One of the ways by which Computers get affected by viruses is through USB Pen drives. Anti viruses are unable to detect them and even if they do, in most cases they are unable to delete the virus. Following are the precautions you can take when plugging USB Drive on your Computer.

Whenever you plug a USB drive in your system (which you think is infected by virus), do not open it -  Do not click ‘OK’ !
click on ‘Cancel’. Now open Command Prompt by typing ‘cmd‘ in run box.
Type dir /w/a and press enter.
Above command will display list of files in pen drive. Check in the list if the files are not

* Heap41a
* New Folder.exe
* Autorun.inf
* svchost.exe
* Ravmon.exe
* or any other exe file which may be suspicious.

If any of the above files are present in the list, then your USB drive is infected. To remove these files, type the following command in command prompt
attrib -r -a -s -h *.* and press enter.
This will remove from files  Read Only, Archive, System and Hidden attributes .

The files which you will now be looking on are the junk files (viruses) and can be deleted using  del command. Delete all those files which you find suspicious. To be on a safer side, just scan again your  USB Pen drive using a anti virus to check whether it is free of virus or not.

What is Hot linking ?

The process of direct linking to websites files such as images, videos etc. It is like using an image (tag/image link) which you have found on someone else web page, and would be using on your blog. Every time the blog is browsed image will be shown because it is Hot linked from it’s original source.

This becomes a point of concern when your website is Hot linked by someone else.

Let me explain
Every website has a fixed bandwidth (bandwidth - Amount of data transferred from website to a users computer). When a user browses a web page , the website’s
bandwidth is used in transferring the requested data.
??? => You are paying for the bandwidth which is used by others.

To overcome Hot linking(Bandwidth Theft) Hotlink Protection is used. It prevents other websites from directly linking to files (as specified above) to your website.
Hotlink Protection can be set from Plesk Control Panel.

Difference between Hardware firewall and software firewall
Which firewall is best?

Well this question again generate a cross question.
What are your requirement?

If you need to protect your network through IP based regardless of Application using the port. Hardware firewalls has a strong and fast protection from most forms of attack coming from the outside world. Hardware firewall has a designed technique called packet filtering that examines the header of a packet to determine its source and destination addresses [IP’s].  This information is compared to set rules that determine whether the packet is to be forwarded or blocked
Now days a new technique called Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) is used in firewall
That check the origin of packets that means it check whether the response is from internet, if yes whether it is the requested response for a machine from local network.
If yes the allow traffic
Bad thing is that, if, say, you get email containing WORD doc that has spyware/Macro hidden in it, which communicate to outer world when WORD file is opened/executed.
Your hardware firewall will allow communication to outer world and the requested incoming packets too, as the packet origin was from local network,
Resulting Machine infection

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Using Pass Phrases to Encrypt Data

A password that allows for spaces can be referred to as a pass phrase. The benefit of pass phrases is that you can make them meaningful and easy to remember. Instead of creating and managing encryption keys or certificates in your database server, you can encrypt data using only a pass phrase.The ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement uses the supplied pass phrase to generate a symmetric key, which is used to perform the actual data encryption. No key management is required, as the key will be recreated each time the same pass phrase is supplied.The common syntax of the ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement is as follows:

ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE ('PASSPHRASE', 'PLAINTEXT')

In this statement, PASSPHRASE specifies the data string to be used to derive an encryption key. PLAINTEXT specifies the data to be encrypted. No permissions are required to run the ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE statement.

The following syntax encrypts the string using the supplied pass phrase:

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To set more than one website on server you are required to set Host Headers
Procedure to set Host Headers
1) Load  IIS (Start >>> Run>>>type “inetmgr” hit enter)

2) On left pane, expand server name, then click “Web Sites“>>>right click on right pane>>>select  New>>>Web Site

3) Website Creation Wizard will open , here you have freedom to write absolutely anything (we will write - Testing) >>> Click Next

4)Under IP address and Port settings
Enter Ip address and port number (Default port - 80) and Host Header for the website >>> Click Next

5) Enter the path for Websites Home Directory and tick (check) “Allow anonymous access to this website” >>> Click Next

6) Under Website Access Permissions , necessary permissions for using ASP , Run Scripts can be used as per requirement. >>> Click Next

7) Click Finish and you’re done.

