So, first off, I wanna welcome our new linux guru jack, really enjoyed your posts so far.

Which brings me to writing this one. For years I’ve been using varying versions of Windows as a so-called power-user, starting off with Windows 3.11 and hitting every single OS Microsoft has thrown at us since then. And of course, I have some resentments of my own regarding the redmonds and their – seemingly inferior – products. But I learned it to be that way, and that’s not easily cast aside.

Come as it may, some years ago I first took a peek into the world of UNIX, and some of its more popular offsprings, namely the Debian, SUSE and – much later – Ubuntu distributions. I never kept one for too long, though.

So, after reading jacks post about the differences between Windows and Linux, I started to wonder again why I didn’t manage to stay on, say, Ubuntu, which is in my biased and narrow-minded opinion by far the most suitable distribution for migrators.

After giving it some thought, it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to do things on Linux the way I know them. Everything I tried ended up in me, digging the appropriate distribution’s forum and Google for a how-to or the solution to a more specific problem. While this seems indeed narrow-minded, like ‘how can he expect to know everything from the start and that everything works out-of-the-box’, it’s the way it is. Most of us spend 6-8 hours asleep, 8-10 hours at work and maybe have a family on top of that. No coffee or a single meal included. Do the math. I for myself cannot afford to put hours after hours into my OS to make things work that never were a problem before – mounting an external USB-drive, setting up or mounting (samba) shares to interact with my necessary Windows-clients. I’m not denying it that it is my lack of in-depth knowledge of Linux or UNIX in general that causes this, and neither that it bugs me from time to time I’m unable to pull it off, but that’s just how it is.

I always said cynically “I’m trying Linux again once they reach final”, and I’m still sticking to that, predicting that the one Linux distro that manages to really implement the “easy as Windows”-feeling will succeed in getting the folks to migrate. It will probably succeed in getting me migrated, but right now, I’m putting my knowledge into my Windows-OS for an extra punch of productivity denied to me by the otherness of Linux.

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As some of the more regular readers may know, I’m all into the whole ‘portable’ thing, and am constantly looking for ways to use stealthy software, sync my data or access it wherever I go. So it’s not surprising I stumbled across the SyncKolab Thunderbird extension some time ago looking for a possibility to sync my contacts across different computers as easy as my bookmarks using Foxmarks. Didn’t turn out that time, I just couldn’t get it to work.

But now, you may have guessed it already where this is heading, version 1.0 is out and, what can I say, it works like a charm, and not only for my contacts, but for my lightning-powered to-do’s and calendar items as well!

The whole thing uses the Kolab ‘protocol’ (in lack for a better word), which uses iCals and E-Mails containing xml-files to, among other things, store the items in your IMAP-Folder.

There’s a pretty good tutorial how to set it up as well, but it’s principle is rather simple. Choose an IMAP-Account, the items you want to have synced (contacts, calendar and to-do; the latter two require lightning to be installed) and where to store the data in the IMAP folder structure. I used a new folder named Synckolab containing subfolders for each of the groups, though I don’t know if it’s necessary to split them up.

Conflicts are resolved by using a pre-defined setting (always use server-side or client-side), or by asking the user, which is always my personal weapon of choice.

The whole thing also works with a specialized server component as well as different clients such as KDE’s Kontact for instance. Check out the wikipedia-entry if you’re interested.

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All except Ulteo, to be precise, which hovered at the edge of my attention with their OpenOfficeOnline-Beta, for example. Now they’re back with a piece of software called “Virtual Desktop“, which can be confusing judging from the name, or at least I expected something different from it. But it turned out to be another solution to run Linux-software seamlessly in a windows environment, just like the recently extremely popular andLinux (In fact, both are based on the same core, coLinux, a portation of a Unix-kernel to windows). But since Ulteo’s Virtual Desktop uses less disk space in comparison to andLinux’ full-featured ubuntu (2,5-4,5 GB), I decided to give it a try.

Installation was quick, and since I already had an Ulteo-Account (which is not required unless you wanna sync your local data to your online desktop), I didn’t encounter anything unusual at all.

Starting the Ulteo Application inside Windows took quite a bit though, which is not to my liking – I guess it’s anywhere near twice the boot time of the kernel and Desktop Environment, and the memory usage was quite corresponding, which was not to my liking at all.

