to be a common issue with these phones and requires the card to be replaced. I don't really care about having to replace the card, but I do care about retrieving all the photos I've taken with the phone over the last year I've owned it.

    Has anyone encountered this issue and been successful with 3rd party tools in recovering data from the card? I took a ton of pictures over the holidays of my family and would really like to recover them.

    Thanks!
     
  12. thabucmaster

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    Another thing I'm trying to figure out...

    The wife's trying to watch some her German TV shows on rtl-now.de from our house here in the US, and it said that she can't because we're not in Germany... So, I tried using a few free German proxies in IE/Firefox's network settings, and it played the commercials prior to the actual show, but when it got to the actual show it just sat there like it was trying to buffer the stream.

    Does anyone have any idea why this would be the case, and/or any proxy servers that would allow her to watch the show?
     
  13. Arctic_Scrap

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    Is it industry practice for an ISP to kill your internet connection for downloading illegal stuff? Sometimes when I'm downloading movies or TV shows off of Frostwire my internet will die and I have to reset my modem. Today it's happened 6-7 times while downloading a season of a show. I've read that some modems can't handle the bandwidth. I'm no expert on this, but I can download a legal file, like a steam game, at 1.4 mb/sec all day long and never have a problem. It's not too often that I see over 1 mb/sec from torrents.

    After doing some searching I changed some settings within Frostwire, I'll see if that works.
     
  14. scootah

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    Bitswarms are a very different thing to a single game steam game.

    When you download a game from Steam, you open a small number of connections - I don't know for sure how many, but probably less than ten. A bit swarm can end up with hundreds or thousands of open connections. Multiple torrents with high numbers of peers can see that growth go up exponentially. While your modem can handle a lot of simultaneous connections, there is an upper limit.
     
  15. VladTheImpaler

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  16. c_norris

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    Hi there everyone, some iTunes help wanted.

    I'm weeding through everything in my library to see what I want to keep and what to delete. Using a script from this site, I've created two separate playlists with all the full albums and all the single songs in my library. Using smart playlists I've also made one for each that have already been played so I know what to listen to next. I have my iPod set to sync only songs that haven't been played (I originally reset all my plays to 0).

    Here's the thing. When I only listen to one or two songs from an album, I only get partial albums synced (because one or two songs are already played). Can I make a smart playlist to only add albums to the playlist when ALL the songs from the album are played, and if so how do I do it?
     
  17. scootah

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    Not sure where to throw this. Had a heat issue in our server room - a pretty bad one. Among other things, we had very, very hot air blowing onto our tape library.

    I know storing LTO tapes in high heat can lead to data loss, but these tapes are blank. No read or write actions taking place during the incident. Ambient air temperature might have been as high as 140 f/60c. Anyone know if that will impact stability/validity of the tape media? No point using them for backups if they're compromised before first use. Tapes are LTO5 and were inside a Dell PowerVault TL4000 tape library for the duration of the incident.
     
  18. Dcc001

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    I'm getting this, too. How do we fix it?
     
  19. hotwheelz

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    i have gone through about 7 mice, in three months. I use them on two different computers including one I had to send in. The problem I'm having is that the mouse becomes unresponsive or it will behave erratically. It won't do what I tell it. Normally I will unplug it and plug it back in until it's working again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I've played with every setting there is. The only common denominator that I can find is the drivers. They are developed by a company called Cirque. As soon as I install them the problem becomes 10 times worse. The mouse will start freezing up more and more often until it becomes impossible to deal with. Uninstalling the drivers will get it to stop freezing up. Normally I would not have to install them but I need to turn up the speed on the cursor. I only have the speed maxed out and the window settings but that's not enough. The drivers allow me to turn it up even more. I tried disabling the mouse on the laptop but that doesn't fix the problem. I called the company a million times and they answer me. All I want to do is play my video game. Does anyone have any idea on how solve the problem?


    <a class="postlink" href="http://www.adesso.com/en/home/micetrackballpresenters/touchpad.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.adesso.com/en/home/micetrack ... chpad.html</a> (the bottom two)
    <a class="postlink" href="http://www.ergonomictouchpad.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ergonomictouchpad.com/</a>
     
  20. downndirty

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    Is there a good program that can convert from MP4 to AVI? I've found a bunch of shit on Cnet, but strangely the one I selected does not work. I'll be using it on a Win7 PC, so no Mac fuckery, please.

    Thanks in advance.