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Transpose Open Office Calc data from rows to columns, or vice versa

11
5. May 2009 / in HowTo, Technology / by

I had to shift through a ton a data today and after I was have way through I realized that I would be easier to express and analyze the data if it was transposed o just filled in the other way around (rows and columns).  On any other day or a different stage of the work I would have retyped it, but I got lazy and found this link and all you have to do is a special paste and check the transpose box.

Incredible!

The best thing is that it works both in M$ Office and Open Office.

Updated 2013/09/04:
As reader Blub kindly pointed out, the link I had was dead so, here is the information directly

  1. Select the range of cells containing the data that is to be transposed.
  2. Click Edit and select Cut.
  3. Select a cell in the spreadsheet that the table will start.
  4. Click Edit and select Paste Special.
  5. In the Options section, check the Transpose checkbox.
  6. Click OK

Additionally here are some links if you want to see the screen shots:
MS Office or Open Office Calc

 

Merging PDF files

0
5. May 2009 / in HowTo, Linux, Open Source, Technology, Windows / by

Have you ever scanned a pile of documents on a “non enterprise” o home scanner, or just got distracted when using the big Xerox machine in the office.  You’ll end up with a ton of individual pdf files.  After a little google and man reading I found these 2 solutions.

  1. On linux just use pdfmerge:   sudo yum install pdfmerge or download the windows version
  2. Do it by hand with ghostscript:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf Scan001.pdf Scan002.pdf

snmp errors in syslog

1
19. April 2009 / in HowTo, Linux, Security / by

I finally got fed up of these messages in my log files (/var/log/messages) and decided to do something about them:

Apr 19 04:14:47 hostname snmpd[3458]: Connection from UDP: [127.0.0.1]:42482
Apr 19 04:14:47 hostname snmpd[3458]: Received SNMP packet(s) from UDP: [127.0.0.1]:42482

After reading, googling around and testing for a while I rounded it the following solution, it should work in any Linux system with net-snmp after some tweaks but out of the box on CentOS, REL, Fedora or any of its relatives:

1. Remove the -a from the snmpd start options or write this in the /etc/sysconfig/snmpd.options file:

OPTIONS=”-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -p /var/run/snmpd.pid”

This should take care of the “Received SNMP” packets line (2nd one).

2. Add dontLogTCPWrappersConnects true at the end of your /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf file, that takes care of the other line:

Apr 19 04:13:47 dcf-is1p snmpd[3458]: Connection from UDP: [127.0.0.1]:48911

According to the man page: This setting disables the log messages for accepted connections. Denied connections will still be logged.”

The problem is that the default settings are to log every connection / request, so what we did was leave the log work only for failed and authenticated attempts

Enjoy readable logs!

Windows FTP client passive

2
2. March 2009 / in Education, Technology, Windows / by

Have you ever tried to connect to an ftp server on a windows box?

I had to do it today and that thing doesn’t know the command: PASV !!

Well after surfing for while I found the workaround: just type:

LITERAL PASV

That bypasses the checks on the client and just sends the command to the server.

picasa and Fedora 10

4
24. February 2009 / in Open Source, Software / by

It’s really been a while since a sent my last update with pictures of what I’ve done.  I normally try to keep friends and family up to date on what I’ve been doing since I moved to the other side of the Atlantic (to the European side).  So today I fired up picasa to get the web albums up2date and nothing happend.  When I ran it in a shell this came out:

[host]:/home/epablo:>picasa
/usr/bin/picasa: line 139: 25634 Segmentation fault      “$PIC_BINDIR”/wrapper check_dir.exe.so
/usr/bin/picasa: line 175: 25734 Segmentation fault      “$PIC_BINDIR/wrapper” regedit /E $registry_export HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-4\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences\

After googling for I while I didn’t find any reasonable explanation for the error.  I did find a beta (comming from google what could I expect) repository (here are the instructions on how to set it up) and upgraded from picasa-2.7.3736-15 to picasa-3.0.5744-02

It started up, I’ll keep you posted on how it goes with the field try..

VMware Workstation 6.5.0 + fedora 10

1
9. February 2009 / in Technology / by

So I upgraded to Fedora 10 and my VMWare stoped working as expected and comented on my last post.

After testing, playing and surfing for I while I found this post which gave me some ideas.  This his how I got it working:

TERM=dumb /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig –console –install-all –icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/32×32/apps/vmware-workstation.png –appname=”VMware Workstation”

So have fun

VMware Workstation linux kernel upgrade

1
18. November 2008 / in Technology / by

After test driving the latest version of VMware Workstation: 6.5.0.  I must say that they fixed most of the small things that made it a pain in the … hard to work with or better described apt for more advanced users.  You get a straight forward RPM installation and everything just works!, you don’t have to patch it anymore.

