ActiveServers Blog

Nearforums – ASP.NET MVC forum engine

Posted on August 19, 2011 by bobh

Available with (WPI) Web Platform Installer; Nearforums is a lightweight modern discussion forum developed in C# with ASP.NET MVC. Open source, with a permissive license (MIT) suitable for companies and developers, Nearforums includes great features like sign-in with Facebook/Twitter, navigation with tags, full Web administration, RSS feeds, accessible HTML and SEO Friendly. Open source SEO friendly ASP.NET MVC forum engine.

Users:
• Navigation in forums, threads and tags
• Login with Facebook Connect / Twitter OAuth
• Related threads
• Fast quoting
• Visual HTML editor for posts
• Rss feeds and short urls
• Alternate Mobile layout template

Developers:
• Open source
• Extensible ASP.NET MVC
• Copy and paste installation
• SEO Friendly
• Lightweight n-tier application

Designers:
• No limits to design
• Accessible HTML markup
• Non intrusive javascript
• Easy templating

Posted in ASP.NET, Open Source | Tagged ASP.NET 4, Open Source | Leave a comment

Why so Many Microsoft .NET Framework updates?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by admin

Anyone who has several web servers with 50 or domains on them clearly wonders why so many Framework updates. Why can’t Microsoft consolidate a few updates. It is like they do not have a clue that while each one of these is being applied IIS has to stop for some period and has to restart through the update process. So below for the month of August 2011 you can see what we have to deal with. This is 5 times per server 50 + servers. Running Yum Update on CentOS sure is allot easier.

Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP2 on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x86 (KB2539631)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2539631

Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 x86 (KB2487367)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS11-066.mspx

Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 x86 (KB2539636)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2539636

Optional:

Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 x86 (KB2533523)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2533523

Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 x86 (KB2468871)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2468871

Posted in ASP.NET | Tagged .NET, Framework | Leave a comment

Veracode Security

Posted on June 15, 2011 by bobh

Veracode provides the world’s leading Application Risk Management Platform. Veracode Security Review‘s patented and proven cloud-based capabilities allow customers to govern and mitigate software security risk across a single application or an enterprise portfolio with unmatched simplicity. Veracode was founded with one simple mission in mind: to make it simple and cost-effective for organizations to accurately identify and manage application security risk.

Veracode’s SecurityReview Application Risk Management Platform is leveraged by software vendors, enterprises and government agencies to secure their SDLCs, minimize risk related to third-party software, automate compliance and reduce risk.

A typical guide:

• Educates readers on threats like cross-site request forgery, SQL injections, mobile code security issues
• Gives easy-to-follow steps, guidelines and helpful “cheat sheets” for preventing attacks
• Provides further free resources to learn more about security risk management

You can find links to five free guides below:

• SQL Injection: Learn More

• Cross Site Scripting: Learn More

• Cross Site Request Forgery: Learn More

• LDAP Injection: Learn More
• Mobile Code Security: Learn More

Posted in Security | Tagged Security Review, SQL Injection, Veracode | Leave a comment

Mark Bohr Gets Small 22nm Explained

Posted on June 4, 2011 by bobh

Intel’s new chips are 37 percent faster than the company’s current ones when operating at low voltages to keep power consumption low. And they require half the power to perform at a given switching speed. Power consumption is important in handheld devices because it determines how long the battery lasts. It’s also crucial in the power-hungry server farms that make up the cloud.

The best chips on the market today use planar transistors that are 32 nanometers in size. The next generation will use 22-nanometer transistors. To pack more processing power into that smaller size without sending power requirements through the roof, the company had to turn to a new design.

Posted in Hardware | Leave a comment

GIGABYTE GA-Z68P-DS3

Posted on May 28, 2011 by bobh

The GIGABYTE GA-Z68P-DS3 motherboard, based on the Intel® Z68 Express Chipset and supporting the new 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors. Delivering the very best that Intel® 6 series chipsets have to offer, including a significant performance boost with Intel® Smart Response Technology, the first ever mSATA drive connectors on a standard desktop PC motherboard, and GIGABYTE’s proprietary Touch BIOS™ technology, GIGABYTE Z68 series motherboards put users in the driver seat, allowing them to take total control over how their system operates and performs to best match their individual computing needs.

This family of boards can be viewed at Computex 2011 May 31 – June 4 2011 Gigabyte booth here.

GIGABYTE Z68 series motherboards are equipped with the much anticipated Intel® Smart Response Technology, allowing users to experience system performance similar to SSD only systems. Intel® Smart Response technology works by using intelligent block-based caching of frequently used applications to improve system performance and responsiveness.

GIGABYTE Z68 motherboards are equipped with the much anticipated Intel® Smart Response Technology, allowing users to experience system performance similar to SSD-only systems. Intel® Smart Response technology works by using intelligent block-based caching of frequently used applications to improve system performance and responsiveness.

