Global Toad News

Since sometime in August, I and certain other people I know have had problems with connecting to some (but not all) MS SQL servers, while others, who don’t regularly update their computer with “critical” patches from Microsoft, have been spared (or cursed with extra work depending on how you look at it) the connection issues.  A possible reason came to my attention at this site:

Greetings,
Early in August, Microsoft released a security patch KB921883, endorsed by Dept. of Homeland Security. One of our customers reported JDBC connection problems, and I have confirmed it. When the kb921883 patch is applied to SQServer database server (running windows 2000, or 2003), The data direct driver (v3.6build6) cannot connect. If I remove the patch, it connects. I have repeated this several times

Microsoft details this patch in  Microsoft Security Bulletin MS06-040 as:

What is the Server service?
The Server service provides RPC support, file print support and named pipe sharing over the network. The Server service allows the sharing of your local resources (such as disks and printers) so that other users on the network can access them. It also allows named pipe communication between applications running on other computers and your computer, which is used for RPC.

Some of the problems seem to be related to the RPC calls in Sql 2000 Enterprise Manager (yes I realize that 2005 is out now, but it seems that some things like DTS packages are deprecated in 2005 and may not always work like they used to).

Microsoft has already admited to some problems with this patch (see KB article 924054), of course the fix doesn’t apply to Windows XP (since Microsoft wishes that to be replaced by Vista, who can blame them).

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Lately a lot of people have had a problem with Microsoft terminal services licensing when they are using Windows XP SP2, where they are not able to connect.  This usually seems to be fixed by removing the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing” registry entry (more here), of course this is a use at own risk type of situation, but it’s worked every time I’ve run across this issue.

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Microsoft has finally been able to develop the ability to save as PDF (download here). I guess that hobbists have been able to add this feature years ago to OpenOffice, has finally gotten the multi-billion dollar organization to say, hey we can do that as well. Of course this is to encourage people to upgrade to Office 2007, as it’s not possible for Microsoft to offer this functionality to people who don’t pay them more money. So if you are using an old version of office you might want to look at this.
In any case it’s free, but only if your computer can pass the Windows Geniune Advantage test.

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There is an article on Salon.com and also at the Brad Blog about a paper that describes how Professor Edward Felten (wiki, Princeton) and a team at Princeton were able to create a self replicating, trace removing program that would change the outcome of any election that uses the Diebold AccuVote TS touch-screen. This new voting system is being deployed as a result of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which is a federal law that actually mandates use of this or similar equipment with legal reprucssions for those county and state officials who do not just take the word of the vendors that the systems are safe and implement them.

(And even though the Dielbold AccuVote TS system is Windows CE based, this isn’t about the operating system that is used, so this is not because I am upset with Microsoft for hiding the great tools that Systernals used to provide for free).

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There is a great web site called www.sysinternals.com,  it has a great selection of tools, and the selection used to grow at a slow pace.
Now Microsoft has aquired the company that sponsored the site (www.winternals.com) which had the fellow who exposed the whole Rootkit fiasco with Sony (Mark Russinovich) who had a great blog where he detailed technical matters and provided great tools (a lot of the time for free).

How this will play out is anyone’s guess.  I do think that Microsoft will have the final word in what secrets will come out in the future, since Mark Russinovich is now going to more tightly bound by NDA’s than he ever was before.

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