Look for IT over here

What’s going on? Short answer – your Wordpress account has been hacked.

More than likely you have been running an old version (ie not the current one) and you have succumbed to an exploit.

The two telling signs is that you have two administrator users (one that ou cannot see), and that your permalink structure has changed. There are other things as well but they are the two main ones.

More detailed discussion can be read about it here.

First and foremost, you should be making sure you have a backup of all your files and SQL database (it should be a regular thing anyway!) before making any changes.

Note: All care but no responsibility is taken with the accuracy of this post.

To find the hidden user, go to the /wp-admin/users.php page and click the link near the top of the page to view only Administrators. The page will not show the hidden administrator, but you can “view source” of this page, and you’ll find the additional username somewhere in the HTML. The key thing to find is the user id, which then can be used with the following URL (substituting the hacker’s user id for xx):

http:///wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=xx

Once you’re in the page to edit the user, you can change its role back to ‘Subscriber’ and delete the bogus ‘first name’ field. (Also you’ll have to insert an email address so that you can save your changes – just enter any old email address) After saving the changes, return to the normal user list, and select this user and delete it.

Upgrade your Wordpress to the latest version, and don’t forget to change your permalink structure. I would also suggest changing your admin password, and having a read of this page to consider other actions to secure your wordpress install.

Finally, thanks to the guys at NachoTech. The post there helped me sort out and fix my WP issues without any loss of data.

The has been a lot of hype about Windows 7 over the last few months, and with the availability of the RC release (that expires next year), more people have had the chance to trial the latest OS from Microsoft.

And might I say justified hype. I personally have found it a good step up from XP, but without the pain of Vista.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft released the RTM version to MSDN and technet subscribers, and I have been using it without any problems at all. They’ve done a good job this time.

Windows 7 is officially released until mid October but what I saw on the net today is a 90 day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise available to try. This trial is mainly aimed at IT pros so they can get familiar with the inner workings and differences to previious Windows operating systems.

Check it out here.

Couple of key notes from MS:

* You have 10 days to activate it.
* After 90 days, the PC will shut down every hour.
* If you wish to use Windows 7 after the 90 days, you need to purchase it and reinstall it from scratch. Bit of a pain, but rememeber it is only a (free) trial

So, if you want to give it a go before deploying it in your business, you have a great opportunity.

In part 1 of this ‘project’ I described what we wanted to build, a rough budget and what sort of hardware we’d be looking at for the PC that I was building for a friend.

This post I will tell you what we ended up with – Amazing how much things change and how budget doesnt really come into it once you are at the PC shop

Anyway, here we go. This is what hardware we ended up with (and why):

Gigatbyte GA-MA790GP motherboard – not sure why this particular model, but I have alway trusted Gigabyte and I just wanted to make sure that it had enough SATA and USB connectors. Bonus is thus it has onboard firewire and HDMI (may be normal these and I’m just ignorant of technology).

AMD X4 Phenom2 Quad Core CPU – Now this was not one of the latest and greatest but still a nice CPU (which a good price tag). 10X better than what he had.

HIS PCI-E 1Gig HD4850 Graphics Card – recommended by a workmate. The 512M version was $7 cheaper so … why bother

Thermaltake V9 case – now this is a nice looking case. I wanted to get a Sunflower brand case but they came with only a small PSU, so I thought I’d get my mate a decent case (without PSU) and he could then select what to throw in it.

Coolermatser Real Power Pro 650 Watt PSU – Man, this thing was heavy, and the box it came in had it’s own handle. For the price, it would want to have a heap on connectors and be prety quiet (later we were to find we were not disappointed.

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Build me a PC part 2

Synergy is a great program to control 2 computers with one mouse and keyboard. But it doesn’t appear to work with Windows 7. Is there any options? Well yes!

I found another program that works well with Windows 7. It’s called Input Director and works quite well – in fact I think better than Synergy does.

It certainly is much easier to configure, where you define a master and slave (in fact you can have many slaves), and can selesct what subnets (or individual hosts) you can accept connections from (on the slave of course).

Why do I always see MD5 next to a file when I’m about to download? What do I need to do with it?Is it important?

MD5 (Message digest 5) is used for a variety of things, but what you are probably interested in is that it can be used to verify the integrity of a file.

Why would you want to do that? Well, to see if the orginal file has been altered in any way (eg malicious code intserted into it etc).

How does it work?

Download the file as well the the MD5 has key (which will be a long string of numbers)
Grab a MD5 checker (such as the one here), and paste the MD5 key into this as well as point the checker to your downloaded file.
The checker will tell you whether the MD5 matches ie. you have an unaltered file. Simple!

Oh, for all you nerds that want to know more about MD5, have a read of RFC1321