I did just find a small problem after installing the latest Fedora 9 kernel upgrade to 2.6.27.x, as usual it didn’t start because the new kernel modules have to be built.  The GUI detected the problem, and tried to do it itself but I couldn’t find the reason why so I found two ways to make it work:

  • Reinstall the rpm
  • Use the following oneline:

TERM=dumb /usr/bin/vmware-modconfig –console –install-all

/etc/init.d/vmware restart

The old vmware-config.pl is gone or maybe just masked but it works as it should.

Certifications

0
21. October 2008 / in Education, General / by

Well after postponing it for quite a while I finally decided it was time to go down the certification path.  So there are a couple of questions that came to mind, I think I did my homework and these were my answers:

Why get certified?

Well it’s a way of proving that you know something to other people, in particular to potential new employers.  It is said that certs are a great way to boost your career or at least make a statement on where you want to steer yours to, i.e. if you take some CISCO certs, you probably what to pursue a the networking path; or if you take a security cert you’re showing that’s the way you want to go.

What certification should I get?

This was a hard one, there are lots of them out there.  So I took some notes and talked to people last year when I attended the RSA Conference 2007.  I also found a great website where they did some comparisons on with a lot of different variables.  After some thinking around I decided to start with Security+ and after that pursue OPSE and / or the well known CISSP.  So step 1 is done.

Other thoughts

A cert alone doesn’t make a good or complete professional, I know a couple of cert holders that don’t know squat and can’t solve a problem in their “area of expertise” even if their life depended on it.  One of those was and old colleague, he had a couple of the CISCO certs and said that he was an expert in networking but couldn’t understand the difference in the use of the POP3 (TCP 110) and webmail or HTTP (tcp 80), after that we just labeled him port 80.

Well officially as of last week I approved my Security+ exam and should continue down the cert road to get a couple more.

Howto: UMTS Card Fedora 9

0
27. August 2008 / in HowTo, Linux / by

After a lot of fighting I finally got my UMTS card working with Fedora 9.

I have a T-Mobile Web’n’Walk II card which turns out to be a Option GEO201 by Qualcomm.  The main problem with this card is that someone had the wonderful idea of integrating a usb flash drive (so you don’t ever loose the drivers) with a usb gsm modem.

The main trick is to use a small program called usb_modeswitch which disables the flash drive and loads the modem’s driver.  So lets cut the chat and get it done:

  1. Go to http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ and download the latest version of the file.
  2. Make sure you have  libusb + libusb-devel + lsusb installed$ sudo yum install libusb libusb-devel usbutils
  3. Unpack, build and install the usb_modeswitch.

    $ mkdir ~/tmp
    $ cd ~/tmp
    $ tar jxvf ~/Download/usb_modeswitch-0.9.4.tar.bz2  # or a newer version
    $ cd ~/tmp/usb_modeswitch-0.9.4
    $ ./compile.sh
    $ sudo install -m755 -o root usb_modeswitch /usr/sbin
    $ sudo install -m744 -o root usb_modeswitch.conf /etc/

  4. Now lets setup udev so it automagically runs usb_modeswitch when the card is inserted.  This gives us the plug ‘n play behaviour.  This we will do as root.

    $ /bin/su –
    # vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
    ####  => Insert the following text:

    #Globetrotter HSDPA Modem T-Mobile Web’n’Walk Express II
    #Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0af0:6701 Option
    #idVendor=05c6, idProduct=1000 are the infos of the flash drive
    #idVendor=0af0, idProduct=6701 are the infos of the HSDPA Modem

    SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ATTR{idProduct}==”1000″, ATTR{idVendor}==”05c6″, RUN+=”/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch”

  5. Make sure that the ” are correct, and that the copy paste doesn’t screw them up (got reports that it does)
  6. Setup the card using the network manager.  Here is my setup for T-Mobile in Germany

Note: The values I used for the udev script I got from running: # lsusb -v

Well hope that sets you up to go.  This should work with other Linux distributions as well

Thanks Per Lasse for the comments and corrections 😀

Updates:
11.12.2007: I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10 and it works flawless
Tested it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and 8.10

AV Comparisson

0
26. February 2008 / in Malware, Security, Windows / by

About a year ago I went through the process of evaluating AV’s for the company I was working for.
What I did was the following:

  1. Setup some detection tests using Eicar and some “wild” viruses.
  2. I asked some vendors that I had short-listed (Symantec, Sophos, Panda, Fortinet) to provide fully fledged versions.
  3. For each of the vendors I looked up their listed vulnerabilities in the past year (ovdb) and the time it took them to issue and install an update.
  4. Compared the upgrade strategy: engine, threat DB, application; some vendors don’t automatically give you all of that.
  5. Used info from http://virusbtn.com to compare some results in time.
  6. Setup demos to see them in action, and test their reporting capabilities in real time.
  7. After all the technical work, of course $$$ came into play.

With the information I made a BIG table and put some weights on the items and let the best player win.

 

PS: For those who will ask, Sophos came out with the best results in our environment.

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