MBSA CMDLINE Wizardry

July 17, 2009

MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer) is a free tool provided by Microsoft.  Its purpose is to scan systems to determine the systems security posture.  Most people run it as a gui, but it also has a cmdline option which allows for scripting and automation of tasks.  In this post I’ll show you how to run mbsacli the cmdline version of mbsa. 

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Using dd To Make a Floppy Image

July 17, 2009

First you may ask yourself, why would anyone would want to make an image of a floppy?  First, virtual floppy images give a better, more durable, and efficient way to store data than a physical floppy.  Secondly for archival purposes,  I have gobs and gobs of floppies with everything from bootable linux distros, utility disks, and games that I want to preserve.  Thirdly, floppy images give you a virtual floppy environment when no physical floppy is device available – supported by VMware workstation and other virtualization packages.  If you’re using linux or another Unix like OS, your probably good to go – just use the built in dd command and simply type the following commands at a shell prompt . If you’re on Windows, head over to chrysocome.net and pick you up a copy of dd for Windows.

On Unix:
     dd if=/dev/fd0 of=floppy.img bs 1440

On Windows:
     dd if=/./a: of=floppy.img bs 1440

Explanation of command:  if = in file, of = outfile, bs = byte sectors.