Vista not any more secure than XP

Well, CRN has done a test. Here is the bottom line:

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Based on the Test Center's findings, businesses that migrate their Windows PCs from XP to Vista will get a slightly more secure OS. But as the Finjan reports showed, Vista's security remains wafer thin.

In the end, both the Vista and the XP test notebooks were almost equally damaged by viruses, trojans and other malware. And because most of the Web sites in the test were able to exploit Vista's weaknesses, Internet users are just about equally vulnerable with both OSes.
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Click here for the full article.

Josh Phillips
ProVisionIT™
www.provisionit.com

Imaging Lenovo Desktops

We were setting up some Lenovo 3000 J Series desktops for a customer, and had quite a time imaging them. Got the first one setup, then attempted to image to the others. Began getting the following error when we would boot the newly imaged disk:

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verifying DMI pool data

There as been a signature failure
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Turns out that the IBM Rescue and Recovery stuff (Client Security) didn't like the way we imaged, and/or the fact that we ran sysprep before imaging. After messing around with a lot of different stuff, finally found that if we started up Ghost with the "Image Boot" switch (ghost.exe -ib) and then did a disk-to-disk image, everything worked correctly.


Josh Phillips
ProVisionIT™
www.provisionit.com

More SIP Stuff

Today we had an issue with getting a remote extension to connect correctly to our Asterisk (PBXtra) box. It would connect remotely, but certain functions wouldn't work (like call transfer). It turned out that the Embarq/Sprint DLS modem was blocking or redirecting certain SIP ports (10000-20000 UDP). We reconfigured the modem as a bridge (was previously NAT'ing the internal network) and connected a Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT installed. Then, after connecting the phone, the remote extension began working. Now, this business's secretary can work from home and transfer calls, etc. just as if she was in the office!


Josh Phillips
ProVisionIT™
www.provisionit.com

Edit Firefox Custom Dictionary

Today I clicked to add a word to my Firefox dictionary by accident. After searching around everywhere in the Firefox menus, I couldn't find anywhere to edit the dictionary. Turns out you can't. So, browse to the following locations depending on your operating system:

Windows XP

C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

Windows Vista

C:\users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\

Mac OS X

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/

Linux

~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/

Once you are in the correct location for your operating system, look for persdict.dat, and open it with your favorite text editor. In this file, you will see line-by-line all of the words you have manually added to the dictionary. Simply delete the entries you don't want.

Josh Phillips
ProVisionIT™
www.provisionit.com

Broadvoice Registration Error on Asterisk Server

So I've messed around with asterisk@home, Trixbox, as well as the commercial side of all these products, Fonality's PBXtra. Here are a couple of things I've learned the hard way:

1. Broadvoice blocks your external IP address for an unknown amount of time (1 hour according to one tech that I talked to), when you have too many failed registration attempts. Ok...what's the deal here? I heard from someone else that they did this, so when I couldn't get my Broadvoice trunk to register, I changed the external IP address on my router to another IP in my pool, and it registered.

2. If you want to change which Broadvoice proxy an Asterisk server connects to, don't change the proxy name in the config file (just leave it at sip.broadvoice.com) and make an entry in /etc/hosts for whichever proxy you want to connect to.

Well, there is more, but that's all I have the energy for right now. I'll post more later.

Josh Phillips
ProVisionIT™
www.provisionit.com