Various cool software and more

Untangle – a cool open source TMG for your lan

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In these days Internet security is more important than ever, would it not be neat if you could run all your Internet traffic through a big filter to filter out all those nasty viruses, malware and privacy concerns!?   Well, if you happen to have an old PC lying around or as I have a server running MS-Hyper-V then you actually can fairly simple (and free)..

Ok, you may have heard about such solutions as; Smoothwall, monowall and others like them?  These are basically routers/firewalls, and could with a PC (and two nics) replace your broadband router, they contain complex firewall capabilities and maybe even VPN connect possibility.  All very cool and quite easy to setup and use..

Untangle go a step further than this, to the basic router capability is added firewall, vpn, antivirus scanning, privacy filter, ad filter, spam filter, captive page and much much more.  The best part is that most of this is free, you can download a bunch of apps and install these (this is point and click, so no linux knowledge is required).

So how does it work, is it a proxy or is it a gateway or what?  Well once installed you set the LAN nic IP as the default gateway and viola all traffic is now filtered against malware, virus, spam, privacy concerns and what not..

I setup my Untangle box as a Hyper-V machine on my Windows 2008R2 server, gave it 640mb ram and two cpu’s and a 120gb hard drive (of which it is now using aprox 6-7gb).

Once installed you configure everything via the web-interface (not on the box itself if you use Hyper-V, but on you own pc);

So a few notes on installing the app as a hyper-v virtual server;

  • Obvious disadvantages, you will never be able to install the Hyper-V additions into the Linux box, thus no mouse ever which leaves the user interface on the installed box useless.
  • I had to run the installation 4-5 times before I succeded, dont know why it failed but it was as if the installer just stalled during the installation, thus I suggest you take a snapshot once you manage to install the basic system (now you can always revert to here).

Ok, let me just give you the quick tour of installing the thing, it is not a complete guide
(so no screenshots and some obvious steps may be omitted, but if you know a bit of Hyper-v’ing it should not be too hard);

1. Download the Untangled install cd from; http://www.untangle.com/Downloads/Download-ISO

2. Create a new Hyper-V machine (I suggest 640mb ram, 2 cpu’s), replace the NIC with two legacy NIC’s (required to work), an IDE drive – I used a dynamic drive of 120gb but I think performance may be better if you set a static drive of perhaps 20gb, mount the downloaded ISO as the CD rom. Tweaks; you can stick to one legacy NIC if you do not plan to use the box as a firewall (eg. if you have a HW firewall in your ISP router etc), some things will not work with only one nic but most will.

3. Start the system and select the Text based installer (as you have no mouse in hyper-v), I seemed to have better luck with the advanced installer..  You should set static IP’s so decide on two IP’s before getting started.

4. Once the installation is complete switch to your browser and connect to the IP you set as the LAN side during install

5. Take a snapshot of your of your Hyper-V machine.

6. Now download the “open source pack”, on the left of the interface.

7. Configure the different modules, I suggest you disable/turn off the firewall, anti spam, PG, intrusion prevention features (unless you plan on using the device as your main router) as this will speed up performance.

8. Now set the LAN NIC IP as your default gateway on your pc (or on your DHCP server)

You can even set up a captive page, this will require people to have a password in order to access the Internet quite cool – sadly it does not support limiting bandwidth, download ratios etc. but well it’s still cool.

Don’t worry if your first or second install fails, as mentioned I had to do multiple installs before it succeeded, but now it runs fairly smooth.  I have experienced that the web-interface was unavailable (network still worked, but I could not reach the interface), but after a reboot everything was back online.

Read more here; www.untangle.com  –  http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/Untangle_Server_User’s_Guide

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iReboot for those with dual or tripple boot needs..

iReboot is NeoSmart Technologies’ simple yet effective reboot helper tool. iReboot sits in your taskbar at startup (only taking up 400KB of memory!) and lets you choose which operating system you want to reboot into. Instead of pressing restart, waiting for Windows to shut down, waiting for your BIOS to post, then selecting the operating system you want to boot into (within the bootloader time-limit!); you just select that entry from iReboot and let it do the rest! If you liked EasyBCD, you’ll just love iReboot!

More here; http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=11

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Flowplayer a free player for your site

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Want to add video to your website?  Well take a look at Flowplayer, it is a free open source player that is very easy to implement.


http://flowplayer.org/demos/installation/index.html
http://flowplayer.org/documentation/installation/index.html

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SiteMagic CMS

A new CMS system has entered the scene, SiteMagic CMS..  It exists in three versions; one free (with advertisements), one paid without advertisements (cheap) and one paid without advertisements and with mysql support (the two first are file based which is OK for smaller sites but likely not sufficient for large sites with heavy load).