The amount of included application is allright, it features the newest Firefox and Thunderbird (of course), as well as OpenOffice and my all-time-reason-for-Linux, Amarok (which will soon enough be no reason for Linux anymore, since Amarok 2.0 is bound to happen on Windows as well) in version 1.3.9 – which brings me to the question, why they didn’t include the current Fast Forward release 1.4.9.1, and furthermore to the point of installing own applications, which seems impossible for the time being. I couldn’t figure out how to do it in the launcher, and the website speaks nothing of it.

The sight of the Konquerer hovering above the Windows Explorer was quite appealing though, and it helps to weaken the borders between the windows and the unix world even further, which is – at least in my world – a good thing.

Next time I’ll try andLinux though, regardless of the ~5GB installation of a full-fledged (K)Ubuntu.

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Luckily, I came across the small Brief Firefox extension which fulfilled all of my wishes. It’s lightweight, it’s a firefox extension, and it has the “unread”-folder as well as a nice and elaborate handling. It’s content-view is skinnable (though I have yet to come across a skin that suited me better than the original one), there are a handful of reasonable options, and it integrates with the Firefox-RSS-capabilities as well using it’s dynamic bookmarks system.
It’s just as the synopsis on the homepage says: “Brief is a light-weight feed reading extension for Firefox. Designed to be easy to use and streamlined, with exactly the right set of features.” – ’nuff said.

So if you happen to be in the market for RSS-Readers, make sure to check this one out.

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I am not a big tutorial-fan, cause I always can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something here I have no particular knowledge of. And depending on what I do, this bothers me. A lot. Take sewing for instance (yes, I do indeed enjoy the fun of sewing, at least as long as it is fun); in the beginning I only did pre-set tutorials. I got to see some achievements, pretty fast as well, and was happy. But the clothings didn’t fit that well, more often than not I had to make corrections to be at least a bit satisfied with my work.

By now, I do most of my sewing patterns myself by taking bits from tutorials and knowledge and putting them together, and it works just fine for me. My point is, tutorials are often brief, giving appealing results in a short time, but often lack some of the necessary theory. Ever happened to you that you did something with a tutorial that just would not work? And after going through the complete text again, looking at all pictures, you realize there’s a small mistake in it, or something you wouldn’t have thought of, which the author took as given?

I guess that’s the reason I don’t want to write tutorials, the danger of missing something (or to cut off too much or something like that) or to have people sitting in front of it thinking “Screw this guy, this just doesn’t work!”. Plus, there are plenty of tutorials out there regarding nearly any topic. Or are there?

But – as the headline suspects – I’m gonna break with this habit for now, and give you a few shots and explanations regarding my former post. No tutorial in a classical sense, but one like I try to write my stuff as well: just concepts and ideas, but this time with pictures.

So let’s get started. Since I’m keeping my connection open most of the time, I’m using PuTTyTray instead of the regular PuTTy or its portable cousin, so some functions described here are not available in other versions.

Here we got the starting screen. Use “Settings from file” (at the bottom of the screen) to save sessions to a file in the PuTTy-directory instead of the windows-registry. An absolute must for all portable users. The first ellipse is where you type your target server’s (or router’s, in our case) IP in. If you can’t remember your IP at any time or get dynamic IPs, make an dyndns-account to save you trouble. Most Routers come with built-in dyndns-support anyway nowadays, sparing you the effort of an update tool. Of course, we want to have “SSH” as a connection type, but it’s per default enabled, so there shouldn’t be any problems.

Ah, that one took me awhile to figure out. Or to be more precise: I was swearing and cursing about the problem I encountered and by accident managed to find a solution in the settings for my terminal, which struck me to be very odd. So I wanna share my insights. The option I circled changes the character send to the server by pressing the backspace-key. Since the routers I mentioned all use some sort of linux, you might wanna change the option to the right one, “Control+? (127)”. Without that enabled, my fritzbox would only type “[^” or something like that instead of deleting the last character. Very annoying.

That one is one of the PuTTyTray-only functions I mentioned that I don’t wanna miss ever again, regardless how more convenient PuTTyPortable sometimes might be for my purposes. Leave the option on “normal” to start it in normal terminal mode. I prefer that one, since I want to use password-authentication. No use minimizing the window to tray on start, only to have to bring it back up, type the password in and minimize it again. “Always” and “Never” produced funny behaviors that I couldn’t get a hold of, but, if you wanna guess and like riddles, go and give it a try.

And oh, the “Accept single-click…”-option is nice as well, if you use this kind of restoring in all of your programs. Mixing double-click and single-click is definitely not a good idea, at least not for me.

