New version of P4A (3.2.0) finally released!

Wow, it’s been a while since the developers updated this framework.  I thought this project was about to die because it used to be very active.  We’re actually still using v2.0 at work (which is working very well) but with the changes in this release, I think it’s time to upgrade :).

Here are the major changes (from the developer’s website, the one I’m most excited about is the P4A_Grid widget):

1. P4A is now released under LGPL 3. This means more flexibility for developers and customers.
2. A new widget, the P4A_Grid, has been added to fast table data editing.
3. P4A_Simple_Edit_Mask has been added to quickly create a simple mask to edit a database table.

You can view the entire changelog here.

Download P4A 3.2 from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=98294&package_id=105252&release_id=647599

Internet Explorer Emergency Patch

Microsoft just released this patch early today.  It’s supposed to patch a very serious vulnerability in IE and some security analysts are even suggesting to use a different browser until the vulnerability is completely patched.

If you’re using WSUS it should already be available, we synchronized our WSUS server early this afternoon and set a deadline for it to get it installed on all our computers as soon as possible.

Read more about it here.

Should you switch to open source software?

Here’s an interesting article from CIO.com explaining the benefits of switching to open source solutions.

As IT costs grow and the economic crisis puts pressure on global IT budgets, open source becomes irresistibly attractive to developers and IT decision makers who are being asked to do more with a whole lot less. Meanwhile, proprietary vendors react by increasing license fees by 15 percent to 45 percent, they continue to lock-in their customers, and they take away independence regarding choice and flexibility across the enterprise technology infrastructure.

How to send syslog messages to a remote syslog server in Fedora 9

I have a virtual machine set up running Fedora 9 on my home network which I mainly use for SSH tunneling and I just realized that this version of Fedora now uses rsyslog as its default syslog daemon.

I wanted to send a copy of the syslog messages for SSH to my central syslog server so I can easily keep track of login attempts to my server from the outside.

Here are the steps:

1. Open /etc/rsyslog.conf and  add this line:

   • authpriv.* @remote_server_ip_address

2. Restart the rsyslog service: /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart

Change “authpriv.*” to “*.*” if you wish to send a copy of all the syslog messages to the remote server.

Windows XP: Updating a domain account’s local cached password

So I took a laptop home from work tonight to do some tests and I forgot that I haven’t logged in to that laptop with my domain account for quite some time now so I of course got the message “Domain YOURDOMAIN is not available” and I couldn’t log in.

I connect to our network over a VPN connection using Cisco VPN Client but I first have to be logged in to Windows to do this.  I want to be able to log in with my domain account directly then log in to the VPN as it is more convenient so here’s what I did to update the local cache for my domain profile:

1. Log in as local Administrator.
2. Log in to the VPN.
3. While still connected to the VPN, do a “Run As” on a program.  In my case, I did a “Run As” with Outlook (press shift+right mouse click on the program’s icon, choose the option “Run As…” -> “The following user:” myDomain\username -> enter your current domain password) and the program should open using the profile of the user you wanted to run as.
4. Log off (which will also disconnect the VPN connection).
5. Log back in to your domain account using your current domain password and it should take it.

If you’re already able to log in with the cached password, but your current domain password is different from the cached password, while connected to the VPN you can just press CTRL+ALT+DEL, choose the option “Lock Computer”, and then unlock it but this time using your current domain password and that should update the cached password.