Technology Insights

How To See How Long A Windows Server Has Been Up, Windows 2003 R2 Uptime Reading

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Earlier while troubleshooting an issue for a customer I needed to start at the bare minimum of troubleshooting because the issue at hand was a bit out of my area of expertise. The problem as reported existed on a Windows 2003 R2 server running backup software called Retrospect. The backup software was reporting via email to the IT staff that it was no longer working and they needed me to locate the issue and resolve. The first thing I needed to do was to see how long the server had been up, if any patches had been applied recently, and if anything else had changed since the last successful backup. Again since this is out of my area of expertise I first needed to see how long the server had been up which luckily is almost as easy to do on Windows 2003 R2 as it is on Linux. Below I provide to examples of how to check server uptime on Windows.

Technology Insights

Restore Trillian Activity History On Windows 7, Import Trillian Chat History

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As noted in previous articles my laptops Windows 7 Ultimate x64 operating system install became corrupted after I attempted to install the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 update. I believe the issue was related to some sort of software conflict so not necessarily all SP1’s fault though you would think there would be some form of error checking involved in the install. I waited out the upgrade for over 8 hours but in the end it still failed out. Anyhow during the process of reinstalling Windows 7 x64 on my laptop and installing all of the applications that were installed previously I wanted to restore my Trillian chat history for all of the various Trillian Connections. Below I describe what connections were configured and what Trillian Connections chat logs were restored.

Technology Insights

Count How Many Files Are In A Directory And All Sub Directories On A Linux Server

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Counting files in Linux is fairly easy by simply listing the files using ls and then using the wc application. Both the ls application and the wc application are core Linux applications and should be installed by default on your server. One thing that I had forgotten how to do was how to count all files in a specific directory as well as all files in each sub directories. The second method I will display below is not 100% accurate because it will count sub directories twice however it is likely you just need a round about method to get an idea of how many files and sub directories you are working with. Below I describe first how to count all files and directories within a single directory and second how to count all the files, sub directories, and files within the sub directories via a Linux shell or command prompt.

Technology Insights

PostgreSQL: Run A SELECT Statement From A Linux Shell Using PSQL

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Earlier today I was troubleshooting some resource issues on a PostgreSQL server and needed to test some various SELECT statements to see if any of them were causing problems. I also wanted to verify the amount of resources a SELECT statement made using PGAdmin versus the amount of resources the same SELECT statement used running it directly on the Postgres server itself. Below is information on how to run a SELECT statement from a Linux shell. In this example the server is running CentOS Linux and PostgreSQL 8.4.4.

Technology Errors

Warning: Can’t Load Net::Whois::IP Module, Whois Queries Desabled

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In going through all the tools with Alex on Backtrack I have discovered a few bugs and missing modules or libs. I will be writting posts on how to fix them but I will also be adding the fix’s to Backtrack svn as well. This morning I was writting the article on Dnsenum by my buddy Barbsie and I ran into a missing perl module.

bash

  1. root@666:/pentest/enumeration/dnsenum# ./dnsenum.pl --enum -f dns.txt --update a -r cnn.com
  2. dnsenum.pl VERSION:1.2
  3. Warning: can't load Net::Whois::IP module, whois queries desabled.

Below I will show to to download and install the needed module: