In an attempt to ensure that all of his digits survive the 4th of July, forum member morehpperliter has devised a simple but elegant replacement to the time-honored tradition of “light the fuse and run like hell!”  Using an Arduino and a bit of code know-how, you too can keep yourself out of the emergency room this 4th of July.  Or you can continue shooting Roman Candles at your friends and hoping for the best…whichever works for you.

Forum member Cerberus posted a tutorial on how to rig up an always-on USB charging port for your PC using a spare USB port, a resistor, and a few pieces of wire.

It requires a small bit of soldering know-how, but anyone who has used an iron at least one time can pull this off.  It is a great option for someone looking to reduce clutter while saving energy, since it enables and USB device to charge while your PC is turned off without the need for yet another wall wart.

I am happy to announce the first public release of my MailBin application, which works in conjunction with Gmail and Newsbin to enable individuals to remotely queue up Usenet downloads by emailing themselves .nzb files.

The concept is simple, utilizing the ability to send oneself a message at Gmail.com with characters appended to your usual email address.  The MailBin application, along with Newsbin takes care of the rest.  Read more about the program here, and join the forum discussion here.

It is Alpha software in that it has not been broadly tested, but I am pretty sure of its capabilities.  Please pass along any bug reports, suggestions, etc you might have.

Thanks to Morehpperliter for the initial idea.

I like having the ability to remotely access my PC at home while I am away in case I want to grab an important file I have left there, or if I need to finish something I didn’t quite get around to.  For ages I simply set port forwarding on my router allowing port 3389 to be directed to my desktop PC, which let me connect to my computer using Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).  While this was not the most secure method of doing so, it worked, and I did not want to change how I did things.That’s not to say that RDP is not secure – it does use 128 bit RC4 according to Microsoft.  However, with man-in-the-middle attacks being relatively easy to carry out, I thought there had to be a better (and more secure) way of connecting to my oh so precious home network.

In the end, I decided that I could route my RDP sessions through an SSH tunnel and sleep a little easier at night.  If you follow the directions below, you can too…

Installing CopSSH

1)    Download CopSSH, Putty and Puttygen.

2)    Execute the CopSSH installer, click Next to proceed, then click I agree to accept the license agreement.

3)    Select the installation directory as shown below. Note: Unless you are running Windows XP 64-bit, you will install in the regular Program Files directory, rather than the Program Files (x86) directory as shown.  Click Install to proceed.

4)    Once all of the files are copied and the service has been started, you will receive the following message stating that no users are enabled on the server.  This is a security precaution – you will need to manually activate each user who you wish to allow access via SSH.

5)    To add a user, open the Start Menu, locate the CopSSH folder, and launch the Activate a User application.  Select the user you wish to activate from the drop down box shown.  Before you click Next, you can deselect the option to Create keys for public key authentication if you wish to generate the keys separately.  I will demonstrate how to generate keys separately, so deselect the box if you wish to follow along.

Note: I used the computer Administrator account to provide an example.  I did not actually enable the built-in Administrator account to use SSH on my PC.

6)    Upon clicking Next, you will receive a message stating that the selected user has been activated and can access the machine via SSH.

SSH Key Pair Generation

1)    Start Puttygen, enter 4096 into the Number of bits in a generated key field, then click Generate to begin the key creation process.

2)    Move the mouse as requested to add randomness to the key generation.  Once you have generated enough random movements, your key will be created.  Once the generation has finished, add a Key Comment if you wish, then enter a key passphrase two times as shown – the more complex, the better.

3)    Highlight all of the text in the Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file box and paste the data into a text editor.  Save the file to the
C:\Program Files\copssh\home\<UserID>\.ssh\ folder, naming the file authorized_keys with no extension.

This naming is important unless you change the key file that CopSSH looks for in the SSHD configuration file.  For the Administrator account shown, you would save the file as
C:\Program Files\copssh\home\Administrator\.ssh\authorized_keys.

Note: You cannot simply click the Save Public Key button to generate this file - CopSSH will not accept that file format as a key.  You must manually copy and paste the public key as noted above.

4)    Now click Save Private Key and save the private key to a location that you will remember.  Close Puttygen.

Configuring CopSSH

1)    Now, we are going to reconfigure CopSSH to use a port other than 22 for connectivity.  Changing the port number adds a bit of security through obfuscation to your SSH install – since port 22 is commonly used for SSH, changing the port in your installation makes it just a bit harder for someone to try hacking your computer via SSH.  To change this setting, we need to open the SSHD configuration file.  It is located at C:\Program Files\CopSSH\etc\sshd_config – you can open it in Wordpad or any text editor.  Notepad really is not the right tool for this job.

