If I should dissappear.....

If I suddenly stop posting and or answering hails there is a simple reason..... I broke my pegnuin. And Linux can take some fixing when it gets broke.

That's the easy version.

what's actually happening is that I have blissfully ignored my Gentoo Linux's desire to update for over a year. i have been so cruel because everytime I update I have to fix the video ripping/burning stuff beacuse the update likes "stable" versions and I need the newer "unstable" version of a few things to be able to pull off all the tricks I'm used to.

So anyway I asked it on friday night " how much updating do you need to do" and it said "385 packages". The cool thing about Gentoo is also it's worst feature. Because it's a source based distro, all your code is built JUST for your machine, unlike windows or even lesser *nix's each program is not stuffed full of code for different architectures and drivers for all conceivable hardware. Makes it lean and quick. Sadly it also mean I have to wait for the stuff to compile. Luckily Gentoo does all the hard stuff.....all I have to do as say "emerge -up world" and go away. This time that going away seems to be for about 3 days.

Anyway, my bro came in and said "you updating?...how long since you last one?", I said over a year and he laughed and said "unless you're very careful and actually do things like you'r meant to....it'll never even boot next time, it'll take you days to fix".

the update is nearly finished, and the reboot awaits GULP. And apparently the user "steve" is no longer allowed to write to /dev/null this can;t be good.

rebooting now fairwell dear friends :)

EDIT: PAH!, easy peasy...... coupla "you wanna be getting rid of these old config files I've got shiney new ones in a new place" warnings, and briefly being told I wasn;t allowed to use my soundcard were the extent of my gorros, not bad going for having updated 380+ programs.

Wish there was a smilie that describes 'hand wisks over head'.Instead i'll just have to use

Couldn't tell me how to get rid of a trojan could you?.Norton is unable to get rid of it.

I can tell you how, but you won't like it...I spent 2 full days trying to remove 6 viruses from my computer and got shot of 4 of them,with a hell of alot of fannying about...all the while being a right old ratty twat with the wife and kids,and obviously distracted from the task at hand in general..So I went beserk and blanked the whole fucking computer..I was going to total the fucker with an axe,until I realised we would'nt have a computer at all then ...Anyhow, it worked,tho I lost everything and had to start again ...Its the music download sites that are a bastard for viruses,but they are too crucial to stay away from for too long I tend to find.....

Apart from Boatrace's solution, which does work a treat, there is one other thing you can do.

i'm assuming you cannot delete the trojans beacuse they are in use by windoze or contain ilegal characters in their filename.

Obvious one to try is "have you tried deleting it yourself from windows explorer"

There are windows live cd's around these days, you can get them on some bittorrent sites. Guys have basically found away around windoze refusal to run off a cd or out of ram. That may enable you to get it deleted.

If you know a bit of unix, or know anyone who does, a Linux live-cd will be even better because you'll be readin the filesystem with totally different software. You don;t need to be linus torvalds, just be capable of mounting and listing the windows drive.

Other things you could try are stopping windows at the dos console and deleting from there, or (if the file is not on C:) , use any program that can yank file handles from windows....roxio perfect disc can do it (it basically tells windows the drive's gone away so windows lets go of the "file open" handle on every damn thing you opened since boot.

FWIW, if you have a decent firewall/port blocking thing, you shouldn't worry too much about a trojan, it IS just that, it's the bit that get's the bastards into your system, but if it can't get traffic back out to let them know, or if they cannot get in more fully, they're boned. your firewall should pop up a thingy saying "some process youl;ve never heard of and didn't run wants to access the net, is that cool" to which you reply "is it fuck!". A trojan will not run riot and delete files and shit on it's own.

Cheers ,Steve.I 'll have to digest your reply a few times and try and get my head round it

have had the trojan (vundo.b) a while now.its not affected my pc at all really.everything still works ok. but the message pops up every time i've got the computer on.just worried if it can track bank details and all that stuff.i use a p2p so prob got it from there.also have 3 spyware i cant get rid of.although i got rid of a shitload (hopefully ) last night with spybot.

Steve Campbell wrote: Apart from Boatrace's solution, which does work a treat, there is one other thing you can do.

i'm assuming you cannot delete the trojans beacuse they are in use by windoze or contain ilegal characters in their filename.

Obvious one to try is "have you tried deleting it yourself from windows explorer"

There are windows live cd's around these days, you can get them on some bittorrent sites. Guys have basically found away around windoze refusal to run off a cd or out of ram. That may enable you to get it deleted.

If you know a bit of unix, or know anyone who does, a Linux live-cd will be even better because you'll be readin the filesystem with totally different software. You don;t need to be linus torvalds, just be capable of mounting and listing the windows drive.

Other things you could try are stopping windows at the dos console and deleting from there, or (if the file is not on C:) , use any program that can yank file handles from windows....roxio perfect disc can do it (it basically tells windows the drive's gone away so windows lets go of the "file open" handle on every damn thing you opened since boot.

FWIW, if you have a decent firewall/port blocking thing, you shouldn't worry too much about a trojan, it IS just that, it's the bit that get's the bastards into your system, but if it can't get traffic back out to let them know, or if they cannot get in more fully, they're boned. your firewall should pop up a thingy saying "some process youl;ve never heard of and didn't run wants to access the net, is that cool" to which you reply "is it fuck!". A trojan will not run riot and delete files and shit on it's own.

Unfortunately it writes to the registry so you'll need the affected copy of windows running to strip it.

Try removing the following registry settings Johnny, if you aint familiar with digging around the registry then maybe this isn the best way as you could accidently fook things up in a bad way.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify[Trojan file name] HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID{44240BB5-BD7D-4D49-A1AA-8AB0F3D3CB44} HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects{44240BB5-BD7D-4D49-A1AA-8AB0F3D3CB44}

Sounds all a bit scary for someone like me:(

back it up and charge ahead, read those like you would a directory path and use regedit to navigate. the thing about the registry is that you're not welcome in it, which is a shame cos you can do so many cool things SO easily. All my old tricks are out of date on XP but.

Barney, I'm not really with you, why does the affectred dos need to be running? just so you can GET at the reg you mean? or does the trojan respawm it's self from a binary dump in the reg (ahhhhh reminds me of good old friar tuck and robin hood, two of the worlds first and funniest viri).

i back up so often and use windows for so little, I've got quite sloppy, I rely entirely on a real hardware firewall keeping that box zoned off from the world save for 2 games, but a hardware firewall is sod all use for trojan warnings unless you actually read the logs (I'm waiting on the movie :) )