Geeksters #148 – Superfecta of Superiority

Hosts:

Tim Bowermeister
Mitch Haman
Martin Obando

Guest:

Fred Gaines

* Microsoft Pushes Patches for Dozens of Flaws
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/02/microsoft-pushes-patches-for-dozens-of-flaws/

* Spareparts Warehouse
http://www.sparepartswarehouse.com/

* Is there a command to restart computer into safe mode?
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12692560/is-there-a-command-to-restart-computer-into-safe-mode

* Xboot
https://sites.google.com/site/shamurxboot/home

* MobaLiveCD
http://www.mobatek.net/labs_mobalivecd.html

* Plop Boot manager
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

* Knight Wise – Life on a Chromebook
http://knightwise.com/kw905-life-on-a-chromebook/

* HOW TO TRANSFER FILES FROM COMPUTER TO SMART PHONE
http://www.latesthackingnews.com/2015/01/14/download-bittorrentsync-transfer-files-pc-android/

* iFixie Server
http://wiki.ifixie.com/index.php/Mumble

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E-mail
I have noticed several windows 8 computers don’t assign a drive letter when you plug in an external usb hard drive.  You have to go to disk management and add a drive letter.  Then when you unplug the drive and plug it in again you have to go through the same process.  I just want a drive to automatically do that like in previous versions of Windows.  I’m always pugging drives in and out. Run this command so a drive letter is automatically assigned every time you plug in a usb drive and becomes persistent.

open command prompt as Administrator -> type in diskpart -> automount enable

— Joe

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Hi folks!

I thought I might suggest some freeware Live CD/DVD tools that can complement the PXE Boot tools mentioned before or used by themselves if needed. They are all for the Windows platform.

1. The first is Xboot (https://sites.google.com/site/shamurxboot/home) which allows a user to combine multiple live ISO images into one single live ISO image. In a way you can use it to create your very own Ultimate Boot disc! You can add just about any bootable ISO image and most should be recognized by Xboot and if not you can choose how the image should be run. It also supports floppy images (.IMG).

You can also create a bootable USB with Xboot but I have been unable to update the bootable USB created with Xboot without deleting all the previous Xboot created files first. The main issue I have with the Xboot is that apparently its no longer being developed as the developer passed away. Its still very useful and very easy to use.

2. The second tool I want to mention is MobaLiveCD (http://www.mobatek.net/labs_mobalivecd.html) this tool allow you to test bootable images without needing to install and run full featured virtual machines like Virtualbox or Vmware. You just run the program and load the bootable image and it will run the image within its own Qemu Virtual machine instance without any configuration needed. As a bonus you can also test any bootable USB drives as well. I should mention that I personally don’t test very large bootable images (ie 1GB or above) as they may load rather slowly.

3. The last tool I want to mention is called Plop Boot manager(http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html). This tool allows a PC to boot from a variety of sources even if there is no native support for them in the BIOS. For example you can boot from CD/DVD or even USB even if the PC’s BIOS doesn’t support it. This can be very useful for older PC’s which don’t have such boot options. You can use Plop boot manager in variety of ways including adding it to your boot manager, putting it in a bootable CDDVDUSB or via network via PXE boot.  Its has more features than mentioned here (see http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/features.html) and even works in Linux.