Category Archives: System Administration

System Administration

How To Reset Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 Passwords with Ubuntu 9.10 Live Image and a USB Drive 2

I put this together for a project in a class I am taking, and thought it would be handy for others as well. The goal is to access a Windows filesystem and reset the password for a user, for example if someone forgot the Administrator password or the account is locked out from too many [...]

Copy Files to Many USB Drives Quickly and Easily 1

I was recently tasked with copying speaker’s presentations, files and handouts onto 100s of USB Drives (key drives) for a conference that work is hosting down in Washington, D.C. My first thought was that it was going to be a pain to have to copy/paste the files to each drive. I thought about creating a [...]

How to Install SNMP on Tomato Router Firmware and Graph Traffic with Cacti 5

You’ve flashed your old WRT54G or other vanilla router with the Tomato firmware. This itself turns your router into a lean, mean routing machine with QOS, SSH and more, but let’s say we want to take it a bit further. What it we want to get some more stats out of it?
In order to do [...]

Social Media and the Downfall of the Password Reset Question 5

There have been a number of high profile account compromises due to the insecurity of password reset questions. Examples of two big ones off the top of my head are Sarah Palin Yahoo account compromise and the Twitter “Hacker Croll” fiasco. There have been many more compromises on accounts due to weaknesses in password reset questions, even [...]

Command Line Packet Sniff Existing Running Process in Linux 0

Have you ever come across a server that is doing a lot of traffic? Maybe you have logged in to see a process running at 100% CPU, so you know the culprit, but instead of kill -9ing it, wouldn’t it be great to see what exactly it is up to? Or even if you see [...]