breednet

I am in the middle of preparing to help out a friend with some consulting help for migrating from Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 (SEP11) to McAfee Total Protection for Endpoint on their corporate endpoints. As you may know, Symantec has the only corporate AV solution in the industry WITHOUT a centrally managed/controlled UNINSTALL function.

Anyway, so in researching how I need to accomplish this, I found a good list on MSDN for all of the standard installer command-line options for Windows installer (i.e. msiexec.exe options, MSI package commands). Thanks Microsoft, at least you are helping to document how to clean up after lame vendors like Symantec.

In Symantec’s defense, they do have knowledgebase articles for how to manually uninstall SEP here and MSI options here. However, McAfee ePO has a central way to do this, as does Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Sophos, you get the picture.

Great article here on how to go about shrinking your virtual disk size for Windows images running under VMware Fusion on a Mac.

One of my favorite open source tools for collecting and processing SNMP Traps is SNMPTT. I started my career in network management and systems management, and along with a good log management strategy, SNMP is a nice way to “trust but verify” when events happen on a system.

In an upcoming guide, I will put together a step-by-step tutorial for building SNMPTT on your server and prepare to collect traps, as well as provide a sample PHP page to display your traps.

When using Windows, it is nice to be able to simply right-click and pop open a command prompt, as opposed to Start — Run — cmd and pressing enter. Running cmd.exe still requires you to go to the exact folder you want to work in. Here are two ways to just right click on a folder to open a command prompt in that particular directory:

Easy Method:

Microsoft has a PowerToys utlity called CmdHere that gives you this functionality. Go here to download. For other cool MS PowerToys for Windows XP, go here.

Not Quite as Easy Method:

1. Open regedit (regedit.exe from the Run dialog box)
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Folder\Shell
3. Right click on the right side and Create a new key called Command Prompt
4. Your default value should be “Open Command Prompt” (without quotes)
5. Create a new key called Command under the Command Prompt key
6. Your default value should be “cmd.exe /k pushd %L” (again w/o quotes)

Your context menu when you right click on any folder will now contain an option called “Open Command Prompt” which will open a command prompt in the selected folder.

I have had the need on occasion to quickly and easily obfuscate the contents of a simple shell script. Shc is a great utility to do just that.
Man page is available here, and you can download the latest source here, and I have used this on FreeBSD, Linux and HP-UX.