Oh, yeah. Not that important, I gotta admit. But it would allow you to pick a username that’s hard to remember (please don’t say anything about the “root” I typed in there.. it is for demonstration purposes only!), and even harder to guess. When using password authentication, I only have to type in my password and not my username. spares me ~1.2 seconds. yay!

Painting Frenzy!! Okay, now here we go. This tab is the mekka for all your needs, the holy grail of port forwarding.
The first option I circled is recommended to use, but it is not without risks (security, mostly). Some protocols may need this option to function properly though. When you look at the entries 1, 2 and 3 they all have a source port (the first column) and a destination (the second one), like my arrows – done extremely skilled, if I may say so – try to show you.

1.) This is a standard port forwarding like used by any program. I specified my source port, which is 5700 (always select “local” as a type if unsure for the others and their doings), and a destination that is usually an IP plus a port. As you can see or at least guess, it’s for VNC (port 5900), and it’s for a fictional desktop in my home network.

2.) That one I use for the emulation of a vpn. Remember the virtual network adapter I had to create? I gave it the very innovative IP 10.0.0.1, Windows File Sharing services use port 139, so its 10.0.0.1:139 for source. The destination is my main network-hard drive with the very same port. If you specify an IP for the source port, the port is only forwarded if the accordant network adapter is used. In case of the file sharing, I had to do this, since I wanted to work both ways at the same time – local file sharing and file sharing over SSH. If you need only one of both, feel free to just forward the port without a source IP.

3.) This one is pretty much like the first, but it points to a virtual network card I created on my Router. I did so because it is forbidden to map any ports directly to the routers own IP, but mapping to the virtual NIC is allowed. Here, I’m forwarding localhost’s port 80 (do NOT do this when running a webserver or any software using port 80) to the virtual NIC’s port 80, so I can display my router’s status page in my browser here at work, taking a look at phone lists and the like. I also could’ve made a port forwarding like “6666 192.168.178.253:80″, to view my routers page then, I would have to connect to “localhost:6666″ in my browser, as well as for connecting my VNC, I have to connect to “<dyndns-address>:5700″ instead of just “<dyndns-address>”.

Be careful with the Connection -> Proxy-Tab though. You don’t have to specify anything here for PuTTy to provide the SOCKS-proxy I mentioned. This is only necessary if PuTTy is forced (or wanted) to use a proxy to connect to the target net (usually, the internet) itself, like when using PuTTy over TOR for instance, which is by the way in my opinion the most comfortable way of using TOR there is.

Oh my, I almost forgot that one.. this is crucial when keeping your connection up and running for a long time. If the connection gets broken there is a chance that your server-component remains active and running on the router, and if your reconnect, you got a second one running, and a third one if that happens again.. you catch my drift. I chose a value of 60 seconds, and it works for me. It was a more or less random choice though, other values might do equally fine.

Okay. I admit, that didn’t hurt that much at all. Maybe I will just… keep posting funny daubed pictures about programs I use…

cya all soon! :)

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So for the first Part of this – hopefully ongoing – series, I decided to look at the MD5 hash algorithm. It’s one of the most commonly used cryptographic algorithms out there and I would claim that nearly everyone has a password somewhere that is stored with an MD5 or similar hash.

MD5 stands for Message-Digest Algorithm 5, and is – as already mentioned and you probably already knew – a hash algorithm.

The MD5 hash algorithm is in simple terms a deterministic function (or blackbox) that will calculate a 128-Bit hash value from a given string of well-nigh any length … yeah, I had to read this sentence over a few times, and it’s just rubbish. If I wanted to write something like that, I could’ve gone Wikipedia. So let’s crack this one open.

You feed the MD5-Box a string of any length you want. This “string” doesn’t have to be alphanumeric of course, any stream of bits and bytes is just fine, like the bitstream of a file, for instance. The output string has always a length of 128 bits and is usually noted as a string of 32 octets, like this one: “B5A8AD3A9CDD6A6953FCBE6975FDE734″ (try guessing what I typed in though).

One of the most important things about hashes is, that they are so-called one-way-functions, meaning, they only encrypt stuff, and can’t – and must not – be decrypted. So hashes are often used for storing passwords in a databases. The same plaintext will always be hashed to the same cipher text with MD5, so all you have to do to check if your password and the stored (hashed) password are identical is to compute the hash of the given password and compare it with the stored one.

