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Scripting is an art. Nifty and subtle, wicked cool scripts can weave magic, and startle compiled languages. When it comes to getting yet-another-pesky-job done, that scripting languages are your friend.

The batch scripting language, is one of the ways Windows operating system offers for writing small scripts without the need of installing any additional language support. It is somewhat limited with multiple short comings that does not make it fun. However you can still get some interesting stuff done with it. Below are some pesky jobs that can still be done with batch scripts.

Pesky job 1 : Map a network drive

net use N:| find “OK”
if errorlevel 1 net use N: \servernamepath$ ******** /user:******* /persistent:yes

This will check if the drive N is mapped or not; in case there is an error, it will map servernamepath with proper username/password values and keep this map persistent across reboots.

Pesky job 2 : Copying files with a time stamp
Say we want to copy a few files from one directory to another file to another with the current date stamp, it could be a simple
copy help.txt Desktop%date:~10,4%%date:~7,2%%date:~4,2%-chgs-1.txt

Truly ugly? Quite right.

Normally the date command would output

C:Documents and SettingsTatha>date
The current date is: Mon 11/17/2008
Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy)

To use the date-stamp say in an echo statement, put the command with in percentage signs. to extract part of the time stamp, the command should be followed with a “:~offset, number_of_characters”. For example

C:Documents and SettingsTatha>echo %date:~0,14%
Mon 11/17/2008

So, the copy command above would create a copy the help.txt to the path C:Documents and SettingsTathaDesktop with a name 20081711-chgs-1.txt, on 17th November 2008.

But wait, this wont work in a Windows NT box. Seems like the automatic variables DATE and TIME were not implemented until windows 2000, so if you want a time stamp in an NT box you should

time /t >> file.txt

Pesky job 3 : Starting and stopping windows services gracefully
Another glitch when running newer bat scripts in Windows NT, that I came across is controlling Windows services. Consider the following snippet to stop a service named SomeAppServer or someappserver in a Windows Xp box.

net start | find “SomeAppServer”
if errorlevel 1 goto STOPPED
if errorlevel 0 echo %date% %time% Attempting to Stop SomeAppServer >> log.txt
start /wait net stop “SomeAppServer” >> log.txt 2>&1
if errorlevel 1 echo %date% %time% SomeAppServer could not be stopped >>log.txt
:STOPPED
echo %date% %time% SomeAppServer is stopped >> log.txt
echo — >> log.txt

However, in case the name of the service is someappserver, instead of SomeAppServer as written in the script, it would fail to stop the service in a Windows NT box. NT treats the service names as case sensitive and you need to supply exactly as it is listed.

Here are some good resources for batch scripting
http://www.robvanderwoude.com/batchcommands.html
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2006/11/20/top-10-dos-batch-tips-yes-dos-batch.aspx

Life has not been that interesting to produce further gibberish adage for the last few months. At work I’m looking into a plethora of antediluvian technologies – but still putting up to learn the new ones.

My white paper titled Security Concerns with Web Services was warmly appreciated and got published our internal knowledge net. Though, I cannot publish it anywhere else … I surely can share the helpful tools that I used to detect web service vulnerabilities.

With the tools listed below, some imaginations and a desire to have fun – you can really have a good idea about web services security.

Tools for studying Web Services Security

• WebGoat is an insecure J2EE application that provides a number of lessons for practicing commonly known security exploits.
• Soap UI is a popular SOA and Web Services testing tool with a number offeatures like web service client code generation, mock serviceimplementation, and groovy scripting.
• WS Fuzzer is a fuzzing penetration testing tool used against HTTP SOAP based web services. It tests numerous aspects (input validation, XML Parser, etc) of the SOAP target.
• WebScarab is a framework for analysing applications that communicate using the HTTP and HTTPS protocols.
• LiveHTTPHeader is a mozilla plugin that provides all the information about the browser traffic.
• Cryptcat is a lightweight version of netcat with integrated transport encryption capabilities.
• Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data.
• TcpMon is a utility that allows the user to monitor the messages passed along in TCP based conversation.
• cURL is a tool to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). The command is designed to work without user interaction.

Most of the above tools comes with neat documentation, so have fun!

“How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”

I lost it. I lost it all.
Three years of electronic ranting, tales of code, help, pride, use, abuse, love, hate, lies, videos, pdfs, – fuck, the list is endless! It surely justifies taking a sick leave …
Andrew Grove says Only the paranoid survives. But he never says getting hyper-paranoid for survival. Well, no regrets brother – just lessons.
If you happen to have no clue which loss I’m talking about – you hardly know me. Its my google account – I forgot the password for it. The big G is the spinal cord of your online existence – once you snap from it your gmail, blog, orkut, notebook, reader, docs everything refuses you as if you are some sort of a beguiler trying to steal the free services and be the next spam superstar!

Every loss makes you wiser. Its like a tool that refreshes the the old, and paves the way for the new change. So …

“Turn the clock to zero, boss
The river’s wide, we’ll swim across
Started up a brand new day

It could happen to you – just like it happened to me
There’s simply no immunity – there’s no guarantee
I say love’s such a force – if you find yourself in it
And sometimes no reflection is there“