Security Hole Or Sysadmin's Savior?

NTFSDOS saves the day.



It started like any other Monday. We were all logged in to the NT server, and the SMPS
fans were humming a soothing lullaby. All looked fine with the world, and work on this

very story was on in full swing. And then it happened-out of the blue, the NT server (4.0)

for some reason stopped responding. Despite repeated frantic efforts, the server refused

to reload. The whole story was in the server. Sure we had taken backups, but what about

the work done over the weekend? What about what was added during the day? And the deadline

was looming ahead of us.

It was time for NTFSDOS to come to the

rescue.

Though the name sounds complex, the program

isn't. In fact, it's a very easy-to-use utility that doesn't take up too much space

either. And its role-to read the NT File System! To use the program, it has to be copied

on a DOS bootable floppy. Then boot the machine on which NT is installed using this

floppy. After this, just run the program from the command prompt and voila-it

automatically searches for NTFS partitions on the machine, mounts them, and assigns them

drive letters. You can now read the NT partition just as you would read an ordinary FAT

partition. The only limitation there is that it allows read access only. You can't make

any changes to it. You can, however, copy files off the NTFS partitions.

Curious, we tried to see whether it would

be able to read the file system of NT 5.0. It read the file system of the Beta copy that

we were running without any problems.

Coming back to the story, using NTFSDOS, we

copied all the necessary files from the server. Now is that a security hole in NT or an

opportunity for the sysadmin? Guess that depends on which side of the fence you are on!

And if you are wondering what happened to

the NT server after that. Lets just say that someone at PCQ Labs has a magic touch because

as soon as he turned the machine on, the operating system loaded as if nothing had ever

happened. Miracles do happen!