Software

General Nonsense, Software

Fun with Garmin Forensics

As you’ll recall from my Christmas post the company I work for is replacing their fleet management equipment, and in part that means upgrading some of our older Garmin GPS screens. As a result a steady stream of old equipment has been trickling into my office. Even though these units no longer fit our needs,…
Helpful Tools, VBScript

Import Nextel iDEN Contacts to Google

Sprint is decommissioning it’s Nextel iDEN network in 2013. The Nextel network has been very popular with businesses for it’s push-to-talk (PTT) “walkie-talkie“-like service. Several rugged (and bulky) mobile phones like the Motorola i355 and i365 are well adapted to the sometimes harsh environments of field work and clumsy service technicians. Unfortunately it seems that…
Hacks, Helpful Tools, Rants

Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool (SERT) Pin Number (All of Them)

The Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool (SERT) is a great concept, it puts the power of Symantec’s Endpoint Protection antivirus scanning onto a bootable CD. If you are familiar with rootkits, you can probably see where this is useful. To scan a file for viruses an antivirus scanner makes a request to the operating system for…
Bash, Helpful Tools, System Administration

Access an APC AP5456 IP Gateway for Analog KVM in Linux

I recently wrote about running an ActiveX component without Internet Explorer. I used that technique to come up with a shell script front-end for downloading, unpacking and running an executable in Wine for accessing an APC IP KVM (model AP5456). Here is the results of that effort. At a minimum the script requires Wine and…
Helpful Tools, System Administration

Make a Program Run as a Windows Service on Boot

Components that run automatically with Windows on boot up often establish themselves as a system service. Other options are to add programs into the registry in places like HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run and HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or into the “All Users” Startup group folder (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, C:\Users\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup). There are pros and cons to each method,…