The Remote Desktop Services Service Terminated Unexpectedly. Windows 2008 R2.

We have several Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers in our environment, and the other day I noticed that I could not remote desktop into one of them. It was a Citrix XenServer VM, so I could still get into it remotely, I just had to use XenCenter to do it. Not the snappiest way to manage a server. Anyway, when I logged in I check the Remote Desktop Service, and saw that it had stopped for some reason. I manually started it up, then tried remoting in with RDP again, and as soon as I logged in I was kicked out. The Remote Desktop Services had kicked off again. I checked the event logs and all I saw was an error saying: The Remote Desktop Services service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 4 time(s). You gotta love vague errors...

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Secure Your Wireless People!

The other day I was at a local park having a picnic with my wife and some friends when my wife checked her phone and noticed that it was connected to a wireless connection nearby. She looked at her wireless settings and saw that the access point she was connected to was an unsecured access point with the SSID of Dlink. She had it stored in her phone's memory because she was at a friend's house a few months back with the same unsecured settings. That prompted me to post this little public service announcement on Bauer-Power's Facebook Page: I'm sure that if you are reading this blog, you are savvy enough to know that you should be at least using WPA2 encryption to keep the bad guys out. I mean there is nothing better to hide your illegal...

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Twitter's Fail-Over Setup Was an Epic Fail

Image via CrunchBase You are probably aware of Twitter's major issues this week. If not, the super popular micro-blogging site seems to have some issues staying up. A year or so ago, this was a common occurrence, but over the last few months Twitter has built up their infrastructure to minimize down time. Well they have been having issues this week. Most notably, yesterday morning they went down. According to ABC News: At around 11:20 a.m. ET, Twitter users started to see their streams come to a screeching halt and were not able to send 140-character messages. The service did not come back online until 1:25 p.m. ET, Twitter confirmed. They shouldn't have gone down though because like most online services they had set up their...

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How To Create A Custom Error Message For Blogger

One of the coolest things about the new blogger interface is the ability to create custom 404 error messages when someone hits a page on your blog that doesn't exist. Users of Wordpress have pretty much always had this, but us poor Blogger users have not. Having the ability to use your own is nice because you can put up a custom message telling people to search your home page for the article they are looking for. It keeps them engaged, and on your site. Or you can just use to to be funny. For example, here are five funny 404 error messages you might want to use: Here is what my error looks like. It's not as funny as the ones above: To set this up yourself, just do the following: When you first login to Blogger, click...

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Want To Keep Big Brother Out of Your Calls? Ditch Skype!

Skype Technologies S.A. logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Microsoft recently purchased the very popular VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) provider Skype for roughly $8.5 Billion, and now they are reportedly having Skype re-engineer Skype's supernodes to make it easier for government agencies and law enforcement to access your call and chat history. Supernodes are third party servers that act as a directory service for routing calls. Arstechnica reported back in May that the original P2P supernodes that Skype used were hosted on regular users computers with sufficient bandwidth. They are now being moved to GRSecurity Linux nodes hosted by Microsoft. Via Ars: Skype is now being powered by a little more than 10,000 supernodes that are...

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Freedom Toaster: Delivering Free Software To The 3rd World

I love me some open source. You know that already because I write about free open source software quite a bit. I even release my own version of Ubuntu Linux called Bauer-Puntu. Freedom truly is open source! That is why the project that I am writing about today is so awesome. They help spread free and open source software to places where it isn't that easy to get it. Places like Africa where most people can't afford internet. This project is called Freedom Toaster. From their page: The Freedom Toaster was originally conceived and developed by the Shuttleworth Foundation in an initiative to deliver open source software to the masses. While much of this software is available on the Internet, in South Africa restrictive bandwidth and the...

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Google's Bouncer Getting Bounced at Black Hat

You may, or may not have heard of a security tool Google deployed to Google Play (Formerly Android Market) to detect and remove apps with malicious code. The tool is called Google Bouncer. Google implemented Bouncer back in February of this year. Well this week at Black Hat, the worlds biggest hacker convention in Las Vegas Nevada, a security firm called Trustwave will be demonstrating how they were able to circumvent Google Bouncer using a masking technique. Trustwave proved to itself that its masking technique could get past Bouncer's detection by getting a malicious app it created into Google Play earlier this year, says Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president and head of Trustwave's SpiderLabs advanced security team. "We wanted to...

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Add Meta Descriptions To Individual Blog Posts on Blogger

As a part of the redesign of Bauer-Power, one of the things I am trying to do is boost my SEO since I pretty much got crushed by the Panda update last year. I mentioned last week that I went from getting roughly 200,000 page views per month to 40,000. That is really significant. One of the things I noticed with the new Blogger layout is that you can now add individual meta descriptions for each blog post you write. That can be huge for SEO! Setting it up is simple too! When you first login to Blogger, click on the drop down menu to the right of the blog you want to add this feature to and click Settings. On the menu on the left, click on Search Preferences. Under Meta Tags, click the Enabled radio button, and enter...

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