Windows NT/XP security

An update: The emergency boot CD is an ISO that provides you with a convenient boot CD. The boot CD provides you with a boot into Linux with a simple way to reset your admin passwords. (site - ebcd.pcministry.com). This was useful to reset the passwords of NT images of defunct hardware that I was migrating to a virtual PC.

It is dangerous to allow a person to boot your PC with his floppy disk. This link discusses how you can get administrative access to a Windows XP machine by booting from a floppy disk.

The approach is rather ingenious. It edits the NT SAM database using an offline registry editor.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/nt.html. The utility chgntpw is excellent as an offline registry editing tool. A while back I was trying to find such a utility (see the BLOG on reinstalling Windows), but gave up. This seems promising...

This website also has approaches for admin access to Linux. A link from one of these pages discusses how to change Administrative passwords on Domain controllers - useful for administrators who install NT/XP half asleep ;-)

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/editor.html

RockXP3
While we are on security, be careful about RockXP3. One of its features is displaying passwords stored in Internet Explorer, Outlook Express and RAS. So if you save such passwords , they can be viewed with RockXP3.

Setup SMTP on a Mandrake Linux

Mandrake Linux uses Postfix rather than Sendmail.
When I try to telnet localhost smtp - it does not show any response from SMTP.

Look at /etc/syslog.conf
Find out which directory are the log files stored. In my case it was /var/log
Look at the errors in /var/log/mail/errors
Mar 6 08:29:37 linux3 postfix/smtpd[19852]: fatal: open database /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db: No such file or directory

. You specified two hash files in your postfix configuration and one of them doesn't exist. Try removing the /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.db from main.cf and see if you can get basic mail delivery working first. Only after you are satisfied with how postfix is functioning, add in the mailman stuff.

After removing the mailman aliases.db, it still did not start.
The problem was that SASL parameters were turned on but SASL libraries were not installed.
Removed SASL parameters by going back to the initial version of the config files.

This page discusses setting up outbound SMTP authentication.

http://www.thecabal.org/~devin/postfix/smtp-auth.txt

Quick notes

Trying to see how Agile can be adapted into our SAP development group.

1. Installed TWIKI - very nice :-). Twiki is a WIKI site that allows users to modify the pages on the fly. It runs on Cygwin Perl and Apache. Found a very nice step-by-step install guide for Windows. Integrated this with Windows NTLM logins - again another step-by-step guide!
2. Installed a pilot site of CommunityServer. Installing CS is really easy despite the size of CommunityServer. BTW - the source code is now available. Guess I was on the bleeding edge when I needed it last week.
3. Emule - is a distributed file-sharing network. Tried it successfully today.
4. ABAP2HTML - Converts your ABAP program to a color coded HTML. You can change the VBA macro code for this program to adapt it to your needs.

Agile Programming and SAP

Martin Fowler's web articles got me rethinking about Agile Programming. He discusses various applicable methods in the article The New Methodology. The paper Is Design Dead raises a lot of questions about whether the waterfall model is really applicable for software development. He also has a nice paper on Agile with Offshore development.

But Ron Jeffries site has a compact (and quick) introduction to Extreme Programming (XP). Martin Fowler has a page full of links to XP resources on the web.

These articles are written for general software development, not really tailored for ERP software. I am interested in seeing how these ideas could be adapted to a SAP development group. Can these advantages be translated into reality with SAP development?