Super-Networking Blog

Sometimes you just need Secure ftp or sftp for some reason or another. Most ftp servers that are free do not include sftp, you need to pay for that functionality. There is a program that CoreFTP puts out called mini sftp server but you need to run this while logged in. If you log out of the server then sftp shuts down, does not run as a service.

Before you spend the $50-$200 to purchase a sftp application that runs as a service try this workaround. Download the mini sftp server, run the program setup the user and path. Then close it and open up scheduled tasks.

Add a new task:

-Browse for the mini sftp program

-Set you “Run as” user and password

-Go to Schedule Tab and change it to “At System Startup”

-Go to the Settings Tab and uncheck “Stop the task if it runs for” box

-Save the settings and run the task.

You should now have your sftp process going even when you aren’t logged in.

How often do you find that one of your servers has a drive that is full or overnight has doubled in space usage. If you are like me you don’t want to spend the time to look through explorer to find out what the size of each folder is manually.

An easy free tool to tell you exactly what all the folder sizes are on any Windows drive is called TreeSize Free. You don’t even have to install it, just move over a folder with two files that are under a meg and you are up and running. It will make a quick scan of the drive of your choice and list the folders in order by size, you can then drill down in the folder structure to find what you need right away.

So we have a couple of down and dirty backup servers that run backup scripts and a free backup program called SyncBack. These methods of backups are cheap (free), easy and fast. One problem you run into is when replicating data to multiple locations that have different retention times you need a way to clean-up old files.

We are talking about over 1TB of backed up data and some individual files that are over 100GBs in size. What we have done in the past is use batch files to run clean-up jobs. Robocopy is used to move aged files from backup locations to another location and then the del command is used to empty the directory. The problem with this method is it takes quite some time to move the files and takes additional space as a queue before deletion. The del command doesn’t have age switches built in.

I found a freeware product called delage32 that adds the age functionality into the mix. Now instead of my cleanup scripts moving the old files to a new directory and then del everything in that clean-up directory it just deletes files with a certain age out of the backup directories. This is much more efficient.

Download it here

I ran across a pretty sweet product today. It is called Yoggie Pico and it is a security suite for your laptop that is based off of a USB stick. It is a hardened Linux box running off a 520MHz processor is a USB stick. It is supposed to provide all of the security you need on your laptop and you can move it from PC to PC.

Features:

Yoggie Pico combines best-of-breed enterprise-class software with proprietary patent pending developments to provide a comprehensive security solution. With its stateful inspection firewall and NAT, Yoggie hides the laptop�s IP address from the outside world and closes any unnecessary network connection. In addition, the hardware design and hardened OS prevents any tampering on the Firewall (a common Spyware, Viruses behavior). Deep packet inspection is performed by a robust intrusion detection/prevention solution to detect attacks as they begin their operation.

The application layer includes four transparent proxies, two for web traffic (HTTP, FTP) and two for email traffic (SMTP and POP3). Using a powerful true-type detection engine, the proxies can deal with any content type, including decompiled elements such as compressed class and file attachments. These elements are analyzed by seven security agents:

• Adaptive Security Policy�
• Multi-Layer Security Agent�
• Layer-8 Security Engine�
• URL Categorization & Filtering
• Anti-Spam
• Anti-Phishing
• Antispyware
• Antivirus
• Transparent Email Proxies (POP3; SMTP)
• Transparent Web Proxies (HTTP; FTP)
• Intrusion Detection System / Intrusion Prevention System
• VPN Client
• Stateful Inspection Firewall

Promqry

Kind of a sweet little tool my buddy sent me. I installed it and ran it, doesn’t do you much good if you aren’t an Administrator of the boxes you are scanning but it is an easy to use tool. Good program to have in your toolbelt if you are paranoid like me.