[vox] How Knoppix saved my sister's Win98 box

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Richard Crawford wrote:

> My sister's Windows 98 computer has been sick for a long time.  Since
> she used to use IE 5 for all of her browsing, with no firewall or virus
> protection or adware/spyware blocking (I've converted her to Firefox
> since), her computer was pretty badly compromised.  She brought it up to
> my house yesterday so that I could rebuild it for her.  I wanted to
> rebuild it with Debian/KDE, of course, but she would have none of that
> (he wanted to get to her AOL, after all).  Attempts to remove everything
> with newly installed copies of AdAware, Spybot S&D, and Norton AV
> failed; the computer was just too badly compromised.

I recently went through this with a friend of a friend, too, but I
wouldn't let him put Win98 back on... no more security updates. He ended
up putting XP Home on.  Let him feel the pain of sticking with M$.

> First thing's first.  I set up an account for her on my RH8 server here
> at home and created a Samba share so that we could browse to it from her
> laptop and easily save her files that way.

I brought a Win2k laptop... he already had a linksys router with private
ethernet setup.

[...]

> So, I turned off her computer, inserted the Knoppix CD, and restarted it
> into Linux.  After a few false starts (trying to remember the syntax of
> the smbmount command, and trying to figure out how to run commands as
> root), I was able to mount her account on my server to her laptop, and
> tar up all of her files onto her share with a few simple commands. 
> Piece of cake.

Knoppix 3.4 boots, auto-configures ethernet, finds linksys DHCP, Konqueror
opens, type "smb:/" as the URL and hit enter, and you have a graphical
network folder browser instantly. Open a new window, navigate to
destination, click, drag, no impression left that I was doing more than he
could have if he only had a copy. Huh? Sure, keep it... I can burn another
one. ;)

[Similar wipe/reconfigure process omitted]

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