I-BLOG

Browsing speed, Multitabs, RSS integration, add-on support are some of the usability considerations in the browser world today.

So I’ll share my experience about 3 browsers.

I’ve been using 3 browsers (Well, I don’t like Internet Explorer )

• Avant Internet Browser
• Firefox 2.x
• Opera 9.x

I liked all the three of them for the normal day to day operations I do, but however the way things work, I love Opera the best.

The aspects that got me into it and conclude to it is the speed of launching pages using Opera, it supports the multiple tabs, an RSS aggregation facility as well as the add-on support. While firefox is fast enough, one thing I’ve noticed is that the more and more plugins/extensions you add, the more it becomes slow. As well, at one point (may be even now), the only browser that had ZERO bugs was Opera.

Now you also need to consider the fact that I am an avid lover of Windows Operating System and do not have much experience with Linux. So these products how do they perform while on Linux is something I do not know.

Technitium MAC Address Changer allows you to change Media Access Control (MAC) Address of your Network Interface Card (NIC) irrespective to your NIC manufacturer or its driver

 A tool that is released for changing the mac address of Network Interface Cards which would facilitate both the good guys and the bad guys

So taste it here

Domain Registration Lookup information – on information such as who it is registered to and other details needs a Whois tool. Every network professional do know this one!

Now, all around the world there are so many REGISTRARS and you need different servers
to find the information. First of all that could take some time;

So here is a tip;

www.allwhois.com -> This is a site, you can check the information regardless where/whom it is registered…

Good one for the bookmarking.

Ever heard about this ? I’m sure some of the network admins have gone haywire on this one!

Well, windows NTFS has a feature called Alternate Data Stream. In simple words, if I have

a file that I want to hide, how would I do it?

Well, hackers do it pretty well :-)

Scenario:

1. Hacker wants to use somebody else’s machine for storing his huge files. Now if he access it

and store it in there, the owner at some point would delete it for sure. Without Owner even

noticing that, how do they do it? -> You have alternate data stream as your answer :-)

So say there is a text file (Owner’s file) called Personal.txt of size 32 kb and the huge file that needs to be hidden is Movie.mov, then this is how you do it on an NTFS partition;

type Movie.mov > Personal.txt:Movie.mov

Then delete the file Movie.mov; Done

If the owner/administrator looks at that file, it will show the file size as 32kb itself.

Now, how does the hacker take it when he wants? Say he wants to play that file, then;

start Personal.txt:Movie.mov

Done, his movie file will be launched.

How is this done? Well, the data is stored in streams and you basically redirect the ’wrong’

stream to the ’Personal.txt’….

There were pandamonium created by this some time back on ISP’s servers or so I heard.

How do you detect it as a Network administrator ? Because you have 1 file of 32kb size and

your whole disk of 10 GB is full :-(

Even the ’dir’ command will show only the parent file’s size.

There is a command line tool called ’LADS‘ which will list it!

Not just that, Microsoft realized it and now has a provision to do it; { Read }

So I’m familiar with 2 giants on firewall-front. One being Cisco and other Juniper and at times it can’t avoided that you forget password. Hey, we’all are humans and so the err…

How do you recover access to the Cisco PIX firewall ? { Click Here }

Now for Juniper Firewalls, you really don’t have a procedure, it will wipe all the configuration on it. It is considered to be a security threat and thus no feature as such.

So may it be Cisco OR Juniper, it would be suggested to have a backup copy of your most recent configuration. I would rather say, if you enter a single CLI, backup then and there.

Tools:

The only TFTP server tool I like so far is SolarWinds TFTP Server No rocket science and a simple interface to deal with. You need to register there and can download it for free. Give it a whirl and you’ll know what I’m talking about…

Working on networking devices, linux/solaris servers for configuration and stuff from a corporate Windows machine gets difficult where you’ll have to open up multiple command window.

The other day, one of my colleague brought this tiny tool to my attention by Marko Bozikovic, a nice multitabbed command processor. I really love it now. All I know for 7 or 8 telnet/ssh sessions will just have one of these open.

Checkout if the idea seems good [Click Here]