There are several demands a good hash-function has to meet in order not to get cracked in the first two hours of its lifetime.
The first one is, that a minor change in the plaintext (like “ghacks” and “gHacks”) should have a big impact on the computed hash (”D1B81FBDEB51C3A850E37177A5A22498″ and “DB3E20DC88EF0B6CA6A8FD5DA448D323″). If the difference would be only minor, and I know the plaintext and hash of “ghacks” (which I do, of course), and have the hash of “gHacks” without the knowledge of its plaintext, I could easily guess it.

The second very important demand is that a hash-function produces a much smaller memory imprint than the original stream. If you hash an 11MB installer to verify its integrity and have to download another 10MB of hash file as well, it’s pretty useless. There are lots of other points to keep an eye on, but these will (and have to) suffice.

As I mentioned already, hash-functions such as MD5 are most commonly used to store passwords without actually storing them in plaintext, and to verify the integrity of files. When you put a file online, just compute the hash and publish it together (but separate) with the file. Ever user would be able to determine if the downloaded file has been tampered with by simply comparing the hash of the downloaded file with the one published on the website.

Now I’d like to say something about security and known (and partly successful) attacks against hashes and MD5 in particular.
Due to the reduction (a 2MB file gets reduced to a 32-octet hash), information gets lost. This gets perfectly clear, if you take a look at the numbers. There are only 2^128 possible hash values, but infinite possible plaintexts. So in a best-case-scenario, after hashing plaintext numbers (2^128)+1 you have at least two plaintexts getting mapped on one and the same hash value.

So the first attack tries to make use of this very fact. When the same hash value is calculated from two different plaintexts, it is called a collision. Depending on the scenario of the attack using collisions, the birthday paradox comes in handy as well, increasing the attackers chance of success.

That would mean that you do not attempt to break the encryption or guess the user’s password when trying to crack a password, but just try to create another password that leads to the very same hash value, granting you access to the account. Of course, knowledge of the hashed password is required, but without that information, most attacks on modern ciphers are more than just tricky.

Edit: please take a look at comments for more clarification on the types of attacks mentioned above.

The second attack is based on a brute-force attack, which is basically “try all possible keys/passwords”. Depending on the numbers this could take some time. Let’s say you’ve already acquired the target hash value and your machine is able to try 100 keys per ms. That would make 100.000 keys per second, and 6.000.000 keys per minute. 2^128 hash values. That’s 3.4E38. We’re talking “age of the universe in seconds”-numbers here.

But there’s more to it than meets the eye. There are several options to reduce the available possibilities. Can you reduce the amount of possible plaintexts maybe? Maybe the password only allows to be 8 alphanumeric letters long? Can you have a look at the used algorithm and find something that may help you further? Do you know part of the plaintext? Maybe a name of son/wife/pet? Then you could combine it with a dictionary-attack. Every bit of information helps reducing the number of possibilities further, which in the end leads to a situation like this:

The following is a description of an attack to crack the user passwords of windows accounts (up to XP), and implemented in a near-perfect way by ophcrack. If interested, do make sure to check this tutorial, it’s quite fascinating and yet unbelievably scary.

Windows saves hash values of the user passwords, but if a password is longer than 7 signs, it gets broken up into chunks of length <= 7. Then the chunks get converted to uppercase only. Microsoft used DES for creating the hashes, but there’s no difference regarding this kind of attack.

So the attacker knows pretty much about the plaintext and can reduce its possibilities by a great deal. Now a computer starts calculating all possible hash values for this particular range of plaintexts (up to 7 digits, uppercase, numbers and some special characters only) and stores them in a database. Once finished, the database is from about 0.7 to 4 GB in size and can be easily transported using a thumb drive or a DVD.

Now all the attacker needs is a few minutes alone with the target computer and it’s done. Again, check the tutorial mentioned above, it kinda blew my mind. 1.7 minutes was the average time in this experiment for cracking a password to your windows account. Ouch.

Since I read and heard all of the above some time ago, I started wondering about the benefits and risks of using MD5. Most security experts discourage the use of MD5 nowadays for its known vulnerability to collision attacks. It should be replaced by something like the SHA-1 or since it is kind of outdated as well the even newer SHA-512. But that doesn’t help against the attack last mentioned, apart from increasing the possible hash values to even greater dimensions.

After some time, I found this very helpful article about spicing up your hashs to be more secure. I have to say though, these tips are NOT increasing the security of your hash function in a mathematical way. Luckily, the real world’s not all about math, so I think they are an easy way to get some extra security.

