Alexander’s Blog

In order to gain momentum in the virtualization market, Microsoft has decided to give away Virtual PC for free. Microsoft is also offering the free download of Virtual PC 2007, with support for Windows Vista in 2007. Here’s the scoop.

FREE:
Virtual Server 2005 R2 from Microsoft
Virtual PC 2004 from Microsoft
VMware Server from EMC

NOT FREE:
VMware Workstation from EMC
Parallels Desktop for Mac from Parallels
Virtual PC for Macs from Microsoft

You can download a free copy of Virtual PC here. The Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise edition is available for free here. Click here for more information.

CodeWeavers’ latest Windows-compatibility product is on its way. Intended for Intel Mac OS X machines, CrossOver Mac will allow Mac users to run their favorite Windows applications seamlessly on their Mac, without the need for a Windows OS license of any kind.

The product is currently in its beta and is expected to be released in late July or early August. CrossOver Mac will be priced at $59.95 for a single copy. Volume and Educational discounts will apply. CrossOver Mac will come with 1 year of both Level 2 support and free product upgrades from CodeWeavers.

If you are hoping to get a beta copy, good luck. There is a huge backlog of testers and chancing of getting in at this time are rather slim. Keep in mind that CrossOver Mac will only run on Intel OS X Macs. Click here for more information.

If you are tired of typing long directory names in Windows, you should take advantage of a feature called “File and Directory Name Completion”. This feature can speed up your navigation when you use the command prompt. The two hot keys that you use to invoke this feature are CTRL+F and CTRL+D. Here’s how it works.

You can enable this feature by starting a command prompt with the /f:on switch. Click Start, Run, and in the Open box type cmd /f:on. Now to use the file completion feature type any executable command and press CTRL+F. For example, if you are in \Windows folder and you want to change directory to “IIS Temporary Compressed Files” folder, simply type cd i and press CTRL+F. You’ll notice that the rest of the characters (IS Temporary Compressed Files) are automatically filled for you.

To make life even easier, try this trick. This is the ultimate time saver because you don’t even need to know the exact name of a folder to use this technique. It will list all the folders for you. If you simply type cd and press spacebar, then hold down the CTRL key and keep on clicking D (or F), you will cycle through all the possible folders. Remember to use the spacebar after typing cd.

The preferred method is to modify the shortcut that starts the command prompt by adding the /f:on switch. Go to Start, Programs, Accessories, right-click Command Prompt and select Properties. Click on the Shortcut Tab and type /f:on at the end of the command in the Target box so it looks like this:

%SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe /f:on

This technique works on Windows 2000/XP/2003.

Insecure.org has released a 2006 survey of 3,243 people (users from the nmap-hackers mailing list) about their favorite security tools. The tools include open source as well as commercial products on any platform. The last survey was done by insecure.org in 2003.

The tools are broken down by various attributes, as shown below.

Nessus, Wireshark and Snort took the top three spots. Check out the rest of the list here. While some tools on the list, such as Google (which was #34) and WMware (#89 on the list) are not really security tools, they were still listed by the users because in case of Google, they use it as a resource for security information and because Google can also be used for hacking. VMware is used as a tool to test code and exploits on various platforms. Microsoft’s MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer) was #100 on the top 100 list.