Windows has a bad habit of enabling by default some shares on a new installation. These are, for example, C$, D$ (they give access to your partition roots) … ADMIN$, IPC$

Those shares are accessible by the administrators, but they could be a useless security breach.

Even worse, if you delete them, they will come back at the next start of the Server service starts…
If you wish to permanently disable them then create the following key in the registry (if it already exists, set the value to 0) :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters\AutoShareWks

REG_DWORD = 0

more good informations here : http://www.petri.co.il/disable_administrative_shares.htm

if your boot block got corrupted (virus, or installation which went wrong), you may want to try to repair it by using the Recovery Console of Windows XP.

To do so, boot on the Windows XP CD and when asked, choose to repair the Windows XP installation by pushing R.

This will lead you to the Recovery Console. You will be asked for the installation to repair (ex : 1: C:\Windows), and then to enter the administrator’s password.

Then you can try to do a fixmbr (which is equivalent to the old fdisk /mbr) or a bootblock which will install a new boot block.

Be sure to understand what you do ! You might as well spoil your last chance to recover your installation with those commands !

not to me !!

The OpenBSD project needs money to hold its events (such as hackaton, where developpers gather to implement features, or usual running costs).

If you think you don’t use OpenBSD, think again ! The project OpenSSH, which implements a free, and secure SSH implementation, comes from OpenBSD. It is widely used in many OSes and appliances …

We need OpenBSD !! Don’t hesitate to make a donation !

The original post
The OpenBSD project
The OpenSSH sister project

If you like Perl and you make dynamic websites with databases backends, Catalyst is definitely worth a look.

It is basically an MVC engine for websites. It lets you nicely separate your business logic, the display and the database backend.

It has extended plugins to deal with things like authentications, sessions, templates, RSS, and God knows what

It can integrate Apache, and harness mod_cgi’s power for high-performance web applications.

It is a little bit tricky to get it right at the beginning, but there are nice tutorials.

Have a look !

Main website you’ll find everything there

I usually code my perl programs on a development machine, and then ty to make in run in the production environment.

I used to manage by myself the various needed packages and tried to have them installed on the production environment as needed.

And one day I had to make a script run on a machine where Perl itself was not even installed…

This has been a nightmare until recently, that is to say until I discovered the PAR module. PAR is closed to the Java JAR files.

Once you have the PAR package installed, you have a set of helper scripts installed as well. Having you script run somewhere else is then as simple as :

pp -o app app.pl (you might want to do pp -o app.exe app.pl if you’re on Windows)

This script will analyze the script, gather all the dependencies (“all” including the Perl binary, used modules and DLLs), and build a self extractible archive which will unpack and execute your script when run.

Simple ?