Edit: Please keep in mind that the tutorial posted here is not a perfect implementation of salts. It’s – as always – a source for ideas, not a perfect solution. But I always like it more if it’s explained like that, easy and understandable and in a rather digestible way. Please correct me if I’m mistaken.

If you want to screw around with MD5 a bit, here’s a link to an applet where you can do just that (SHA-1 as well). Switch to MD5, enter some text and press “Text digest”. Try guessing my hash from above (reaaaal easy), if you like and post the answer in the comments. First to score gets a cookie ;)

Stay tuned for upcoming ramblings about encryption and stuff. Maybe AES will be next.

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I was no exception to this when I decided to fool around a bit with my AVM Fritz!Box (Broadband Router quite common in Germany and Austria that runs with Linux) and installed – among other amusing things – the dropbear SSH Server on it. I was then able to connect to my home network from all around the world using just my dyndns-account and PuTTy, or better his cousin PuTTyPortable, which runs from thumb drives without leaving traces behind on the host system. Oh the joy!

After going through the massive troubles of installing and configuring dropbear via FTP and VM, I first started to think about the use I could get out of this.

note: I didn’t intend to give instructions of how to use PuTTy or to set up those functions I mention, more to give some inspiration. Google helps all, but if someone is interested in a particular HowTo, just ask, I’m here ;).

First of all, I found out that I could use my encrypted Connection to eliminate some holes in my firewall, VNC always being a big thorn in my side. If I use the standard ports, it’s insecure, and if I use custom ports, I’m bound to fail to remember them when needed. With the SSH Connection, I only have to remember one custom port (in fact, PuTTy does remember it), and I can spare the additional effort and cpu time for encrypting VNC sessions, as well as I could stuff all commonly used holes in my firewall.

Incredibly simple, but at the same time incredibly effective. If you want something like this, the tunneling function (also port forwarding) is for you. It also allowed me – with some tweaking on the router as well – to view the html-based configuration side from outside over the secure line, taking a look at the list of calls received in absence.

The next useful function I could think of was to use my secure Connection to obscure my internet traffic. Not to circumvent IP-Checks, but to prevent the casual network analyzer of having anything to work with besides my current IP at home. No destination, no protocol, no data. Setting it up was even easier than setting up the port tunnels, which, from time to time, tend to be a real pain in the ass, so to speak. For every open SSH Connection and without further configuration, PuTTy procures a full-fledged SOCKS proxy server for you. Ain’t that nice? And with plugins like QuickProxy for Firefox you are free to switch it on or off as you like. Which, of course, is also available as a portable version. But you all knew that already.

The third function I use pretty often was a nasty one to get by, but it was definitely worth the trouble, since it fits my setting nigh perfectly. I’m quite fond of VPNs, but I have yet to encounter a VPN-software that really satisfies me and my personal needs and/or beliefs. So, among the other amusing programs I set up on my router (as mentioned above), was a VPN-server, to allow me to connect to my network-enabled hard drives at home. To cut it short, it worked, I felt secure and all, but it was impossible to take the solution with me, since all VPN-Implementations (OpenVPN, that is) required installation and the creation (and configuration) of a virtual network adapter. So I tried to bring up a feasible solution involving PuTTy.

The easy one was to use a protocol that allows you to transfer files, (s)FTP, SCP, or even HTTP, but all require a special server component to be run on the target, which is not possible for me without leaving one of my computers on, which is entirely out of the question. The NAS is even able to manage FTP, but it would require me to rely on FTP and FTP alone. No Samba and FTP at the same time for the same files. So I had to discard that as well.

The next thought was to just forward port 139 (used by windows filesharing services) to my target network. It would’ve worked, but it would’ve rendered me incapable of using the filesharing service for local shares. I’m using this solution at work, so it’s either home or work. It would work, I could only start up the connection of needed, and so on, but I wasn’t just happy with it, so I digged further.

If I had found a software for windows, that used not the windows filesharing service but an own implementation of it, I could just tell it to use another port and forward that one, but unfortunately, I found no such program.
The best I could come up with was to create a network adapter as VPN does, but without configuring anything on it except for a meaningless IP, and then forward all traffic on 10.0.0.1:139 to my network at home. Works like a charm, but if anyone ever happens to find a program like mentioned above, I would be more than happy to give it a try. Portable Applications preferred ;)

Another function available, though I did not use it very often, was the forwarding of the X11-protocol used by common Linux-desktops, which gives you the power of controlling the remote computer similar to VNC but without the need for additional software.

