Tech Chop! Ep. 2 How To Securely Wipe a Hard Drive Using Linux

Since the month is basically over, I decided to go ahead and release episode two of Tech Chop. The email in this video actually comes from a former co-worker of mine who was looking to use Bauer-Puntu to wipe some hard drives on servers before donating them to a local charity. If you didn't know there are two utilities that you can use to do this in Bauer-Puntu. The one I show you in this episode is called Shred.

The reason you want to securely wipe a drive before donating it, or selling it on eBay is that if you don't, the potential for the next owner of your equipment obtaining your financial records, or finding your secret stash of porn vids is pretty good. Simply formatting your drive isn't good enough to prevent this, as most of the data still exists on the drive. The only way you can make sure people can't recover that data is to over-write the drive multiple times with random 1's and 0's.

Now that you have a basic idea of what the show is about, here is episode two of Tech Chop!



What do you like to use to wipe hard drives? How many passes do you usually do? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: how to, securely, wipe, hard drive, hdd, linux, ubuntu

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Permaban for players with Halo: Reach

 

If you have downloaded the leaked Halo: Reach and play it on Xbox Live watch out: Microsoft will kick your ass from Xbox Live forever.

Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's director of Policy Enforcement for Xbox Live, said they’ll permanently ban anyone who plays the leaked game on Xbox Live.

He posted on his Twitter acount.  "as with all unauthorized play on Xbox LIVE, anyone playing any unauthorized title runs the risk of account permaban and console." And "remember, legit store bought copy runs no risk of ban. Key word: UNAUTHORIZED. We have ways of knowing. :>."

Toulouse did not say if they have or have not already banned some people, but it's clear that Microsoft is acting quickly to deter players from pirating the game.

Halo: Reach is set to be released on September 14. Last week, copies of the game started coming up on P2P (torrent) sites like The Pirate Bay.

Now that’s not to say if you disconnect yourself from Xbox Live and play the game that they will be able to catch you at all. So you can always download and play it to get the upper hand on all your friends that wait for the official release.

Photo Credit to Bungie Studios

By: FreedomChicken

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SQL Error: The Given Network Name is Unusable

I was setting up a SQL 2008 R2 Failover cluster the other day in VMWare. We are currently using VMWare 4.0 Update 1. I had previously setup my failover clustering in Windows using my instructions here: (Setup a Failover Cluster in VMWare). After setting that up, I thought everything would be smooth. Well, not so much.

Setting up failover clustering in VMWare isn’t that difficult, but it is time consuming. I thought that with the hard part behind me, installing SQL would be a piece of cake. With Murphy’s law in full effect, I guess i was wrong. You see, while going through the installation wizard for Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 I would get to the Instance Configuration screen and I would get the following error:

The given network name is unusable because there was a failure trying to determine if the network name is valid for use by the clustered SQL instance due to the following error: 'The network address is invalid.'

WTF is that? It turns out the problem is with VMWare tools. in fact, the Shared Folders option in VMWare tools is the culprit here. To fix I I had to cancel the SQL install and do the following on both nodes in the cluster:

1. Start vSphere Client and connect to either ESX server running the VM or to vCenter server managing the ESX.
2. Find the problematic VM in inventory and then select Install/Upgrade VMware Tools for the VM
3. Select Interactive Tools Upgrade
4. Connect to the console of the problematic VM and run VMware Tools setup from mounted cd-rom
5. Select Modify program maintenance
6. Uninstall Shared Folders from VMware Device Drivers (anyway this feature is not used when a VM runs on ESX host)
7. Restart Guest OS
8. Install SQL Server 2008 R2 based cluster

After I did that, I was able to install SQL without a hitch!

Did you run into a similar problem? Did you solve it differently? Let us know in the comments!

[Via Andrei Maier]

Technorati Tags: sql 2008 r2,failover,cluster,error,vmware,tools

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Alternative To Ninite

A while back I wrote about one of the coolest applications I have ever seen. The reason it was so cool was because it is such a time saver! The tool was called Ninite, and in just a couple of checkmarks later you will be given a free installer that will automatically download and install all of your favorite freeware programs!

Now every time I have to rebuild a Windows workstation, one of my first stops is to the Ninite website to download an all-in-one installer for my favorite free programs. Well, Ninite isn’t the only game in town any more.

If for some weird reason you don’t like Ninite, then there is an alternative. It is called FreeApps, and can download just as many, if not more apps in an all-in-one, one stop shop. According to their page, you can install your favorite apps in three easy steps:

Easy, Fast and Safe Way for Downloading Freeware!

