Uninstalling Trend Micro Client/Server Security without a Password
Lost or forgot your Trend Micro Client/Server Password? How about inheriting a computer that had the software installed by an IT team or consultant that won’t give up the password? I had to work on a network with the latter and it’s rather annoying. The product is utter crap as the machine is spyware infested even though the antivirus is running and present. I went to uninstall it but can’t because the previous person/company password protected it and nobody has it.
Here’s how to bypass the protection:
- Load up Regedit and browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\TrendMicro\PC-cillinNTCorp\CurrentVersion\Misc.\Allow Uninstall - Change the value to 1.
Now you can uninstall TrendMicro’s crappy product and replace with a real solution like Eset.
TrustedInstaller.EXE CPU Usage
Solution 1: Clear Problem History
The following fix is intended for situations where trustedinstaller.exe causes problems due to the Problem Reports and Solutions history maintained in Windows Vista.
- Go to Start and then select Control Panel.
- Turn on Classic View.
- Select Problem Reports and Solutions.
- Click Clear Solution and Problem History in the left panel.
- Confirm your decision.
- Exit the Problems Reports and Solutions Window and Control Panel.
You can also click Change in the Problems Reports and Solutions Window. And then change the configuration from Check for solutions automatically setting to Ask me to check if a problem occurs.
Solution 2: Change Microsoft Update Startup Settings to Manual
- Go to Start and then select Control Panel.
- Select Administrative Tools and then select Services.
- Scroll down to Microsoft Update, right-click on it and then select Stop.
- Right-click on Microsoft Update again and select Properties.
- On the General tab, set Startup type as Manual.
- Next, display the Recovery tab.
- Choose Take No Action and click OK for First Failure.
- Exit the properties dialog box.
- Bring up your Task Manager by pressing on Ctrl + Alt + Del or Ctrl + Shift + Esc.
- On the Processes tab, look for and select trustedinstaller.exe.
- Click End process to kill trustedinstaller.exe.
Solution 3: Disable Automatic Update
- Go to Start and then select Control Panel.
- Go to System and Maintenance.
- Click Turn automatic update on or off option.
- Next, depending on your preference choose one of the following options:
- Never check for updates (not recommended)
- Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them
- Download updates but let me choose whether to install them
- Click OK to save your changes and exit the dialog box.
Solution 4: Stop the Windows Module Installer That Runs Trustedinstaller.exe
- Click on Start, in the Start Search box, type msconfig and then press Enter.
- Click Continue when User Account Control prompt is displayed.
- In the System Configuration window that is displayed, open the Services tab.
- Locate and clear the Windows Module Installer check box.
- Click OK save your changes and exit the dialog box.
- Next, open Services window again and change the Startup type of Windows Module Installer to Manual.
mtouch exited with code 98
In an attempt to leverage my existing .NET skills, I started working on learning MonoTouch and MonoDroid. I tried following the simple HelloWorld tutorial on the documents section of MonoTouch and kept getting a random error during any build:
mtouch exited with code 98
This is a really good example of bad user experience. The error is extremely cryptic and tells the user nothing. I tried searching for documentation on error codes to no avail. Finally I stumbled upon the build output tab (which is hidden by default, unlike Visual Studio) to find a bit more useful information:
License file is missing. Please activate MonoTouch.
Looks like the IT team didn’t activate the license properly on the Mac they provided me but having this error description shown in the error list would have saved me 3 hours of hunting.
Drobo Dashboard Can’t Connect to Drobo when ESET Firewall is Active
Have a Drobo storage unit? If you have ESET Smart Security Firewall enabled, you’ll probably find Drobo Dashboard can’t connect while the firewall is on even after adding all the required ports and services to ESET’s rules from the Drobo online help site (http://goo.gl/iVKVU).
After enabling the detailed logging in ESET, I found that ESET’s firewall was flagging Drobo Dashboard as an intrusion attempt and blocked it. From the Drobo help page (http://goo.gl/iVKVU):
Drobo Dashboard connects to port 5000 and then randomly picks a port in the range for broadcasting.
This is definitely not the most intelligent way to build a product when users who are trying to secure their home or business network and it’s no wonder that ESET flagged the behavior as suspicious. Luckily there’s a fix to keep ESET from blocking the Drobo connection:
- Make sure you add the rules as per Drobo’s site (http://goo.gl/iVKVU).