The last one I want to mention is not one of PuTTy, but one that uses its opened shell to go through with it. A little program called etherwake can be run on common Linux-powered systems which enables you to start your computer without actually sitting in front of it via the magic of WOL (pun intended). A pre-set shell-script that’s run with a short command, a VNC server installed as a service, and you’re good to go. Connect the Router, wake up the computer, connect using VNC and take a look at the all-important document you left at home.

So, if you happen to own a Fritz!Box or one of them shiny, new, world-wide-available OpenSource-Routers, or just an old crappy computer that could deliver a reasonable SSH server for an equally reasonable amount of watts spent, maybe those ideas incorporated one for you.

Also, please notice that PuTTyTray works from Thumb Drives as well without leaving any Data behind (if you use the “session from file”-option), but has the advantage that it can be minimized to the system tray.

If you’re planning on keeping the connection up for quite some time, also remember to activate the “Keep Alive”-function ;)

Edit: After getting rebuked for not doing it from the beginning, I’d like to incorporate some useful links that might get you started.
Complete Installation Guide for Telnet, FTP, SSH, WOL & VPN on a Fritz!Box, German.
You can also get this functions creating a nice and easy pseudo-firmware-image here, but I guess one could lack the insight needed to fill in all the right information if he never did it manually before. So, feel free to screw around using the above link and once you figured it all out, use this one. Also German, but with very little text ;)
Another tutorial, this time for the Linksys WRT54G, including SSH and Tunneling.

Thx again to Ace_NoOne, who could’ve used Google instead ;)

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Luckily, the guys from uvnc.com are providing us with a third option, called PCHelpware, which is basically another remote-viewing-tool from the developers of my favorite VNC implementation. The interesting part though is, that it allows you to create a redistributable executable which can be placed on the target’s computer, on a web server for downloading or sent to the person on the other end by mail. And it gets even better. Due to the opposed direction of starting the communication, it allows you to bypass routers and firewalls on the side of the user in need, sparing you the excess of configuring the router/firewall in advance if you want to remotely connect to that computer.

Basically, it works like that: the damsel-in-distress calls, you tell her to double-click the little blue icon in the upper right corner of her desktop, which you planted there earlier in wise foresight, while you start the viewer-part of the application on your computer. She hits “start”, and you’re free to control her desktop while she can watch every step. It’s exactly what I always wanted for Christmas!

I have found a number of manuals and step-by-step-tutorials, but I decided to give some quick hints on my own, since I wasn’t that happy with all of them.

PCHelpware offers three ways of connecting to a Viewer (the side of the plagued person-to-help – that’s you). By direct connection with no router or firewall getting in the way, through a firewall that has an appropriate port opened to the Internet, or through a repeater service which should offer a zero-configuration-connection over two or more firewalls, but which didn’t work for me, with other users reporting the same problems. But since we usually have full control over our own routers and firewalls, and PCHelpware also supporting UPnP, the second one seems like the most probable and suitable setting.

Unzipping and locating the viewer executable shouldn’t be that much of a problem. After starting, just follow the steps in the picture and you should be rewarded with a distributable single-click-executable of minimal size in the /myservers/profilename directory.

After you push “Create Server”, a small popup will show up to enter your IP address. If you have a dynamic IP, you should use a dynamic dns-service like dyndns.org.

To ready the viewer for incoming connections (which should only be done when expecting one or for another very good reason), just pick the profile and click “Start” in the lower right corner. You could open the port in your UPnP-supporting firewall automatically by checking “Auto Map” or click the “Map Upnp”-button, or just leave
it alone because you already troubled yourself with it. Once your viewer is set up, the user-in-need may start his server, which will connect and voilá!

Another nice feature is the customizable server-part, which allows you to incorporate your own logos and stuff. Since the license emphatically allows use in a commercial environment, I’m going to design one for my own workplace, since we do a lot of helpdesk-stuff from time to time. I only have to figure out a way that’s just as easy for dial-up-connections…

Note. You should also download the patched dlls, which offer better compression and some bugfixes.

Any questions can be relayed to me or posted in the comments. Since this is sort of my very first article I publish, please be nice to me ;)

Finally, Hails and Cheers to Martin for giving me the opportunity of doing so.

Stay Metal! >-< \m/

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