Archive for December 10th, 2010

How to invoke virtual keyboard through a command in Windows 7,XP and Vista

Friday, December 10th, 2010

I just learned something useful from a friend that I found worthy to share here with my readers.

There is a Windows command that can be used straight to bring up the virtual keyboard.

The simple command is called osk which abbreviate stands for On Screen Keyboard

Here is how the On Screen Keyboard looks like in Windows XP.

Windows XP Virtual Keyboard, On Screen Keyboard

This type of keyboard is especially handy for some security reasons sometimes. For instance let’s say you’re sitting on a Windows XP that might be trojanned or could have some kind of keyboard logger / sniffer.
If you have to login via ssh or even simply to your web email interface, facebook, twitter or any other web frontend that requires your credentials. Then your passwords could be easily stolen, this is especially true with the spyware.
Probably the bigger parts of Windows powered computers that are connected to the internet has some kind of Viruses or spyware which basicly does some keyboard logging and send data about your usernames and logins, bank accounts privacy details to crackers.

This could be very easily omitted if you simply use the On Screen Keyboard since you don’t physically type on the keyboard but use the virtual keyboard malicious people cannot get over your privacy and passwords 🙂

Again if you want to quickly visualize the OSK all you need to do is:

C:>osk

Now the virtual kbd app will open. Enjoy 🙂

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Posted in Windows | 1 Comment »

How to list all files and directories in Windows XP drive and save it to a file

Friday, December 10th, 2010

Yesterday I had this thing, by accident because of some misconfiguration of the domain controller here in the university. I can read some files and folders which were belonging to students and teachers here in the university. We had some great fun with my good old friend David. In checking up some trashy stuff. It was rather interesting that one of the directory listings actually contained all the teachers computer usernames with it, therefore I needed a quick way to make all the files listing stored in a file in order to be able to later have this usernames listing stored in an MySQL or some other kind of database, after consulting few websites I came to the command to list all files and directories in the mapped sharing.

We first used the net use //workgroup/ J: to map the sharing in the workgroup and later we used the dir command as shown below to list all files and directories and store the data in a file.
So here is how you can also come with all your files and directories in your Windows drive stored in a file:

dir J: /s > c:somepathj_file.txt

Now if the files and directory is not too long you will have everything stored in j_file.txt in a couple of minutes time, however in our case the directory listing was huge so we had to wait for an hour and still the file was filling in 🙂

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Posted in System Administration, Windows | 1 Comment »