Log into Plesk Control Panel and  steer yourself to “phpMyAdmin”

For Backup of MySQL database click on Export.

1) Make sure that entire database is selected for Export, and not just one table.
All the Tables under Database list should be added in Export List.

2) Now, follow the steps given
select “SQL” for output format
Check “Structure”
and “Add AUTO_INCREMENT” value
Check “Enclose table and field name with back quotes”
Check “DATA”
check use “hexadecimal for binary field”
Export type set to “INSERT”

3) Check “Save as file”, it is not necessary to change the file name.
Click “GO” to download the backup file.

Backup of your MySQL database is created !

Now, for Restoring backup of MySql database

1) Click on SQL tab, to start restoration of your backup file.

2) Un-Check “Show this query here again”.

3) Browse to your database backup file.

4) Click - “GO”

Backup is Restored !

Large MySQL Backups:

Error: MySQL has gone away

To restore large SQL backups there are 2 setting that you will need to take of:

1. Make sure that you PHP upload size is great than your MySQL backup file, this setting will be needed to be changed in php.ini file. Only those who has server administrator access would be able to make changes in PHP.INI file. Hence you will have to contact your Hosting provider if you are hosted on a Shared server. But if you have a Dedicated Server then this file is normally stored in C:\Windows\php.ini or you can esily get the path from phpinfo() page. The option that you need to change is upload_max_filesize. It is also suggested that you increase the following parameters as per the size of your MySQL backup file:

max_execution_time = 30     ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 60    ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 8M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)

2. You will need to increase the MySQL buffer size in MySQL configuration size, the file is my.cnf in Linux server and my.ini on Windows Server. The parameter that you need to change is:

read_buffer_size

By default it is set to 1MB, if the entry is not present then add it under [MYSQLD] section.

Please Make sure that you restart IIS webserver after making change to php.ini and restart MySQL after making changes in my.ini file.

If you looking backup MySQL using VBS or ASP script then refer the link below:

How to backup MySQL using VBS or ASP script.

What is NTFS ?

The File system comes with Windows NT. (NT File System) An optional file system for Windows NT, 2000, XP and Vista. NTFS is the more advanced file system, compared to FAT32. It improves performance and is required in order to implement numerous security and administrative features in the OS. NTFS supports Active Directory domain names and provides file encryption. Permissions can be set at the file level rather than by folder, and individual users can be assigned disk space quotas. NTFS is designed to log activity and recover on the fly from hard disk crashes. It also supports the Unicode character set and allows file names up to 255 characters in length. See FAT32 and file system.

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Microsoft Windows Server 2003 does not install Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) for
NTS (CDONTS). Therefore, applications that use   do not function on a Windows
Server 2003-based computer.

Windows Server 2003 provides improved alternatives to CDONTS. To make CDONTS
functioning on a Windows Server 2003-based computer, use one of the following

solution:

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What is Apache ?

The Apache HTTP Web Server, we all well know it as Apache, is one of the world’s most widely used Web servers. It is very popular because of its strong security features, most outstanding performance & the fact that it does cost us any thing. It comprehensively supports and it is most recommended for MySQL & PHP/Perl/Python (and now also supports Ruby) programming languages.

It’s available for all flavours of Unix (GNU/Linux & UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows including other OS as well, for Example Linux distros such as  RedHat, SuSe, Debian, CentOs, Gentoo, Mandrake, Fedora, etc etc. Apache is used to serve both dynamic static content & static Web pages on the Internet. Some web applications are developed expecting the features & environment that Apache provides. It is one of the most basic feature in the hosting world is what allows your website to be seen by the world.

What is a DDoS attack ?

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Creating a VPN Server on Windows will require enabling Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS). This service will not start unless you have at least two network connections. The purpose of RRAS is to pass packets between IP subnets. It basically turns your Windows workstation or server into a router. Normally, when you have only one network interface, any attempt to enable the service will fail.

To get around this requirement, a virtual network adapter can be installed. This software-based NIC is called Microsoft Loopback Adapter. To install the Loopback Adapter, you can follow the instructions below. This step-by-step, like all the others in this article, follow the wizards and consoles installed in Windows 2000. The wizards and tools on Windows XP Pro and Server 2003 are similar. The instructions below provide enough information to configure utilities on those operating systems with very little modification.

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