Month: February 2007

Convert ADM to ADMX Files and Use Group Policy in Vista

As Microsoft have released the new policy template, ADMX with with Vista – it’s about time I looked into converting our Centaur Systems policy template to the new ADMX format to see how the process goes.

Thanks to the ADMX Editor available from Microsoft, the process is quite straight-forward.

  1. Install and run the ADMX editor
  2. Click ‘Generate ADMX from ADM…
    ADMX Editor with an ADMX file loaded
  3. Click ‘Yes’ to load the new ADMX file into the editor.
    Load ADMX file dialog
  4. Finally, select your new ADMX file and click ‘Save As…’
    ADXM Editor

The editor will save two files. One will be your ADMX file, and another will be a language file (ADML). This contains the strings that you have used in the ADM file.

Easy!

Now, if you want to use the ADMX files over a Windows 2000 / 2003 network, then that’s no problem either!

  1. Open the SYSVOL share on a domain controller (preferably the PDC-emulator role if you have multiple servers)
  2. Open the Policies folder and create a new folder called PolicyDefinitions
  3. Copy your ADMX files to the new folder (and the ones from %systemroot%\policydefinitions if you want to include the standard Vista ADMX files)
  4. Copy the relevant language files into a subfolder (in my case that’s en-US)

As soon as these policies are available over the network, Windows Vista will ignore the local ADMX files and get system values from the server copies instead. Woo!

Linksys WPC54g Wireless Working in Ubuntu

I’ve just spent 3 hours playing around with trying to get wireless to play nicely.

Thankfully, after attempting various HOW-TOs that are out there, I managed to use the Windows drivers from the Linksys FTP site with ndiswrapper.

I also installed network-manager to get the whole thing rolling, and the wifi worked immediately after the final reboot.

If you’re having trouble with the Linksys (or Broadcom) wireless card, check out the Ubuntu forum and a guide to enable WPA and install Network Manager.

The main issue with using the NDIS driver is to add the naive Broadcom driver to the blacklist to prevent it loading in, as it will interfere otherwise. If you do not, you get this error:

bcm43xx Microcode “bcm43xx_microcode5.fw” not available or load failed

Well, I’d better get to bed.

Installing Vista Clean with an Upgrade Licence

Following on from my guide on how to install Vista Upgrade onto a fresh hard drive, I’ve noticed that the internet has been rife with guides on how to install Vista without any other media at all, such as on the Windows IT Pro site.

I can confirm that this method works so here goes:

  1. Install Vista onto a new hard disk drive by booting from the DVD.
  2. When asked for a serial number, do not enter the key. Press ‘Next’ and then ‘No’.
  3. Select the edition of Vista that you are licensed to run (it’s important that this is the same, or at least follows the correct upgrade path).
  4. Once installation is complete, log onto Windows Vista, and run the setup for Vista from the DVD.
  5. When prompted, select Upgrade and then enter your serial number.

Basically what this does is fools the setup program into believing that you are upgrading your version of Windows Vista.

The downside of this method is that the upgrade takes a very long time. If you do have Windows on another partition, I strongly recommend that you begin your installation from there instead.

Simple User Logon Logoff Logging on a Windows Domain

I like simple scripts, and this one is so obvious – I wonder why I didn’t think of it:

First, create a folder on your server, and share it as logon$. Make sure that users are given read and write access in the share properties, and in the folder security settings.

Create the following logon scripts and add them to the logon / logoff scripts as appropriate. Both scripts are ONE LINE ONLY.

logon.cmd

echo logon,%COMPUTERNAME%,%USERNAME%,%DATE%,%TIME% >> \\server1\logon$\Logon.csv

logout.cmd

echo logoff,%COMPUTERNAME%,%USERNAME%,%DATE%,%TIME% >> \\server1\logon$\Logon.csv

Once done, you can load the file into a program such as Excel and easily manipulate the data to find what you are looking for.

Naturally, change the name server1 to your server name. It’s a simple way to log users accessing workstations so that you know who as logged on where.

I was considering doing the same with a database and VBscript – which would inevitably slow down the logon process. This should make things wonderfully simple.

I settled on keeping the log file the same for logons and logoffs, as it seems sensible to track these in the same file. If you seperate them and say, want to find out how long a user has been logged on for, then you have to start dealing with too many seperate files.

Microsoft begin to make good on open formats

Release 1 of the OpenXML Translator for Microsoft Word is now available through Sourceforge.

This tool allows MS Word users to open files saved in OpenOffice Write format (.ODF), make modifications and save the files.

Microsoft is due to release this through its website shortly, and apparently there will be Impress and Calc converters, too.

For people who are considering using OpenOffice, or use both OO and MS Office, this is definitely good news.

The tool will work in both Word 2003 and Word 2007.