Provins Sirock Technology Site

Archive for October, 2011

Traditionally employees have been restricted to working from an office every single day of their working lives. However, recent developments within business communications technologies have challenged this traditional approach and now allow employees to remain in contact from anywhere in the world. This means that companies can now enjoy an unprecedented level of flexibility among their employees and has allowed businesses to become truly global in their nature. Whether operating from the office, from home or from the road, employees can always remain in touch with the company and clients alike.
Gone are the days when employees were tethered to a business landline which was the only in which they could communicate within the workplace. Now with significant developments within the field of business telephone systems and the introduction of versatile new communications technologies an employee can communicate effectively from any location with access to a broadband internet connection. This breakthrough means that employees can work from home without any detriment to their business communications capability. Through use of unified communications software loaded onto a laptop the employee can choose from a range of different channels of communication including voice calls, instant messaging, video messaging, conferencing and email. This laptop can be used from any location via a broadband internet connection to communicate with other company employees, clients and suppliers.
With the majority of households now operating their own broadband internet connections employees can easily work from home when circumstances allow. This can save employees a lengthy commute and utilise their time for the progression of the company. Moreover, employees working from home can generate substantial cost savings for the company for which they work. Through the use of unified communications employees instantly have access to a wide range of channels of communication and all of their contacts even when working from home. With the development of more mobile internet connections modern business telephone systems can also be used on the move. Through the use of a public WI-FI network, an internet dongle or a mobile phone modem employees can access all of their channels of communication even when travelling. This can be particularly advantageous for sales staff and other employees who travel frequently but need to be in constant contact with the office. With unified communications and a mobile internet connection employees can access numerous means of communication from their own vehicle, while on a train or even from a client’s premises.
The development of new methods of business communications technologies has revolutionised the way in which employees not only communicate but the way in which they operate entirely. Company employees are no longer tied to their desks in order to be able to communicate effectively with clients and other employees but can travel wherever they are required and still keep in touch. Whether working from home, while on the move or even from another country employees will always be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with the office in real time.

You Have 50GB Of Data To Move Along With Permissions Security
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This article is about several tools that can save a Windows administrators you know what in the event of a large scale permissions security problem.

Here is a fictional scenario we can use to illustrate the use of the XCACLS tool. We need to move or copy 50GB worth of data that is comprised of several thousand directories containing hundreds of thousands of small files from one storage system to another. These systems happen to part of a Windows 2000 Domain and permissions are quite granular in definition. We start the replication of that data using a favorite replication or synchronization tool and walk away for the evening. When we return the next day, everything has copied and all looks well. That is until you try to access the data.

The Data Is Copied, But I Cannot Access It: Permissions Security Problem
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What you did not know, until just now, is that the root directory of the drive that you copied the data to had the wrong permissions assigned to it. In addition, inheritance was configured such that any data that is placed on the drive is over written with the permissions of the root directory. In this case, it was an old account that no longer existed. Believe it or not, that can happen, and system administrators will know what I am talking about. Now you are left with trying to figure out what to do. Do I format the new drive, change the permissions and inheritance on the root directory so they are correct and start all over again? Do I make the changes on the root drive so they have the correct permissions and wait hours upon hours for the permissions to propagate? No, there is another, very fast way of resolving this issue with XCACLS or another tool called SUBINACL.

XCALCS Quickly Resets Permissions On Directories And Files
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Becasue I have limited space in this article, I am going to use XCACLS as the tool to correct this problem. However, in complex permissions structures, you will most likely want to use SUBINACL to fix the issue. I will talk about SUBINACL briefly at the end of the article.

XCACLS as a very fast tool that can set, remove, add, and change permissions on files and directories. For intance, the following command replaces all existing access rights and accounts with that of “dmiller” on the file “file.txt” with read-only access: “xcalcs file.txt /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:r”. Although that is pretty easy and helpful, what about changing all my directories and files, which I have thousands of, to allow the domain\dmiller account to have full access? To do this in a very fast fashion you could execute the following from the root directory of the drive: “for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:f”. This will go through every directory, subdirectory, and file and replace the current permissions with dmiller having full access to the object. You’ll notice I put “” around the %g in the example. This is not required, but if you have directories that have names with spaces in them you will need to have the “”.

What Other Ways Can I Use XCACLS To Change Security Permissions
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To give you a few additional handy examples of how you can use this tool take a look at the follow command prompt methods for replacing, updating and removing accounts and permissions from large numbers of directories and files.

The following command replaces all existing access rights an accounts with that of dmiller with read only access rights:
for /d %g IN (*.*) DO xcacls “%g” /Y /T /G domain\dmiller:r
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CCNA exam success depends largely on noticing the details, and this is especially true of configurations involving directly connected serial interfaces. And of course, it’s not enough to notice these details – you’ve got to know what to do about them!

A Cisco router is a DTE by default, but directly connecting two DTEs with a DCE/DTE cable is not enough. In the following example, R1 and R3 are directly connected at their Serial1 interfaces. The line goes up briefly after being opened, but the line protocol goes down after about 30 seconds.

R3(config-if)#int s1

R3(config-if)#ip address 172.12.13.3 255.255.255.0

R3(config-if)#no shutdown

2d18h: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface Serial1, changed state to up

2d18h: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Serial1, changed state to up

R3(config-if)#

2d18h: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Serial1, changed state to down

The problem is that one of the routers needs to act as the DCE in order for the line protocol to come up and stay up. If this were your CCNA / CCNP home lab, you could just go over and look at the DTE/DCE cable to see which router had the DCE end of the cable attached. In this example, though, we don’t have physical access to the routers. How can we tell which router has the DCE end of the cable attached?

R3#show controller serial 1

HD unit 1, idb = 0x1C44E8, driver structure at 0x1CBAC8

buffer size 1524 HD unit 1, V.35 DCE cable

The show controller command gives us this information. (There’s a lot more output that this with this command, but it’s unimportant for our purposes.) The router with the DCE end of the cable needs to supply a clock rate to the DTE, and we’ll do just that with the interface-level clockrate command.
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Anonymous surfing is one of the simple solutions to this problem. Surfing websites privately by hiding your details like IP address, location is termed as anonymous surfing. You may use a proxy server to surf anonymously and hence, access the blocked websites. A proxy server allows the users to enter the blocked website’s address and then direct them to that web address in a special window. In short, you connect to a proxy server which then establishes a connection to the desired website allowing you to interact with the website in real-time.

Some of the other possible ways to unblock websites are:

Using URL Redirects
In this method, you need to create a new URL for the blocked website by using websites which offer free URL redirection service. Once you’ve the new URL with you, you need to enter it in the browser and wait for the redirection service to redirect the URL to the blocked website. This method can work in situations where new URLs do not change while being redirected to the target website.
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