Tuesday 29 June 2010

For Sale: Fake POS Devices

This is an article from Trend Micro.
For Sale: Fake POS Devices

My Thoughts
I have always been suspicious of chip and pin.


The banks will always say it is a more secure way of handling transactions. A chip and pin unit reads a card and relays your pin, albeit encrypted when it leaves the POS device.
I guess if you type your pin incorrectly you won’t get the pin fail but the same transaction error devised by the unscrupulous.
All this box needs to do is capture card information so it can be cloned and the all important PIN.

I am sure my local main brand shops in Yeovil are all squeaky clean.

This is an article from Trend Micro.
For Sale: Fake POS Devices

Thursday 24 June 2010

A small diversion from matters computing

I have been nagged for a while by my son to build a water bottle rocket.





My son has made a video of progress so far. We have mastered a pressure system and pipes. We need to now make a stable base and sort out a release mechanism.



It certainly goes with a big bang when the bottle losses grip on the tube.

We have used a bike tyre valve, garden hose and various pipe fittings to get a 22mm launch tube (needed to reduce the 22mm down a little with sand paper and wire wool).

Friday 11 June 2010

Recreating operating system partition from a Dell factory.wim

Introduction
I had to replace the hard disk in a Dell XPS m1210 Laptop, I had made a copy of the recovery partition.

I used a vista install DVD to boot and sort partitions and copied the factory.wim file and imagex.exe from the Dell recovery files \tools\imagex.exe and dell\image\factory.wim
I created two partitions one for windows and a 10gb Partition for recovery files.
How I reinstalled the factory defaults from a Dell Factory.wim
Installed the new disk in Laptop, (only a 120gb)
Restoring the Del .wim
Boot the laptop with the Vista install dvd, you will need to go to the install option (this is after the country selections).
Follow the install until you arrive at the disk partition screen. If it is a new disk there will probably be no partitions. If there are partitions delete them (unless you need the data), and reformat each partition (in my case I created a first partition of 100gb and a second partition of 10gb).
Once the disk is partitioned and formatted I exited the install and returned to the repair options, go to the command prompt.

My cd was E:, first partition was C: and second D:

I popped the install DVD out of the drive and inserted my DVD with the factory.wim and Imagex.exe files.

I navigated to the DVD and imagex.exe file, at the command prompt I typed.

Imagex /apply factory.wim 1 c:\

After a short while the file was installed, I did one last step.

I popped the install DVD backing and ran repair to make sure that the boot records etc were in correct.

I restarted and I was back with a fresh install of Dell software on my Dell XPS M1210

My Dell XPS

Dell XPS M1210, 2ghz Proc, 1gb Mem, 12” screen, vista ratting 4.5

I now just need to sort the left touchpad button and replace the battery

The disk was £34.90, I am hoping that ebay will come to the rescue on the battery and touch pad.

My main concern at the moment is the heat that is coming out, but a quick blast of air will I am sure keep things in check.

Tuesday 8 June 2010

Microsoft Exchange 2007 certificate expiry

Microsoft Exchange 2007 certificate expiry, Error in Windows Application logs


The STARTTLS certificate will expire soon: subject: exchserv.local, hours remaining:

This will occur if you are relying on the default certificates, you will need to update yearly.

On the exchange server 2007 which need new certificate, to see current certificate

Get-ExchangeCertificate | List

You will need to make a note of the services, IMAP, POP, IIS and SMTP

Now to add a new certificate

New-ExchangeCertificate

You will see the expiry date and various options, say yes to all

Now check the new certificate

Get-ExchangeCertificate | List

And make sure all services are included; in my case IIS service never loads the new certificate, so you need to add the new certificate to the missing IIS service.

Get the Thumbprint value from the new certificate. “Get-ExchangeCertificate |
List

Enable-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint 67666866126376newone -Service IIS

Now remove the old certificate

Remove-ExchangeCertificate –Thumbprint 26556556565657565675oldvalue

When you “Get-ExchangeCertificate | List” you should have the new certificate with the original services.

You can always buy a certificate, which will last longer than a year.