Rubrika: IT

There is McAfee Endpoint Security running on my work computer. Yesterday I lost few hours with having it blocked by my computer. I turned the computer on in the morning but Endpoint Security (ES) did not accept my password with following message: Error EE0F0001: Token authentication parameters are incorrect. I was more carefull typing the password, I had to wait for a minute  but it failed again. The third attempt failed again (and pause doubled). Then I had to call to a service desk to unlock it via passphrase exchange. I was curios, if the error disappeared so I rebooted my computer,  typed carefully the password and the same problem occured again, but the wait time increased to 5 minutes.

So I called helpdesk again, we went through the same procedure and he told me to change my windows password. I did and I printed neccessary materials, then I rebooted the computer and tried again – 15 minutes wait time and passwors was not still accepted. Fourth unlock procedure and guy from helpdesk told me that I need to wait at least half an hour after password change before rebooting computer to let McAfee Endpoint security sync new password. Fine, I did it again, finished some important work, verified in ES that authentical token was synced recently and rebooted notebook again. I typed my password and it told me that it is blocked for 30 minutes now! I called the helpdesk again and he told me that I had to switch off the computer to reset this pause counter. When I did, I could login in immediatelly.

Well, friday was not very productive day. But i realized that to spoof McAfee’s security increasing pause you just need to turn the computer off.

I recently started to use Google Drive desktop client on Windows. It created Disk Google in my home directory. Test was OK, but I realized one thing: there is no possibility to add a directory outside of this default directory. I was used to SugarSync where I had total control, which directory will be synchronized and I lacked this feature in Google Drive. Having strong Unix background I immediatelly had an idea to use symlinks. I knew there was such functionality in NFTS and after while I found junction command.

The first attempt was unsuccessful. When I created symlink in my Google Drive directory pointing to the requested location, nothing happened. Google Drive completely ignored such directory. When I reversed the direction, it worked. So I had to move existing directory (AppData\Roaming\.purple\logs\ to synchronize IM conversations across multiple computers) to Google Drive and then create symlink on original location. That’s it.

c:\Users\Leoš\AppData\Roaming\.purple>c:\bin\junction.exe logs "c:\Users\Leoš\Disk Google\pidgin\"

Junction v1.06 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
Copyright (C) 2000-2010 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Created: c:\Users\Leo?\AppData\Roaming\.purple\logs
Targetted at: c:\Users\Leo?\Disk Google\pidgin"

I have seen several forms recently that requested user to enter some information twice. It makes sense to retype the password that user has chosen. It reduces a risk that user does typo and newly created account will be unaccessible. But these forms asked the user to retype his email address or existing password. The email address is displayed unlike password, so the risk of typo is quite small. But I can imagine that developer thinks that this email is so important to force the user to enter the same information twice. To retype existing password is totally useless. If the user enters his password incorrectly, just redisplay the form. Please when you design some form with duplicated entry of some field, ask yourself – is it really neccessary to bother the user?