Published at: 11:04 am - Wednesday April 23 2008
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.
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Published at: 04:02 pm - Friday February 15 2008
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.
Published at: 09:02 am - Friday February 15 2008
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.
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Published at: 02:02 pm - Monday February 11 2008
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”…
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Published at: 04:02 pm - Thursday February 07 2008
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.
Published at: 12:02 pm - Thursday February 07 2008
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!
Published at: 03:12 pm - Thursday December 27 2007
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.
Published at: 01:12 pm - Friday December 14 2007
Forum member Cerberus continues to hack away at his Akimbo IP1150, and this time he has added a VGA port to the box.
I can’t wait to see what the final product will look like when he is finished modding it.
Published at: 02:12 pm - Thursday December 06 2007
Forum member Cerberus has a walkthrough on his web site demonstrating how you can add a serial port to an RCA Akimbo IP TV/PVR box, enabling you to gain console access to the machine. It is a pretty easy hack, but really its the first step in hacking these things for personal use.
Not familiar with the Akimbo? That’s ok, Cerberus has a nice introduction and specification post for you as well.
Published at: 02:11 pm - Tuesday November 27 2007
As you might notice, this page has changed completely from the last time you visited. We were visited by a cracker, who took the liberty of exploiting the Xoops installation we used to have for our main page. I have now installed Wordpress, and things are looking good.
I plan to utilize this main portal page far more than it was before, linking interesting articles, forum posts, hacks, and walkthroughs created by our team members. This should be a positive change for Team Hack-a-Day.
Over the next few weeks you will see additions and changes to this site, as well as some errors/downtime/etc. as formatting and content are tweaked. Please be patient while we make these changes – you will be pleased with the results, I promise.
-DrNathan
