computoman

Question was asked recently what open software tools do we use or have used for tech support. Once, I thought about it the answer was, what do I not use. One of the first tools I ever used was Knoppix. Microsoft Windows did not have a free tool (there was a commercial one from sys internals) to boot to an operating system to rescue failed hard drives. Of course you could pull the drive and hook it to another machine, but that could be very iffy. To back up files, I would boot with knoppix live cd (long before ubuntu) and make sure the drive was readable despite not being bootable. Then I would use the linux ntfs utilities and samba to log into the mswindows server and back up the user files to the home drive from linux. Of course you had to have admin rights to do that both on linux and MSWindows.  That made a lot of people happy that they did not lose all their data. Lastly,  the data was restored after a hard drive replacement and a new MSWindows was install...

NOTE: Try this at your own risk. I will not be responsible for any issues. To my knowledge there are no traditional viruses within linux. You do have rootkits, but that is another subject (rtkhunter and chkrootkit can be used). What we want to do here is to be able to defend against Microsoft Windows viruses. This is especially important if you run WINE (wine is not an emulator), Crossover office, or other Microsoft compatible software on linux. It is also important if you need to detect for an MSWindows virus using a machine that normally can not be susceptible to MSWindows viruses. Case in point. I was over at my brothers place spending the night when I brother was frustrated because he could not get rid of an MSWindows virus on MSWindows 7 using the great Microsoft anti-virus product. Here is sort of an outline we did to deal with the problem. Apparently his daughter brought home a thumbdrive that had a Microsoft type virus. We plan to use Clamav for at least minimal ...