Category Archives: security

Repairing a TrueCrypt Volume and Unmountable Boot Volumes

Posted on by

truecrypt-logo38pxThe dreaded Unmountable Boot Volume rears its ugly head from time to time. Microsoft says it’s either a bad cable or a corrupt filesystem. For me it has always been the later which I fix by putting the harddrive into another computer and running a chkdsk. Or windows sees it as corrupt and fixes it for me (ie Windows 7). But what if your drive has full disk encryption using Truecrypt? (Don’t know what TrueCrypt is? It is an encryption program that can encrypt full volumes or volumes you create. Awesome indeed)

TrueCrypt is not longer being supported and is now VeraCrypt https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/. The info here should be the same for 7.1a versions of TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt.

 

I have a MacBook Pro so I hooked up the drive using a USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Cable (which are very handy BTW) and mounted it in Parallels Desktop with Windows XP by selecting the USB ATA Bridge under the Devices->USB menu. I loaded up TrueCrypt in XP and mounted the drive. You have to make sure to mount the drive with “mount partition using system encryption without pre-boot authentication” selected under options. I forgot to do this and got frustrated, but after a quick google I figured that part out. Here is where that is:

truecrypt-mount-without-pre-authentication

Once the volume was mounted under windows TrueCrypt noticed the volume had not been unmounted correctly and asked me if I wanted to ChkDsk the drive. I said yes as this is exactly what I wanted to do! It found a couple problems and ChkDsk stopped. I then ran ChkDsk 2 more times till it ran with no errors.

I now have a bootable TrueCrypt system volume again and best of all my client will be happy she can get access to her files!

Paypal’s Security FOB

Posted on by

Yes this has been reviewed multiple times (here) as well as talked about on one of my favorite podcasts Security Now (transcript), but I just had to let the people who look at my blog (all 8 of you lol) how great it is. Here is a picture of it:

This hangs on my keychain and has a button that when I press on it gives me a 6 digit number which I can then use to log into paypal.

In fact I just used it to login to paypal to help my buddy Matt get his Dad a new wii at http://www.mydadneedsawii.com/. Please check it out and donate a dollar or two.

So here are the steps to using the Paypal Security device:

1) Goto http://www.mydadneedsawii.com/
2) Click on the Donate button on the right
3) Enter an amount (ie $5) and click Update Total
4) Enter your paypal email and password
5) Then instead of logging you in you are presented with a box to enter your 6 digit security code from your Paypal FOB.

So that is it. Pretty simple and makes your paypal account alot more secure. Check out more on the paypal site.. You also get to use the same key for your eBay login!

SuSE SLES 10 Migrating from NIS using MigrationTools

Posted on by

So we were moving a NIS database to LDAP under SUSE SLES 10 using the MigrationTools-47 scripts. It generated the ldif file, but would not import because it was failing on adding groups. This was the error we were getting:

(65) no structural object class provided

All we had to do is change this:

objectClass: posixGroup
objectClass: top

to this:

objectClass: posixGroup
objectClass: namedObject
objectClass: top

for each group in the ldif file. Then we redid slapadd -l file.ldif and everything worked.
Continue reading →

Tired of popups and spyware?

Posted on by
Reply

I know everyone I talk to that uses windows for more than 1 week is tired of popups. Those annoying little buggers get into IE and annoy you to the end. Well now you have some help: Spybot-S&D. Spybot searches for over 12,000 spyware programs, popups and any other malware that has infested your windows pc. It can even immunize you from allowing those same greedy little programs from burrowing their way back into your browser. Here is the place to go get spybot: Spybot-S&D – http://www.safer-networking.org/ If you like this program which is free please donate to the author so he can continue to develop the great piece of software. I donated $5 just today!

To see what steps I use when setting up Spybot click on read more…

(note) Having anti-virus software and anti-spyware are an essential part of using windows operating systems. Click on read more to get more info.
Continue reading →