I’m often switching between different Amazon AWS accounts. So to speed things along I’ve set up some simple scripts to easily switch between accounts while at the command line On Linux (aws_setup): <code>#!/bin/bash export EC2_URL=https://eu-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com export EC2_CERT=/home/john/cert-12345678901234567890123456789012.pem export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/home/john/pk-12345678901234567890123456789012.pem</code> Once saved, run chmod +x aws_setup On Windows (aws_setup.cmd): <code>SET EC2_URL=https://eu-west-1.ec2.amazonaws.com SET EC2_CERT=C:\Users\John\cert-12345678901234567890123456789012.pem SET EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=C:\Users\John\pk-12345678901234567890123456789012.pem</code> Save [...]

While Group Policy software distribution is a quick and easy way to get software around a network, it isn’t without its problems. One such problem is when a computer is attached to a new domain. If your software distribution is the same, Windows will still reinstall the MSI packages. The simplest way is to join [...]

For shutting down multiple computers on a network: <code>for /L %C in (1,1,30) do shutdown -f -s -t 0 -m \\ict-%C</code> This shuts down all Windows computers named ict-X where X is a number from 1 to 30.

I had a little trouble with an HP Printer driver that was causing the Vista PCs to hang at logon. Without going into the specifics of the problem (which comes down to poor HP drivers), I needed a way to ensure that the driver wouldn’t be active the next time that a user logged onto [...]

Sometimes it might be necessary to remove Sentinel’s Ranger software from a computer with the minimum of fuss. Even though there is a removal user account. For instance, this may not work. So here’s a handy script to automitcally disable Ranger on a workstation. This returns some Windows settings back to normal and backs up [...]

Vista’s UAC prevents standard users from installing printer drivers by default. This can cause a problem, especially if you use a logon script or group policy preferences to add shared printers to the user profile.

Luckily there’s a quick group policy fix that will allow users to add printers without any prompt. Once configured, you should be able to log on with a user account that automatically adds the printer without a hitch.