2)    In the file, the first value you can change is Port.  Change it to something that you will remember, uncomment the line by removing the pound sign at the beginning of the line, then save and close the file.

3)    Now, restart the OpenSSHD service via Windows’ Services panel to allow the configuration changes to be applied.

4)    If you have a router with firewall capabilities installed, you should log on to the administration web page and forward the SSH port you just defined to the computer on which you installed CopSSH.  I will assume that you know what you are doing and let you take care of this on your own.

Configuring Putty

Now we need to configure Putty to connect to our SSH server.  This is a pretty straightforward process that you should do on the remote computer from which you want to connect.

1)    Launch Putty.  Under Session settings, we will adjust 2 items:

a) Set your Host Name or Host IP for connection.  I use DD-WRT on my router, and it supports DynDNS – so I just entered my DynDNS host name here.

b) Set the Port number to reflect the port number you configured in the sshd_config file earlier.

2)    Under Connection -> Data, we will adjust one item:

a) Set the Auto-login Username value to reflect the user you enabled on the SSH server

3)    Under the main SSH section, we will adjust two items:

a) Check the Enable Compression box under Protocol Options section

b) Select 2 only under the Preferred SSH protocol version section

4)    Expand the SSH section and select Auth.  In this section, we will set the Private key file for authentication to the location of the private key you created earlier.

5)    Under the Tunnels section of the SSH section, we will establish the tunneling settings for your remote desktop sessions.  This where the real work gets done.

You must create an entry for each computer you want to connect to at the other end of the SSH tunnel.  To do this, you will need RDP enabled on the target computer, as well as the host name of the target computer.  Once you have entered the proper values, click Add to add the port forwarding to the configuration.

In the previous picture, you should note two things:

a) The Source port refers to the port you are connecting to on your local computer, i.e. the port that Putty will listen to for connections while you have the SSH tunnel established.  I usually set this to 3390 for the first host I want to RDP to, and then count up from there.

b) In the Destination section, you will need to enter the name of the remote host you want to connect to, followed by a colon, then the RDP port number.  For hosts using the default Windows RDP configuration, this is always 3389.  If you have changed this value, adjust as necessary.

You can pretty much add as many hosts as you can keep straight in your head:

5)    Finally, return to the main Sessions section of Putty and give the configured session a name as seen below.  Click Save to save your configuration – it will then appear in the list of saved session configurations.

6)    Finally, when you want to RDP into your remote computer, you can launch the Putty console to establish the connection, or you can simply run “putty.exe –load <session name here>” from the command line to launch Putty and connect to your remote host.  For example, I would type “putty.exe –load Home Network” if I wanted to launch this particular connection.

7)    After you authenticate using the passphrase you created earlier, you can simply RDP into your remote computer by connecting to localhost:3390 from the Remote Desktop Connection application as shown below:

Note: You can always test SSH connectivity locally by replacing your SSH host’s IP address with localhost and launching Putty.  In fact, I recommend you do this to ensure that your key pair is working properly before you attempt to connect remotely.

Download This Guide in PDF Format Here

I can see that we are getting a little influx of traffic from my Lifehacker comments and such, so I wanted to give visitors an idea of what Team Hack-a-Day is about, and encourage them to stop by our forum and chat room as well.

Our main focus is participating in Stanford University’s Folding@Home Project, which is a distributed computing application which allows Stanford researchers to utilize unused computer cycles to further their research into diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s,  Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, etc.  This is done by downloading the Folding@Home software package and installing it on your computer.  It is an incredibly easy process, and I encourage any visitors that are not currently participating in the project to do so.  A (somewhat dated) installation and configuration walk through can be found here.

For those of you wondering why or how we became organized around this project, you can read the full details here - for those of you who want the quick and dirty version, here goes.  Several readers of the Hack-a-Day blog decided to start participating in Stanford’s Folding@Home project, and one skilled gentleman that goes by the name BillytheImpaler put together a great how-to guide to help others get folding.  Many people joined in, and once the community began to outgrow the Hack-a-Day comments section, a user by the name of PocketLnt started an online forum for the group.  With an unofficial blessing from Eliot Phillips, the founder of Hack-a-Day, Team Hack-a-Day and our web site were born.

