Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Strip Owner Password from Encrypted PDF

This handy dandy command script will allow you to strip the owner password out of a pdf file:

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=unencrypted.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f encrypted.pdf

Works in linux, mac and cygwin.

Alternately, you can crack the owner or user password from a pdf file using the open source utility PDFCrack:

http://pdfcrack.sourceforge.net/

Additionally, you can remove copy/print/save security from a PDF via Ensode's handy online tool over at: http://www.ensode.net/pdf-crack.jsf

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Avast 5 - Thunderbird: Server is not an IMAP4 server

Fresh install of Thunderbird and Avast 5. Thunderbird is unable to connect to your mail server via IMAP. You receive the error message:

<servername> is not an IMAP4 server.

With the release of Avast 5, there are new heuristic methods used for allowing imap and pop connections to mail servers. Avast is supposed to automatically prompt you for an action to take, but this sometimes gets messed up.

Solution:
1) Launch Avast user interface
2) Click Real Time Shields
3) Click Mail Shield
4) Click Expert Settings
5) Click SSL Accounts
6) Manually add your IMAP mail server account information - if it is already listed, delete it and manually add it. Be sure you know what you're doing here. If you're unsure, contact your email provider for help
7) Check your mail. If you're still seeing the IMAP4 error, try closing and restarting Thunderbird.

This solution works for both Thunderbird 2.x and 3.x

Element CFID is undefined in SESSION

This is an issue I came across with a site hosted on a shared hosting server. The problem is a misconfiguration in the CF Admin. The solution:

1) Login to the CF Admin
2) Navigate to the Server Settings page -> Memory Variables
3) Un-check the option Use J2EE session variables
4) Check the options Enable Application Variables and Enable Session Variables
5) Submit the changes

Friday, February 12, 2010

Windows 2003/XP Time Service

I've had problems in the past with the time service in windows not working correctly or the Internet Time tab grayed out on the Date and Time Properties menu. Here is the best solution I have cobbled together to make it work again. From a commend prompt:

net stop w32time
w32tm /unregister [you might get an error]
w32tm /unregister [do it again]
> reboot the machine
> open another command prompt
w32tm /register
net start w32time

If your Internet Time tab was grayed out before, it should be back to normal now. For either case, you should be able to click the Update Now button and get the correct time.