Happy Thanksgiving!

To those of you in the USA!

Kirk

November Newsletter Published

This newsletter talks about the changes in NetScanTools Pro 10.94 in detail. It covers new record types that it can retrieve: NSEC, DNSKEY, RRSIG and the new Get Basic DNS Records tool. There is also a discussion about using the Passive Discovery tool and the changes made to make it easier to use.

There is a status report on NetScanTools LE (law enforcement edition).

I added in a paragraph about my experience upgrading a computer from Windows Vista x64 to Windows 7 x64. It was actually pretty painless. And it even worked!

The newsletter can be found on this page:
http://www.netscantools.com/newsletters.html

NetScanTools (TM) Pro 10.94 USB Version Patch Ready

I should have posted this a couple days ago, but for those of you who are NetScanTools Pro USB Version users, the patch to upgrade to the latest version 10.94 is ready. You will need an active maintenance plan to access the patch. Login through Help/Check for New Version.

NetScanTools Pro USB Version is a fully portable software application that runs from a USB flash drive. It is self-contained and does not require installation on the target computer. All data is saved on the USB drive and not saved to the hard drive of the computer hosting it. NetScanTools Pro USB Version runs on Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000. It runs on both the 64 and 32 bit versions of the operating systems and is a 32 bit application itself.

More information about NetScanTools Pro USB Version:
http://www.netscantools.com/nstprousb.html

Right now we are having a sale. Get the installed version on CDROM and the USB Version for the price of the USB Version. More details:
http://www.netscantools.com/nstpro2for1sale.html

NetScanTools (TM) Pro 10.94 Published

The installed version of this release was posted on November 2. This release is geared towards improved Windows 7 compatibility.

It now includes the latest version of WinPcap 4.1.1 (just released last week) which has been extensively tested on Windows 7. NetScanTools Pro uses WinPcap for packet capture and generation of specialized packets. Previously we used 4.0.2 which seems to work fine on Windows 7 for our purposes.

We've also updated the SQLite DLL to the latest version 3.6.19 and made it statically linked to avoid SxS DLL problems.

Feature-wise there are several changes to the "DNS Tools-Core" toolset. There is a new tool called "Get Basic DNS Records". This tool requests SOA, A, NS, MX, CNAME, PTR and TXT resource records as applicable for a given input IP address, hostname or domain name. It saves time by combining all those queries into one query.

DNS Tools - Core also now includes options for requesting the NSEC, DNSKEY and RRSIG resource records. We have had the ability to parse those records for awhile, but now you can directly request them and the parsing has now been significantly improved. When parsing NSEC, we added showing the list of resource records (RR) covered. In DNSKEY we added display of the public key as hex and also now also compute and display the Key ID. The Key ID can be correlated with the corresponding Key ID from the RRSIG records. The RRSIG record parsing was improved by adding display of the signature in hex and we now parse many more "types covered".

DNS Tools - Core also had a problem when doing a Zone Transfer of a medium to large zone. They would crash the program. This was due to a memory allocation error and also due to the fact that in C "static int x = 0;" is not reset to zero when the function is re-entered.

Passive Discovery has a change which is more user related. We had heard from people who saw a "Error compiling filter" when they tried to run it. This was due to a mismatch between the WinPcap interface they selected, the subnet mask and the starting network IP address. We are no longer saving the subnet mask and starting IP, they are being recalculated. We also reworded the Recalculate button to better explain what it does and we improved the error messages.

There were some other minor changes but I won't go into those. As usual the database were updated. If you have NetScanTools Pro with an active maintenance plan, click on Help/Check for New Version to get 10.94.

How to use ARP Ping to Detect Duplicate IP Addresses

I've mentioned before how due to past problems with online games sites I have my son use a Linux distribution called Knoppix 6.0.1 that runs from a CD inside a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine. Well due to a problem with a DHCP server, I found that Knoppix was taking the same IP address as an HP Laser Printer. I had been having trouble with the printer on the weekend - it decided on it's own to change it's fixed IP address.

So I decided to use the situation as a real world demonstration of how to find a duplicate IP address. This can be done from NetScanTools Pro using the ARP Ping Tool. Since I had my suspicions about the printer, I used the printer IP. The video shows the results quite clearly.

http://www.netscantools.com/videos/duplicateipdetect/duplicateipdetect.html

In NetScanTools Pro v11 we will be introducing a tool to scan the whole subnet for duplicate IPs, not just one at a time.

October Newsletter Posted

This newsletter talks about our releases and the progress being made on NetScanTools LE. It also talks about the upcoming NetScanTools Pro 10.94.

http://www.netscantools.com/pressandnewsletters/NST_Pro_October_2009_News.pdf

It also mentions the return of the 2 for 1 NetScanTools Pro CDROM and USB sale.

Enjoy!

KB970892 solved - at least for me!

As I mentioned in early posts, Sage ACT 2009 (ACT 7) uses MS SQL Server Express 2005 and KB970892 failed to patch it. Someone anonymously posted a solution today and it works for me. Their solution of changing the registry entry makes perfect sense because if you dive into the patch log, you will see that it seems to think that SQL Server is not fully installed and it asks you to use add-remove programs to complete the installation.

By simply changing this registry entry from a numeric '1' to a '0' (zer0), you are apparently telling the patch that the original installation was completed correctly:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQLServer\MSSQL.1\Setup

Change the "Resume" value from a 1 to a 0.

(If you have multiple instances of MSSQL installed, the MSSQL.1 reg key might be different for you)

Now you should be able to install the update either from Windows Update or manually using the knowledge base patch that has a full user interface. I used the full user interface patch and you may need to stop your instance of SQL Server before the patch can be fully applied - it will tell you if you need to. I did not use the "silent" Windows Update patch.

A big THANK YOU to whoever figured this out and to the person who posted the solution here today!