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I’ll be offline for sometime to take a needed break…

Wahooo!

Happy birthday to me on June 5! My Wish List is available if you are planning to give me a gift. Heehee. Thank you in advance.

Every now and then, a few car manufacturers take the time to make a really cool-looking vehicle. A vehicle that oozes so much cool that it makes most people stop and take a peek at it, makes people smile when they see one.

Some cars did this to me the first few times I saw them: New beetle, PT Cruiser, Audi TT, Dodge Viper, new Ford Thunderbird, and the Porsche Boxster (to name a few).

Today, while driving on the city road, I was stuck in traffic… not the super heavy type of traffic due to a bad accident or a closed lane, but traffic due to a cool-looking car.

Finally, when I approached the “end” of the congestion, I noticed what all the fuss was about: almost every single car was slowing down to take a look at a brand new “Electric Blue” Mini Cooper S, and nearly everyone was smiling, kids were pointing.

The car wasn’t parked by the side of the road or anything, the poor driver was smirking and cruising along as fast as he could, but wasn’t able to get very far on account of people slowing down to gawk at his vehicle.

He looked mighty proud … rightfully so.

Well, I still love Jero.

How many of you installed and use Windows XP?This is a very very important information.

In order to minimize the likelihood of piracy, Microsoft has included Product Activation technology within Windows XP.

The following are twelve facts that you should know about activation:

* Activation is mandatory.

* Activation is anonymous.

* Activation and registration are two different things.

* After you install Windows XP, you have 30 days to activate it. If you fail to do so, you will not be able to use it.

* You can activate either over the Internet or with a phone call.

* You can activate Windows XP on only one computer at a time.

* You can activate Windows XP an unlimited number of times on a given computer.

* If you install the same copy of Windows XP on another computer, you’ll need to remove the copy from the first system and use the phone activation.

* Substantially changing your hardware might require that you reactivate Windows XP. In such cases, you’ll need to call Microsoft and explain the situation.

* Windows XP is not the only Microsoft program that uses activation. Office is another application.

* Microsoft is not the only company that uses activation in its products.

* If you buy several copies of Windows XP, you can get the version without the product activation code. In other words, anyone can purchase versions that don’t require activation.

By default, Windows NT creates so-called administrative shares that are accessible to domain administrators and allows them to remotely retrieve all the files on a computer. And these shares are re-created each time the system reboots.

To access administrative shares, type \computer\c$ in the Run box, where computer is the name of the remote computer, c is the partition you want to access, and the dollar sign ($) indicates that the shares are hidden. All shares on the computer–administrative and other–can be viewed by typing net share in the Command Prompt. If there’s only one partition, four default shares will be visible: IPC$, C$, PRINT$, and ADMIN$.

Administrative shares are useful for administrators but can also pose a security risk. Unless they’re needed, consider disabling them by performing this registry edit:

1. Open the Registry Editor (Regedit.exe or Regedt32.exe).

2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Paramaters.

3. Set both AutoShareServer and AutoShareWks values to 0. If these values don’t exist, create them by clicking Add Value from the Edit menu and use REG_DWORD as the type.

4. Close the Registry Editor.

To reenable the shares, simply change the two values back to 1.

This was posted by allymcjoyce in strdoc@yahoo.

Read on…

Once upon a time there was a Prince who, through no fault of his own was cast under a spell by an evil witch. The curse was that the Prince could speak only one word each year. However, he could save up the words so that if he did not speak for a whole year, then the following year he was allowed to speak two words.(This was before the time of letter writing or sign language.)

One day he met a beautiful princess (ruby lips, golden hair, sapphire eyes,) and fell madly in love.

With the greatest difficulty he decided to refrain from speaking for two whole years so that he could look at her and say “my darling”. But at the end of the two years he wished to tell her that he loved her. Because of this he waited three more years without speaking (bringing the total number of silent years to 5). But at the end of these five
years he realized that he had to ask her to marry him. So he waited ANOTHER four years without speaking.

Finally as the ninth year of silence ended, his joy knew no bounds. Leading the lovely princess to the most secluded and romantic place in that beautiful royal garden the prince heaped a hundred red roses on her lap, knelt before her, and taking her hand in his, said huskily,

“Mydarling, I love you! Will you marry me?”

And the princess tucked a strand of golden hair behind a dainty ear, opened her sapphire eyes in wonder, and parting her ruby lips, said:

scroll down……

……Well, guess what she said ……….

……come on, guess what could she have said…………..

………..well, she said…………..

pardon?

How many plums would a plumber plumb if a plumber could plumb plums?

For the past 3 months I’m not paying my cell phone bills and for 4 days now I don’t have outgoing call. Great right? It means I’m saving call-charges. I’ll keep it unpaid for sometime.

My vacation scheduled on May 23 to June 22 is again cancelled!
Reasons? Our expansion project, and other more.

Jero now runs 50,000 kms.

There are a number of methods used to restrict root logins on a given Linux server. There are also many good reasons to do so. The more commonly known methods of using sudo and su certainly apply, but if someone can log in as root, the requirements for sudo or su may no longer apply.

The /etc/securetty file is a list of devices that are considered secure, which the root user is allowed to log in via.

For instance, most distributions will, by default, have tty1 through tty6 listed in this file, indicating that root is allowed to log in at the physical machine on consoles 1 through 6.

If the /etc/securetty file contains additional devices, such as ttyS0 or ttyS1, root logins can be done over the serial device. If you have a modem connected to your computer or a serial connection from another machine, root will be able to log in through the modem or from the machine’s serial connection via a null-modem cable.

Allowing login attempts from a nonlocal source is not a good idea. In fact, the most secure alternative would be to make this an empty file. This will prevent root from logging in and will force you (and attackers) to authenticate as a valid user and su to become root. Potential attackers will need to have a valid login name and two passwords, which makes it more difficult for them, thereby keeping most attackers off of your system as root.

One caveat: If /etc/securetty does not exist, root logins are not restricted. So, for maximum security, ensure that the file exists but is empty.