As time went on, the group grew in magnitude as did our Folding@Home contributions.  Team Hack-a-Day is now ranked number #29 in the world for its contributions to Stanford’s Folding@Home project with a total of over 80,000,000 points.

Our forum is full of people from various backgrounds with two things in common: our love for technology, and our drive to help rid the world of these protein-related diseases any way we can.  Take a look around, I guarantee you will find something of interest.

I saw a recent article on Lifehacker about cleanly shutting down and restarting explorer.exe in Windows Vista. I gave it a try in XP just for the sake of it, and not surprisingly, it did not work.

I did however find a way to do it in Windows XP that I wanted to share with others.

You can see the full process after the jump.

Before we begin, some people have asked why you would want to restart explorer.exe in the first place.  There are times when this can be helpful, such as when Windows refuses to unlock a file you are trying to delete, or if you need to refresh something that has to do with the visual aspect of Windows.  The explorer shell is handles all file and display aspects of Windows, so you may find it helpful to restart explorer.exe when you are in a bind.

Now on to the important stuff!

The first step to restart explorer.exe is to click on Start and select Shut Down. The Windows shut down dialog will appear.

Next, while holding down the Control, Shift, and Alt keys (notice I did not say Ctrl-Alt-Del!) click the Cancel button on the shut down dialog window. This should kill explorer.exe and leave you with no Start menu, task bar, etc.

Now, press Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Windows task manager. Click File and select New Task (Run…).

This will bring up the Create New Task dialog box. Simply type in explorer.exe to relaunch Windows Explorer.

It has been noted that you can also restart explorer.exe very easily using Sysinternals Process Explorer.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of a working Promise RAID controller, it was the age of a failed Promise RAID controller…

My motherboard has two on board Sata RAID controllers - one Promise FastTrack 378 controller and one Intel ICH5 controller. They are far from enterprise-grade, but they get the job done…most of the time. I began having problems with the ICH5 controller awhile back, where the controller would suddenly “lose” one or both of the drives in my RAID0 array. Obviously this is a problem, but I stuck with that controller until I couldn’t take it any more.

I finally decided to give up on the Intel controller, so I started shopping around for a new SATA II controller card, capable of RAID0. I narrowed down my options and settled on a Promise FastTrack TX2300 card, figuring that since my current Promise controller had a good track record, adding another Promise card would be great.

That assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Let’s just say the card didn’t live up to its “Promise”…
Sad, sad puns aside, trying to get the new card to work was a nightmare.  After many days of trying and some interesting troubleshooting later, I was just about ready to give up.  Connecting the new card to my hard drives would cause my system to be unbootable, no matter what I tried.  I finally found a comment by someone in a random forum who had similar problems with a similar on board Promise controller.

The final verdict?

Well, it seems that they were able to get a response from Promise technical support who told them, in broken English, that you cannot use an on board Promise controller with a separate Promise controller board.  In no way were the two compatible.  In short, Promise controllers do not work with other Promise controllers!!!

I promptly boxed my Promise card up, sent it back to Newegg, and went shopping for a new card.  I settled on a Highpoint RocketRaid 1720 card which worked like a charm once it was installed.  It took 2 minutes to install and has been nothing but easy to use.

The lesson here is “Never buy a Promise product and expect it to work with any other Promise product”.

I really wish they would have stated that there would be a conflict on their web site, or in the product documentation, but it was nowhere to be found.

So now you know…and knowing is half the battle.

The forum upgrade went smoothly, and everything looks like it was carried over properly.

There are a few things that are missing such as  “Quick Reply” and the advertisements, among a few others.  I will be bringing those components back up to speed shortly, so bear with us.

The only issue that might remain from the upgrade is an issue with some passwords not converting properly.  If you cannot log into the forum, just use the “I Forgot my Password” function to reset your password.  If you cannot reset your password, just drop me an email at admin-at-teamhackaday-dot-com, and I will see what I can do.

The forums might seem like they are down, but that is not the case.  We are doing some housekeeping and upgrading our forum to the newest version of phpBB.  Expect some down time as we migrate posts and such, as well as after the upgrade.  Hopefully our old theme will work with the new software, but if not, I will hunt something down ASAP!

Bear with us, it will be over soon!

Forum member DrNathan posted a quick write-up on how to use Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2, Beta 3, and Beta 4 side-by-side without causing any profile conflicts or corruption. It only takes minutes and is a nice way to give the new iteration of Firefox a spin before the final version is released.