Cisco PIX - Troubleshooting Commands
I was having an issue today troubleshooting a Cisco PIX today. A client has a Cisco PIX separating the outside world from their safe inside comfort zone. So what I needed to do is put 2 holes in the PIX to allow Remote Desktop clients to be able to connect to the server and also for their camera system to be viewed from the outside. I'll go on how I did that another day but I wanted to show you some troubleshooting tools (basic).
Bottom line, I tried to Remote Desktop in and couldn't after I thought I had it figured out but it didn't work. So I did this.
router# conf t (puts the router in configuration mode)
router# logging monitor 7 (turns on logging)
router# terminal monitor
This will push all output to the telnet console, be careful it may be a lot to handle. I then tried to use Remote Desktop and then I saw in the log that I had it mapped to the wrong IP address. Use the following commands to turn off logging.
router# terminal no monitor
router# no logging monitor
Friday Night Horror's
Last night I was really excited. It was my friend's wife's birthday and they had a limo and I was ready for a night on the town drinking and having fun. That was until then I got the phone call and heard the worst sentence a technician can hear after hours 'Our server is down'. I quickly ran over there, I had a good hour before it was time to go out. Its a really nice Sushi restaurant 5 minutes from my house, I eat there all the time so I really wanted to help them out.
Turns out they have a POS system that is stored as a shared directory on the server. The server would instantly reboot AFTER the login process. This is unique, normally a reboot would occur prior to that (pre-gui) stage. I found out that if I booted it into Safe Mode with Networking the cash registers were able to access the shared directory. However many other functions were disabled because it required the server to boot and a start up file to run.
The computer was custom, which of course is a pain because any notion of easily finding drivers was totally out of the question. Their 'server' was actually running Windows XP Professional and the old providers didn't even put the XP product key stickers on the box! Suddently my Friday night wasn't looking too good. Anyway I popped the side of the box off and got the Intel info, got the drivers, used nLite (as described in my last blog post - wow that came in handy), booted to Windows and did a repair and the process actually worked. Unforatuntely I didn't get out until 11:30pm thus missing all the fun.
Installing Windows XP on a Vista Machine
I ran into an interesting issue today. I had a customer that had a Windows Vista laptop and like most Vista users they did not care for it. I purchased them a new installation of Windows XP Home and put in the CD only to find out that Windows 'Setup could not find any hard disks'. Hmm, upon further thinking I realized the laptop had a SATA hard drive and Windows XP does not have those drivers naively installed. So what's next?
Well you may remember during one of the first screens in setup it asks if you have any RAID or SATA drivers? Well that's what we need to do but you'll notice that if you do this option it'll ask you to insert a floppy. A floppy? In 2008?
Now if you are lucky you may have a computer with a BIOS that will allow you to turn SATA operation from RAID or SATA to IDE. If you have that in your BIOS than praise your maker because you are done. If you don't have that option you'll have to make a custom Windows XP installation CD and bundle the drivers into it yourself. Don't worry its not really that hard and I found a great tutorial.
Super AntiSpyware - Is it really super?
If you are like me then you have tried basically every single Adware, Virus, Spyware removal out there. It's difficult to know which ones are 'real' and what ones are fake, which ones actually are actually the cause of spyware infections.
Like always when removing a virus it is typically a very manual process. Basically starting out as removing all unknown startup programs, restarting, seeing what ones came back and how to remove them. I've recently come across a new software program called Super AntiSpyware. It's actually very good and has helped me remove a lot of bad programs. Just install it, update it, boot into safe mode and have it run a full scan. That's it!
