Confessions of a nerd

OK, now you have made a working backup, so now you can proceed.
Next step is to boot up a couple of rescue disks from your favourite anti malware providers.
Personally I use  F-secure , bitdefender and avira but you can easily find your own favourites.
Remember that the PC need a cabled connection to the network, the rescue cd’s may have a problem with the wireless NIC.
You will find that different antivirus software finds different threats, so it is important to scan with more than one product.
And the antivirus database on the CD is an outdated one, so you need the network connection to update to the lates version.
If you are very paranoid, you can create a separate network for the test PC, so you don’t infect the rest of your environment

Yeah, I know it is trivial.
But before tinkering with other peoples computers you need to make a backup of it.
A total backup that is.
And remember, when you get a new computer, you don’t know, if it is infected with some  virus.
The solution is to use CloneZilla or a similar  live CD.
CloneZilla will guide you through storing an image of the partitions on an external device, or over ssh to a server.
And you should make an image of all partitions!
Now you can restore the entire disk if you mess up. And you will – sooner or later, believe me!
The issue is that if you need to restore a few files, CloneZilla has no way of doing that. It is a major issue with the product, but at that prize you cannot afford to complaint.
The workaround is to fire up your favourite virtual machine software, create a new  machine with at least the same size of hard disk as your client machine. Use clonezilla to restore to the virtual machine, and presto, you can transfer all the files you want.
You may find that windows complains. And that the virtual machine is slow. Very slow, especially if it trying to update windows. But think about it – you don’t need to boot the windows virtual machine. When clonezilla has done its work, ask for a command shell instead of powering down. Mount the windows filesystem, and use rsync or another tool to get hold of the files you need.

But be carefull – this is your original – and it may be infected!

http://clonezilla.org/

And BTW I have found that most live CD’s do not recognize the Wireless NIC card, so you should have a cabled connection to the box.

Being a linux guy, you may wonder why I focus on this windows thing.

Well – first of all my main tool for developing is Delphi, which only runs on windows.
And in my professional career, I had a lot of documents and spreadsheets, which had to be in word and excel,   so my workstation was windows.

And now, where I use the pascal called Lazarus and libreOffice I could go for all Linux, but the stuff that I have a chance to lay my hands on nowadays is almost entirely windows, so I am stuck with the dreadfull windows. Currently windows 7, but during summer/autumn I will hopefully be getting windows 10.

One of my laptops is a dual boot with Kalix, and I have a couple of virtual machines running Centos and Ubuntu. In my opiniom Linux is so much better for a lot of tasks, so I am trying to pickup the best of both worlds.

And by the way – several of the tools I am using, is a live distribution of a linux distro, with special tools on. 🙂

A common issue is “I have a lot of fotos and no backup, so can you please fix my laptop”
After fixing the laptop, I wanted to copy the fotos to DVDs. Yeah – I know USB drives are cheap these days – but if they don’t have a drive, I will recommend that they buy one, but untill then – use the DVD’s.
Don’t want to use MS backup, and don’t want to use archivers,because I would have to train the client in using these tools.
Found CDBurnerXP, a free tool, that actually automagically spans over multiple DVD’s, exactly the tool I was looking for.
https://cdburnerxp.se/
Unfortunately they don’t hav a portable version – I love to have my tools on an USB stick, and not install them on my clients machines

In this blog, I plan to document some of the tools I am using – or won’t use, when I work on PC’s and servers.

I used to be a programmer – a sysadmin – a security specialist – a network troubleshooter – an IT manager, but now I am retired – well almost anyway.

Since everybody knows what I used to do for living, I get request like “could you take a look at my PC” or “we have a network issue, could you take a look”, and since chopping wood does not require a lot from my brain, I usually says yes.

People don’t have a lot of money, including me, so I try to make do with free tools, and that surely gives me some challenges.

I decided that other peoples may benefit from my experience – so that is the background for this blog.

I appologize up front for my English – as you may have already noticed – English is not my native language.