- Open the main program window by clicking ‘Start’ -> ‘All Programs’ -> ‘ESET’ -> ‘ESET Smart Security’.
- Click on ‘Setup’ on the left, and then click ‘Enter Advanced setup’ on the right to open the Advanced Setup tree.
- From the Advanced Setup tree on the left, Expand ‘Network’, and Click on ‘Personal Firewall’, and then select ‘Interactive mode’ from the Filtering mode drop-down menu on the right.
- From the advanced setup tree, click ‘Personal Firewall’ -> ‘Rules and zones’. Click the ‘Setup…’ button in the Trusted zone section and then choose ‘Allow sharing’. Click ‘OK’.
- Click ‘Personal Firewall’ -> ‘IDS and advanced options’. In the ‘Allowed services’ section, make sure all services are selected. Click ‘OK’.
Drobo Dashboard should now be able to connect to the unit with no issues.
Reading JSON through JQuery from Cross Domain ASP.NET Web Service
Recently I had an issue with JQuery and accessing JSON from a cross domain ASP.NET Web Service. After much googling, I stumbled upon many articles that provided no fix that would solve the issue.
Every sample I found was some derivative of the following code:
$.ajax({
type: 'POST',
dataType: 'jsonp',
contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
,
url: 'http://www.domain.com/webservice.asmx/function',
data: '{}',
success: function (response) {}
});
Nearly every post pointing out that the contentType argument was the issue but it still didn’t work when I included it. There were posts that said you can’t use GET and had to use POST. There might be valid security issues with not using GET but that’s another topic of discussion. in the case of an open web service where you’re providing raw data to be consumed, a GET should suffice just fine.
To support GET, you need to add the following attribute tags to your asmx.cs:
[sourcecode language=”csharp”][WebMethod(), ScriptMethod(UseHttpGet = true, ResponseFormat = ResponseFormat.Json)][/sourcecode]
This will cause ASP.NET to automatically serialize the returned data to JSON without requiring you to do it manually in code. There are no issues when making the call locally either. The second you go cross domain, the call fails.
A few articles mention JSONP (JSON with Padding) which is supposed to provide a workaround for the Same Origin Policy in JavaScript. Once I implemented the JSONP, the entire function
function getJSON() {
var url = 'http://www.domain.com/webservice.asmx/function';
$.ajax({
type: 'GET',
url: url,
async: false,
jsonpCallback: 'jsonCallback',
contentType: "application/json",
dataType: 'jsonp',
success: function (json) {
alert(json);
},
error: function (e) {
alert(e.toString());
}
});
}
Kill Multiple Processes at Once Via Command Line with Taskkill
Ever have a program or process that doesn’t end properly and runs in the background continuously?
I recently encountered this issue with VLC on one Windows 7 machine where it keeps the process never terminates. Since I never reboot the machine for other than Windows Updates, this amounted to 633 copies of VLC running in memory. Each process only used about 633k so it wasn’t an astronomical memory hog but multiply that by 633, you begin to feel the machine slowing down. Task Manager doesn’t let you kill multiple processes in bulk and I didn’t want to go through killing them one by one or rebooting.
The solution? Good old command line. Open up command prompt (start -> run -> cmd.exe). This snippet will kill all processes that start with the taskname:
TASKKILL /IM [TASKNAME]* /F
To kill all VLC processes, you’d use:
TASKKILL /IM vlc* /F
All running VLC processes will be terminated automatically.
jQuery fancybox ‘*.support not defined’ or ‘b.support not defined’ Error
I was importing some code from static HTML pages into a client’s home grown CMS system this morning. When I reviewed the site in Firefox with Firebug running, I was seeing the error:
b.support not defined
The site uses Fancybox to display the window overlays within the site so I had to step through the code and to find out what broke during the migration. Turns out it was a stupid mistake on my part.
Make sure that you include a reference to the jquery library before you load fancybox.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/Fancybox.js"></script>
Drobo Dashboard Can’t Connect to Drobo when ESET Firewall is Active
Have a Drobo storage unit? If you have ESET Smart Security Firewall enabled, you’ll probably find Drobo Dashboard can’t connect while the firewall is on even after adding all the required ports and services to ESET’s rules from the Drobo online help site (http://goo.gl/iVKVU).