1. Choose free apps you like best

2. Get FreeApps installer

3. Have a cup of coffee and all work will be automatically done in a few minutes

 

If Ninite, and FreeApps can do this, there must be others. If you know of any others let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: alternative to,ninite,freeaps,all-in-one,installer,freeware,open source

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Download Music From Pandora… And Other Sites

I’m not sure if this is legal or not. In fact, i am pretty sure it isn’t. I don’t want to be that guy who shows you something really friggin’ awesome, and doesn’t tell you that there is a slight possibility that you may be breaking the law. Anything you do using this software is on you, not on me. get it? Good!

So anyway, I was surfing around the interweb when i came a across a pretty nifty piece of software. Before I go any further, I want to find something out. Please raise your hand if you like to listen to music. Please raise your other hand if you like to listen to free music. Now raise your foot if you like to listen to said free music on Pandora. Now raise your other foot if you’ve ever wanted to download the songs you hear on Pandora! I hope you were sitting down…

This really cool tool I found allows you to do just that! It is called Orbit Downloader and will let you download your favorite songs directly from Pandora! That isn’t all though, it also lets you download music from other music sites like Yahoo Music, MySpace Music, Bebo Music etc! Besides music, it also lets you download videos from just about every video site on the internet as well. you can download videos from Youtube, Metacafe, Veoh, and others! You can even download files from Rapidshare with it!

  From their page:

Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/streaming media from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare, support RTMP. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

There are many free video and music downloaders out there, but few of them offer a one-stop-shop experience that allows you to download from multiple sites all in one convenient package.

Do you know of a similar software? Know of any ones that are better? Let us know about your favorite in the comments!

Technorati Tags: free,download,music,video,pandora,youtube,yahoo music,myspace music

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Hide Your Torrents in Plain Site

I was surfing the internet the other day when I came across something pretty interesting. I know the idea isn’t knew per se because I have blogged about doing something similar before, but this new twist seems pretty cool. It’s cool because it basically lets you trade torrent files in plain site, and the bloodhounds at the RIAA and MPAA can’t search for them. Go ahead and say it, “F**K the RIAA (or MPAA)”!

The thing I came across allows you to convert a simple torrent file of 250kb or less into a png image that you can post anywhere. Flicker, Facebook, basically anywhere you can share images. Then people can find that image, and using this tool, can convert it back to a torrent and download their stuff. Simple!

The tool is called Hid.im. It also has it’s own Firefox extension so you can convert torrents to png, or vice versa anywhere! From their page, here are some sample Hid.im torrents:

 

• 

  sameer verma - olpc photo dvd.torrent

• 

  legaltorrents collections - web development icons superset.torrent

• 

  politics apocalypse - oppressed by the authorities remix sources.torrent

Pretty cool right? Now this only keeps the authorities from finding your torrent files online via search, however once you convert it and start downloading whatever it is you are downloading, it will not prevent people from grabbing your IP address from the tracker. So make sure you are only using this for legit torrents ok ;-P

Know of any other interesting ways to hide your torrent activity? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: hide,torrent,png,hid.im

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My New Favorite Open Source Alternative to Ghost

I periodically will write about cool free disk imaging tools I find. There are many free ones out there, but only a few are worth mentioning in my opinion. For deploying images to multiple computers at once, I have written about Fog which uses Partimage as it’s disk cloning tool.

Another free tool I have written about that is also based on Partimage is P.I.N.G. or Partimage Is Not Ghost. That one is good because you can quickly boot off of a live CD and create an image to USB, or even create a pxe environment to use in a server like situation. If you have the right tools you can even make self-bootable ghost DVD’s which can come in handy. The only problem I have with P.I.N.G. is it’s requirement to use answer files in order to get the job done.

Well today I had to take some disk images of two HP Proliant servers, and I wanted to try something new. I have heard of this tool before, but never got around to using it until today. It is called Clonezilla! Instead of using Partimage, it instead is based on Partclone. Not that it really makes a difference.

Clonezilla comes in two flavors. A live version for quick imaging to USB drives, or a server edition for multicast cloning. Here are a list of features from their website:

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

I liked Clonezilla because it was fast, and it didn’t require the different files like P.I.N.G. did. I just booted up, selected my USB drive as the destination and followed the prompts. It couldn’t be easier!

What’s your favorite Linux based cloning solution? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: clonezilla,free,open source,linux,disk cloning,symantec,norton,ghost,alternative

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