Your Comments...

I have re-opened comments from unregistered users again in hopes of generating more reader comments. Remember these are moderated and may end up being primers for new articles or end up on Dagger of the Week. As always I hope you have enjoyed this column and continue to read in the future.

Malware on legit sites, more common than you think.

For the past seven years I've watched the influx of spyware, adware and malware become a daily problem for my customers and co-workers and one question has always troubled me. "how did I get this?" After quizzing the already frustrated user about e-mail, downloads and websites I would always assume game downloads or porn sites. Before chucking the problem up to one of these reasons, read this article by avast.

My suggestion to all of my customers has always been

1. Always use a good antivirus software. The most expensive one at the store may not be the greatest, the one with the best known name may not be the greatest. Top 5 antivirus programs to purchase are Viper, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Panda and Norton. Top free antivirus programs are AVG, Avast and Avira.


2. Always use a antispyware program. Isn't this the same as antivirus? No. Doesn't antivirus do the same thing? NO. Doesn't my antivirus take care of this too? YOU AREN'T LISTENING. NO, NO, NO!!!! You can not rely on your anti-virus software to take care of anything more than viruses which leave you wide open to all kinds of malware. The best one I've found that specializes in root-kit attacks is SuperAntispyware (programmed by geniuses and named by a 5 year old, i'm sure)
   
3. If you have an anti-phishing filter (not to be confused with NO FISHING) on your browser please keep it turned on.


4. Quit reading mail from people you don't know and quit sending the chain mail. To all my readers, you will not save little timmy's leg, there is no little girl saving the deer with water from her hand, there is no stalker in the wal-mart parking lot under your car, there is no gang initiation waiting for you to flash your headlights, or any of thousand other ridiculous chainmail stories that just aren't true, and you'll for sure not find a thousand dollars from Bill Gates, true love, world peace, or anything else at the end of these insane e-mails. Get an education at snopes.com for God's sake.

Active Directory Primer

So many of you, (or maybe not so many) may be wondering... Wow Mitchel You've been gone so long at school, but there's no posts on anything from school.

Well I've got one for you. Two ways to look at creating users in active directory GUI (I'm working on a database project that can add multiple users in the server 2003 command line with dsadd and will talk about that when the bugs are out)

• The first way, which is the simplest but most time consuming is to go directly to the user group or the OU that is assigned to you and click add new user or the picture of the user (single human) and when the GUI opens you fill in the name, the address, the fax number, the phone number, give them and e-mail address, create their roaming profile, create their network folder, add them to all the groups you think they fall in and then wait for the user to call and complain about which network resources they still need access to, (more on NTFS troubleshooting in the future, just remember high/high/low for principle of least privilege), and then blame their supervisor for not knowing what groups the employee should have been in.

• The second way is to re-evaluate your current ADUC structure and make a group for each department and create a new "template" user with all the generic info about their site, add a home directory of \\server\folder\%username% (the %username% is a universal variable, if you don't understand how this saves time then google it) and the same for their roaming profile.

Now all you have to do is add their group to the security tab on the system NTFS folders in question and your done... unless you need to have your group access shares outside your local domain, don't know what an OU was, are not sure what a roaming profile is, or enjoy setting up one account at a time.

Still on target part 2

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I've been pretty busy studying for my MCP which I passed on 4/17. Moving on to my MCSA.
I've got multiple interviews this week so hopefully I'll be back to work soon.

I thought I felt a little tingle in my back recently and upon investigation I found that there are daggers stuck in my back, so for future posts I'll add dagger of the week comments (except for the truly poisonous one's which I'll just delete)

WHOISDNS writes again "still no job huh? thats weird with all your experience and certifications you should be making atleast $70,000 by now...."

To which I reply "Nope"

My question to you is, why do you care? I never get any comments from anyone except you. You seem so happy that I don't have a job at this point. Why is that? I'd hate to think that maybe you contributed to me being terminated. But it doesn't matter much to me, keep up the good work at baker and taylor and make sure you don't learn anything new especially how to keep my databases running when something goes wrong. I'd hate to think my old department didn't immediately fall back into the same old complacent slump of fixing antique crap, putting users off and making excuses for why new projects can't be achieved.