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From Technibble, I found this post and is very very useful for a person like me and I thought I should put it up online once again here;

To read the original article, head over to Technibble.

Oh well, if you’re more used to IPTables than any normal firewall software, then of course you’re gonna need that for your Windows machine as well. Nothing wrong about that, the interesting stuff here is about the technology, really and not who made it – if it works well.

Windows IP Firewall (WIPFW) is an open source project that gives you exactly that;

Checkout their page here

WHAT IS WIPFW?

WIPFW is a MS Windows operable version of IPFW for FreeBSD OS. You can use the same functionality and configure it as only you work with IPFW.

IPFW is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernelmode, and has a user-land control utility, ipfw. Together, they allow you to define and query the rules used by the kernel in its routing decisions.

There are two related parts to ipfw. The firewall section performs packet filtering. There is also an IP accounting section which tracks usage of the router, based on rules similar to those used in the firewall section. This allows the administrator to monitor how much traffic the router is getting from a certain machine, or how much WWW traffic it is forwarding, for example.

As a result of the way that ipfw is designed, you can use ipfw on non-router machines to perform packet filtering on incoming and outgoing connections. This is a special case of the more general use of ipfw, and the same commands and techniques should be used in this situation.

And one more important piece of info would be;

Q: Whats the difference between WIPFW and IPFW?

A: Now WIPFW is unable to change packets content, so it is impossible to redirect packets. Also WIPFW has no traffic shaper. In the future WIPFW will be using ndis driver which will allow all abilities.

Quite often when you’re infected with a Virus, the virus does diligently disable a lot of functions in Windows (Like disable the task manager, Disable registry editor etc).

So either you’re stuck at different Google searches in search for fixes to these individual problems or you really start thinking of re-loading the OS itself. Situations like that can be pretty annoying. This is one nice tool with about 25 quick fixes put together in an UI.

Some of fixes that can be done using this little tool are;

• Enable Command Prompt
• Enable Task Manager
• Enable Folder Options
• Enable Registry Editor
• Restore missing Run dialog box
• Stop My Documents open at startup
• Fix right-click error
• Fix slow network file/shared/remote
• Restore Network icon to system tray
• Fix slow hotkeys
• Fix CD/DVD drive is missing or not recognized
• Fix CD auto play
• Restore My Computer (Computer) properties
• Restore Device Manager
• Fix delay in opening Explorer
• Restore grayed Explorer and Taskbar toolbars
• Restore My Documents properties
• Remove OEM splash and wallpaper
• Restore My Network Places to Desktop
• Enable Recovery Console
• Restore grayed file associations
• Restore “Send To” context menu item
• Restore the native ZIP file integration
• Error when trying to access Add or Remove/ Program and Features program

You can read about & download this awesome little portable lifesaver from HERE

I had moved to Foxit reader from Adobe Reader for the sole reason that I can have a cup of coffee by the time adobe loads the document, not to mention when we’re browsing a PDF document through Internet.

Then I came upon this little tool while I was searching for ‘how to speed up adobe reader’, this utility is Adobe Reader Speedup

It does disabling of some plugin’s and voila PDF’s with adobe loads almost instantaneously now!

You may wanna try it. Download it by clicking the above link.

One of the things in TCP/IP communications is inefficient communication/problems caused by packet fragmentation due to MTU settings along with the PATH. There is one known problem which almost everyone hits especially over IPSEC (Outlook & Exchange) on which I had blogged previously on how to find the optimal MTU value for traffic so that the packet doesn’t get fragmented => [ HERE ]

Finding the optimal MTU is relatively easy procedure along the WAN path, however it has to deal with multiple ping requests with different sized packets manually. Now I stumbled across a utility that’ll do it much efficient MTURoute

It is a free tool and does it nicely and also does have multiple options.

Use it with caution though since it produces a lot of ICMP traffic and your ISP or Network may not like it (more details on the authors page, follow the link, here

One of the things every network admin would like to do is to monitor his key application servers/machines’ up status. If it is down, the last thing he wants is to have the users come to him and complain!

Say I own a web server and I want to see if the web server is alive and I’d like to know when the server goes down, one option is to keep an infinite ping loop and keep it outputting to a text file or so, then do a daily look through of the text file to see if it went down or not. Not an efficient way to handle things, as well this doesn’t ensure that you get notified the moment it goes down.

I did spend some time in Google. Well, there are thousands of networking monitoring applications that can do this, but they all come with $$$. I was searching for a rather freeware solution or write a script in Perl or something. Then I stumbled upon this one;

CheckHost by ab-tools.com just developed August 2009.

The tool has amazing capabilities. It does exactly what I wanted and even more. It can check to see if a HOST is alive by ping and when down, give a desktop alert or even send an email to you. Further more to the functionality, it can work on TCP and UDP as well.

So if you have a web server, it can check by actual TCP/80 connections, if you have a public facing RDP server – then check actual TCP/3389 and let you know immediately when it goes down. Check out the configuration options tab below;

This is technology at its best. Simple/low on resources yet still get things done. Wouldn’t people like an admin like this who is always get first to the issue.

Great going guys! Check out their website they have some more cool stuff under development as well.

Some time back I had written on there is no load balancing concept in Windows XP. However with 2 internet connections which is kinda normal for guys like me (I have a broadband connection over WiMAX as well as an EVDO connection from BSNL).

So I can’t load balance theoretically, however I was looking for a way to kind of have Windows select both connections randomly or in a round robin fashion. This way I get both connections utilized. So again Google helped me, following is the DWORD that can be used to set Windows to choose internet connections randomly;

Open Registry Editor and go to;

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP]

Create a DWORD entry named ‘RandomAdaptor’ and set the value to 1.

Keeping it to 1 enables random selection of adaptors and keep it to 0 disables it.

Try it out and see for yourselves.

So in the coming weeks, we can see WPA a joke too (just like its predecessor WEP)!

To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference’s organizer.

This is in a way good to know in this way rather than the algorithm broken by the ‘bad guys’. So I welcome it

[Read the Full Story]

I’m sure a lot of enterprise is now looking or in the process of moving to WPA from WEP, this is going to stall some of ‘em.

As Microsoft says;

Account Lockout Status (LockoutStatus.exe) is a combination command-line and graphical tool that displays lockout information about a particular user account.

[Follow it to Microsoft]

Ever had a situation where in you have a program in ISO and you want to install? There are so many free tools available outside to create Virtual CD Drives. However I found something interesting on the web from Tech-Recipes (a good site). Until then I never knew that there is a piece of software available from Microsoft itself to do the very same task.

Well, there is no support or anything of that sort from M$ on this one, but oh yeah, it works! You can download it from here and unzip it to see the instructions;

[Click Here to Download WinXPVirtualCDControlPanel]