In fact, GIGABYTE Z68 motherboards with Intel® Smart Response Technology are able to outperform hybrid drive systems by more than 2X (PC Mark Vantage HDD test) and HDD-only systems by as much as 4X (PC Mark Vantage HDD test) and deliver a 60% performance improvement over HDD-only systems in PC Mark Vantage Suite.

Posted in Hardware | Tagged Gigabyte, Intel, mSATA, Z68 | Leave a comment

Microsoft Security Toolkit (EMET 2.1)

Posted on May 19, 2011 by bobh

Microsoft released a new version of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET 2.1) with brand new features and mitigations. Users can click here to download the tool free of charge.

The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit enables and implements different techniques to make successful attacks on your system more difficult. EMET is designed to mitigate exploitation attempts (even of 0-days) by making “current” exploitation techniques harder and less reliable. Users interested in finding out more about EMET can read more here.

EMET has a proven track record of stopping real-life attacks, as we have detailed in our previous blog-posts here , here and here.

This release marks a big milestone for EMET since this is the first version that is available as an officially-supported product. Support will be forum based available here.

EMET 2.1 release comes with some new features:

•EMET is an officially-supported product through the online forum
•“Bottom-up Rand” new mitigation randomizes (8 bits of entropy) the base address of bottom-up allocations (including heaps, stacks, and other memory allocations) once EMET has enabled this mitigation.
•Export Address Filtering is now available for 64 bit processes. EAF filters all accesses to the Export Address Table which blocks most of the existing shellcodes
•Improved command line support for enterprise deployment and configuration
•Ability to export/import EMET settings
•Improved SEHOP (structured exception handler overwrite protection) mitigation
•Minor bug fixes

Posted in FreeWare, Security | Leave a comment

Wireshark and WinPcap

Posted on May 14, 2011 by bobh

Wireshark is a free and open-source packet analyzer. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Originally named Ethereal, in May 2006 the project was renamed Wireshark due to trademark issues.

Wireshark is cross-platform, using the GTK+ widget toolkit to implement its user interface, and using pcap to capture packets; it runs on various Unix-like operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, and Solaris, and on Microsoft Windows. There is also a terminal-based (non-GUI) version called TShark. Wireshark, and the other programs distributed with it such as TShark, are free software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Learn WireShark video archive:
Wireshark has a rich feature set which includes the following:
Deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, with more being added all the time

WinPcap is released under the BSD open source licence. This means that you have total freedom to modify and use it with your application, even if it’s commercial. The binary and source code are available here.

High performance. WinPcap implements all of the classic optimizations described in the packet capture literature (e.g., kernel-level filtering and buffering, context switch mitigation, partial packet copy), plus some original ones, like JIT filter compilation and kernel-level statistic processing. For these reasons, WinPcap outperforms other comparable approaches.

Popular. WinPcap is used as the network interface by many tools — both free and commercial including protocol analyzers, network monitors, network intrusion detection systems, sniffers, traffic generators, network testers, etc. Some of these tools, like Wireshark, Nmap, Snort, WinDump, ntop are very well known in the networking community. WinPcap is downloaded thousands of times every day.

Portable. WinPcap is completely compatible with libpcap. This means that you can use it to port your existing Unix or Linux tools to Windows. This also means that your Windows applications will be easily portable to Unix.

Well documented. The WinPcap manual documents the API and the internals in an easy-to-follow hyperlinked manner. The documentation includes a tutorial that takes you step-by-step through all of the features of WinPcap.

Posted in Open Source | Tagged Network, WinPcap, Wireshark | Leave a comment

Search the Commands in Microsoft Office Ribbon

Posted on May 12, 2011 by bobh

Did you ever get lost with too many functions and commands in Office 2007 and Office 2010 ribbon? Or did you just blame the ribbon for not being able to find the command that you wanted to use in Office 2007 and Office 2010? Well, here is the solution to all that! Its Search Commands from Office Labs.

Search Commands add-on was released by Microsoft which is a part of Office Labs project. You need not wonder where is the command you are looking for anymore. All that you have to do is start typing the name of command or the description of the command that you might be looking for and Search Commands starts to display all the possible commands you might be looking for. Search Commands works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint from Office 2007 and Office 2010.

Download Search Commands for Office 2007 and Office 2010

Tips for better usage of Search Commands
•First, there is a well structures and well designed guided help which will explain how to use and get the best of Search Commands.

•No matter what you doing in Office 2007 applications like Word, Excel or PowerPoint, just use the keyboard shortcut Win Key + Y to use Search Commands.
•Also after searching, you can just use the number displayed near the commands as the keyboard shortcut to use those commands.

Posted in FreeWare | Tagged add-on, Microsoft Office | Leave a comment

Delicious is AVOS now

Posted on May 2, 2011 by bobh

San Francisco, CA – April 27, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

Delicious is the leading social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, Delicious has built a passionate, worldwide community of millions of users. In 2011, Delicious was acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Previously, they co-founded YouTube, the world’s largest video site in 2005, which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B. Delicious is part of AVOS, a new Internet company based in San Mateo, California.

Posted in Business | Tagged AVOS, Delicious, Yahoo | Leave a comment