Man, what a terrible week this has turned out to be. At the beginning of the week I had a job interview on a job I believe I am qualified for and had experience doing as I had done other jobs of nearly the same thing though on a different scale (more computers to monitor but also I wouldn't have been the ONLY one doing the job like I had been in previous companies).

Late Wednesday I heard rumblings that the two positions had been filled and I hadn't heard anything, leading to a downer of a night while I waited for official confirmation. Next day I email the company and find out that in fact the positions had been filled the night before. Ok, I'm quite disappointed as it would have been more what I want to do for work, more money and steady hours.

So that left me in a slump on Thursday. On friday though, I woke up early, decided to walk to work. Get all ready, plug the headphones into my tablet and start walking.

Or, I tried to. Going down 5 steps seemed to be more than I could handle. In my defense the steps are cement and have some chunks taken out of them. Sadly, I lost my footing on one of them and managed to twist my ankle into a horrible looking (and feeling) angle, putting an end to my planned day.

Nearly seven hours later, I find out the end result (Canadian medical is free but painfully slow, in my case, literally painfully slow): I managed to break one bone in my ankle, a minor break in the other one and a few tense minutes as a specialist at another hospital decided if I needed immediate surgery or not. Currently I don't need it, but for the next week I have no cast while they see how it tries to fix itself and to reduce the swelling. After that week, i'll either end up in surgery if it's bad or a cast otherwise. Then a couple weeks after I have to go visit the specialist and see how it's going.

People seem to be fond of saying things come in three, I'm really hoping there's no more bad news coming. I'm not sure I'll survive that one.

StartUpLite is a small (200k) program from Malwarebytes who also make the very handy Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

The software does one thing and does it well: provide a quick and easy method to remove or disable unnecessary application that start during Windows startup. The interface is pretty self explanatory so I'll just post a screenshot.

There is also a list of programs that StartUpLite checks that can be helpful to determine if this tool is useful for you or not.

This is a quick tip on getting backtrack 5 to automatically login as root and startx which will run the graphical interface. There is a disclaimer though as this method does work but isn't exactly secure. Then again, if you are using Backtrack, you probably know that already :)

First step is to install rungetty

aptitude install rungetty

Next we have to edit /etc/init/tty1.conf

nano /etc/init/tty1.conf

use the arrow keys to move down to the last line and add a "#" before the line "exec /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1" so it looks like so

#exec /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1

Once that is done, add the following line which will automatically login as root

exec /sbin/rungetty tty1 --autologin root

Press CTRL+X an enter to save and close nano

Next, you need to set the .bash_profile for the root user to automatically run startx which starts your graphical interface

nano /root/.bash_profile

Add the following to this file

startx

CTRL+X to save and close

Reboot your BT5 install and there you go. Obviously, going back to the above warning, this isn't recommended for any machines that could fall into the wrong hands or if you store data on your BT5 install. Personally, I have a proxmox cluster that runs BT5 and this makes it easier to get to the console without logging in constantly, I have just have to start the VM and then vnc to the console.

Here is a quick guide on using UFW (Uncomplicated FireWall) under linux

A good first step is to do the following

sudo ufw default deny

which will set the default action to denying everything

If you are connection from remote, you will want to allow ssh otherwise it will create a nasty embarassing situation when you can't get into your machine :)

sudo ufw allow ssh

then you can enable UFW by:

sudo ufw enable

You will now have a very basic firewall setup to deny everything except ssh. Not overly helpful if you are hosting anything else on the system. The rest of the points will be in quick format and in the future I may update and clean up the info below

Disable UFW

sudo ufw disable

Enable UFW

sudo ufw enable

Get current UFW status

sudo ufw status

Allow port 80 (http)

sudo ufw allow 80

Deny a certain port

sudo ufw deny port <port number>

Deny a certain ip from entire host

sudo ufw deny from <ip address>

Block an ip from a port

sudo ufw deny from <ipaddress> to port <port number>

Advanced blocking of multiple ips from a port

sudo ufw deny from 10.0.0.1/24 to any port 22

To open up port range 64000-65000 on udp

ufw allow proto udp to any port 64000:65000

To open up port range 64000-65000 on tcp

ufw allow proto tcp to any port 64000:65000

Mostly posted in case I ever have to do this again, but also to hopefully work this post up to the top of google to help someone else out as the answer to this was buried in tons of spam sites with links to toner, drum, etc replacement sites and extremely little help on actually zeroing the drum copy counter on a Xerox Workcentre (xd125f in my case but it seems xd120f is also a common one people were trying to get help with and seems to work for it as well from what I read). The printer gives a j2 error on the screen when it hits it's max copies and just changing the drum isn't enough to reset it.

First, you need to enter diagnostics mode:

With the printer off to start, you need to turn it on and within the next 4 or 5 seconds, push Clear, Exposure Mode, Clear, Exposure mode. On the xd125f that I did this on, Clear is to the far right and Exposure is the far left button.

The display will go blank but the printer will still be running. Select 24 copies and press start and the screen will go blank again. Select 7 copies and press start again, this will reset and show 000 on the screen.

Turn off the printer, count to 5 and turn it back on to what should be a functioning printer again.

Not an overly hard process, once you know the combination of keys and the right order. Of course, finding that combination made me want to smash the printer into little bits aka Office Space (As a site note, there are tons of people copying the Office Space printer smashing scene, in fact, so many of them that I couldn't easily find the original scene to link here like I had wanted to)