Splents

I had this problem where I would go to play a game of Battlefield 2 (Single Player or Multiplayer), and when I would get to the spawn screen the mouse would just be frozen.

It hadn’t done it before, and I had been playing both the retail version of BF2 and the Steam version. Turns out it is caused by a profile conflict. All I did was delete my profile from the ‘Documents’ folder and away it went.

This poster had the same problem and solved it by deleting his Battlefield 2 Profile.

So you’ve suspected that there are hacks in the game all along, but haven’t had the evidence…

This is about as good as the evidence will get, and unfortunately Infinity Ward are either incapable or unwilling to address the problem.

From a technical point of view, I find the hack funny. Having said that, I’m sick of rage leaving games because some n00b is using tools similar to this. Ah well.

So you’ve noticed that whenever you get into Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 you get this annoying “NAT Status: Strict”, or perhaps more annoying – when you and your friends try joining the game lobby it says unable to connect, and counts the connection attempts up until it throws an error.

You’ve followed the borderline offensively abandoning instructions left on Infinity Wards website, with still no change.

Well  I have a few more suggestions that have so far worked for everyone I’ve shared them with.

1. You have additional network adapters – perhaps from VMWare, perhaps physical. Try disabling all but the one you need for internet in the network control panel. 90% of the time, it works every time.
2. You have uPNP disabled in the network control panel. Enable it

Restart Steam and see if it helps. Hopefully it does, because usually this means you won’t have any more squad trouble.

I’m currently hosting S-T-D and Backtrack distributions in the mirrors folder. These can be used with my rainbow tables, or for a whole range of fun activity’s.

A few years ago I created some rainbow tables for cracking a particular type of password. I’ve been hosting them for a fair while but now I’ve updated the site I thought I would point towards their location.
You can download the lm_alpha-numeric-symbol14-space1-7_0_4000×46000000 tables by clicking on the Rainbow Tables link. The tables can be used with Backtrack or S-T-D.

I had a situation where I needed to recover some MYOB backup files from a corrupt Norton Ghost (version 8.0) file. Ghost Explorer wouldn’t open the backups, due to some form of corruption, somewhere. There was little information that was available, despite the file corruption being a common problem. Ghost is no longer a supported product, and future versions were essentially a completely new program. I read a thread on corrupt ghost images that discussed my problem in depth. Praise to Nigel who provided the inspiration to try what I did, although unfortunately the header fix program was simply slack data when I downloaded it… sabotage?

Out of desperation I used HxD to search for the file header of a MYOB backup. It was tedious and took a while, particularly considering I was sifting through 20gB of hexadecimal data.

If I get some time I would like to produce a program that can automatically recover these files (and others, especially .jpeg) from a corrupt ghost image. In summary however, if you are trying to recover data from a norton ghost image file that seems to have become corrupt. Here is a brief overview of what you’ll need to do to recover the data.

1. Load it in HxD
2. Search for the file beginning
3. Write down this location
4. Search for the file end
5. Write down this location
6. Select between the start and end locations
7. Copy it, then paste it into a new Hex file
8. Save it

If everything went correctly, you’ll be left the file you were trying to recover.

You may be asking “What is the file start/end?”.

I would say that is a good question – this is what took me a while to figure out.

For MYOB:
version 13, file start “6D 79 6F 62 31 33 2F 50 4B 03 04 0A”
version 18, file start “6D 79 6F 62 31 38 2F 50 4B 03 04 0A”

You will notice that the 6th byte is the only thing that changes between the two. Thats because its specifying the version number. In hex, 0×31=1, 0×33=3, 0×38=8.

The end of the MYOB files was always “50 4B 01 02 14 0B 14″ followed by a large null padding (…00 00 00 00 00 00…), although the amount of padding varied from file to file.

Generally I selected a few zeros after the file end so… “50 4B 01 02 14 0B 14 00 00 00 00″.

I successfully recovered 8 backups doing this manually.

Feel free to contact me via email if you would like a more in depth tutorial on recovering files from Ghost backups, or donating if I just saved you!