Check it out at;

http://www.sitemagic.dk/Index.html

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Internet Explorer 8 – first run screen

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Are you as annoyed as me in regard to the “first run wizard” thingy that IE8 is displaying the first time it runs?? It’s as annoying as the older IE’s that also launched the Email creation wizard… as if it was not enough that they always start off by launching some stupid intro site..

Anyhow, no reason to get TOO upset, as with most things there are ways around this, so take a look here;
http://digitaljive.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/disable-ie8-%E2%80%9Cset-up-windows-internet-explorer-8%E2%80%9D-wizard/
many lovely ways to get rid of this stupidity.

One of the simplest is this;

Registry:
DWORD : “DisableFirstRunCustomize” set to 1 under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

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Troubleshooting ‘At least one service or driver failed during system startup’

You receive the following error message after Windows 2003 boots.

At least one service or driver failed during system startup.  Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details.

There is a  quite excellent article here on how to debug errors like this; http://networkadminkb.com/kb/Knowledge%20Base/Windows2003/Troubleshooting%20%91At%20least%20one%20service%20or%20driver%20failed%20during%20system%20startup%92.aspx

I found it while trying to find a way to surpress the dialog box, which sadly I did never find (one would think there would be some registry tweak that would disable this stupid dialogbox on a server where the error had no effect and was impossible to resolve)..

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W32Time issues on Win2003 server – and resolution

Had problems with a server that was complaining that it could not sync. time with the DC, it stated that it received invalid data amongst other.

Event ID 38, 47 and 29 – Source: W32Time
“The time provider NtpClient cannot reach or is currently receiving invalid time data from NTP_server_IP_Address.”

Found the resolution here;
http://www.chicagotech.net/troubleshooting/eventid47.htm

Basically (this worked for me);

1. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then press ENTER.
 
2. At the command prompt, type the following commands in the order that they are given. After you type each command, press ENTER.

• w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:<TIME SERVER IP, EG DC>,0x8 /syncfromflags:MANUAL
• net stop w32time
• net start w32time
• w32tm /resync

a few additional dos commands you may try when debugging w32time;
C:\>net time /querysntp
C:\>w32tm /resync
C:\>w32tm /monitor

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USB Safely remove + a whole lot more…

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Ever had problems ejecting a USB device – getting an errror like “Unable to stop….”?

Well this page claim to have a utility that can assist you with this issue plus a whole lot more (like renaming USB devices, ejecting USB via command line and hot-key eject)… Sounds very promising..

http://safelyremove.com

I found this by visiting an old post here on my site, a post about a file unlocking utility.

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Repetitive tasks – the easy way..

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Now this fall under the category, easy solutions to complex problems…

I recently had to remove about 150 computer objects from a MOM 2005 console, it was not possible to select all and choose remove so you had to right click each and every one of them – click “remove” and then answer “Yes” to the “Are you sure….” dialog…  Now imagine how long this would take to do manually!?  Well you could probably do some scripting that would solve the problem – however that would require some research to find, test and then implement..  but then it struck me, a flashback from back in Windows 3.1 where you had a macro recorder, this macro recorder would allow you to record keyboard and mouse actions and then play it back as many times as you would like (I remember making a macro sending emails and thus spamming some of my fellow students, great fun at the time), now someone must have made a freeware tool that will do this under modern versions of Windows, and sure enough – “Do it again” to the rescue…  “Do it Again” will allow you to make macros and play them back as many times as you’d like, it’s free and easy to use..

1. Get the util from here; http://www.spacetornado.com/DoItAgain/

2. Install it

3. Start “Do it again” and click “create new task” and perform the task you want repeated.

4. Press “Scroll lock” (the button) once you are done with your task.

5. Name the macro in “Do it again” (a dialog box will pop up).

6. Under options set the number of times you want the task to repeat

7. Double click the macro you just created

8. Sit back in amazement and watch someone else making all the hard work for you, now it will still take time but you can sit back and drink coffee while it does.. NICE..  a simple solution to a time consuming problem…

UPDATE;
Sadly I found out this does NOT work on Vista/Win7 🙁 – bummer, however I guess there will be some other util out there that will…

UPDATE2;
I just found a util  “Windows Macro Recorder” that claims to work on all windows versions, same concept as the above;
http://www.freelabs.info/MacroRecorder.aspx

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TestTube

Want to keep up on what the guys at YouTube is working with/testing currently?

http://www.youtube.com/testtube

Here you can check out some of the possibly to come features of YouTube.

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