After enabling the detailed logging in ESET, I found that ESET’s firewall was flagging Drobo Dashboard as an intrusion attempt and blocked it. From the Drobo help page (http://goo.gl/iVKVU):
Drobo Dashboard connects to port 5000 and then randomly picks a port in the range for broadcasting.
This is definitely not the most intelligent way to build a product when users who are trying to secure their home or business network and it’s no wonder that ESET flagged the behavior as suspicious. Luckily there’s a fix to keep ESET from blocking the Drobo connection:
- Make sure you add the rules as per Drobo’s site (http://goo.gl/iVKVU).
- Open the main program window by clicking ‘Start’ -> ‘All Programs’ -> ‘ESET’ -> ‘ESET Smart Security’.
- Click on ‘Setup’ on the left, and then click ‘Enter Advanced setup’ on the right to open the Advanced Setup tree.
- From the Advanced Setup tree on the left, Expand ‘Network’, and Click on ‘Personal Firewall’, and then select ‘Interactive mode’ from the Filtering mode drop-down menu on the right.
- From the advanced setup tree, click ‘Personal Firewall’ -> ‘Rules and zones’. Click the ‘Setup…’ button in the Trusted zone section and then choose ‘Allow sharing’. Click ‘OK’.
- Click ‘Personal Firewall’ -> ‘IDS and advanced options’. In the ‘Allowed services’ section, make sure all services are selected. Click ‘OK’.
Drobo Dashboard should now be able to connect to the unit with no issues.
SSL, jQuery, and CDN
I just got whacked by a minor bug with SSL and the Google CDN (totally my fault, not theirs). I stuck the reference to the CDN in my master page not realizing one of the pages would be served up as secured by the vendor due to compliance issues. It made it through all testing because none of the staging/dev environments were configured for SSL and I was not made aware of the fact that we’d be serving the page up through SSL. Internet Explorer 8 prompted users about the insecure content before rendering the page. In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft decided to implement a new workflow for insecure content where the content is ignored and the page renders immediately with the unsecured content ignored. Since jQuery was used on multiple parts of the form, the site essentially broke. Google Chrome and Firefox seem to recognize the CDN as a trusted source and render the page as expected.
To fix the site, I added a javascript check to set the appropriate prefix to the CDN call:
<script>// <![CDATA[
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.3/jquery.min.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
// ]]></script>
SQL 2008 DTSX
The Problem
Earlier today, I was working on setting up DTSX so some end users could run some packages. After loading and testing the packages successfully, the users tried running the package and encountered an interesting error:
SSIS Execution Properties
Failed to open package file “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Packages\dts_filename.dtsx” due to error 0x80070005 “Access is denied.”. This happens when loading a package and the file cannot be opened or loaded correctly into the XML document. This can be the result of either providing an incorrect file name was specified when calling LoadPackage or the XML file was specified and has an incorrect format. ({FFEE8F2F-A0A6-40BE-8CDA-86BEC124F874})
The packages were provided by another vendor so I wasn’t keen on trying to modify things within the packages themselves. I was able to run the packages under my admin account but the end users kept running into the error which lead me to believe that the user needed some special permissions. The users were connecting to this virtual server via remote desktop. While it was a dedicated virtual machine specifically for this project, I really didn’t want to give users admin rights because…well I don’t think that needs to be explained so I hunted around and of course there are no settings for controlling access via permissions in management studio. It was time to take to the interwebs and use my Google-Fu and see what others have found on this error. I found others who had similar errors but none had the exact issue. Some similar errors:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337083.aspx – This was the closest except that it dealt with remote access which wasn’t the case here. I tried it anyways in case it was the problem.
- http://www.mssqltips.com/tip.asp?tip=1199 – Proxy permissions for SQL agent which is useful to know when creating scheduled jobs.
The Solution
I remembered that SQL Management Studio had issues with accessing files in different locations (i.e. My Documents). With the new security settings in Windows, you may have noticed you need admin rights to add, run, or or modify folders/files in locations like c:\Program Files in Windows 7/2008. I wondered if DTSX used a special permission that allowed it to access files and checked the groups under the Server Manager. I found a group called SQLServerDTSUser$[MachineName]. I added the users who were executing the packages to this group and then checked the permissions on the folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS which didn’t have the group listed. I added the group to the folder permissions, tested the package and voila – it worked.