One of the constant struggles in business is trying to engage new customers, and catch them when they need you. Businesses are constantly trying to come up with clever ideas to remain in the potential customer’s mind at all moments so that when you suddenly think “I need a quote for car insurance” that brand is right at the front of your mind.
So, I’ve had a thought. Why can’t we turn this around and have customers advertise to us? Continue reading Why Not Let Business Leads Chase You?
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 export a registry key from a computer that is currently joined to the new domain, and then import it into the new system.
And here it is:
<code>HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Group Policy\AppMgmt</code>
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 a computer.
A bit of quick thinking, and I quickly knocked up this command, that will enumerate all users in a folder and make the appropriate change while they are offline. Hurrah!
<code>for /D %D in (\\domain.local\users\*.*) DO ( reg load HKU\UserLoad %D\profile.V2\ntuser.dat reg delete "HKU\UserLoad\Printers\Connections\,,domainsrv1,Suite Mono Printer" /f reg delete "HKU\UserLoad\Printers\Connections\,,domainsrv1,Suite Colour Printer" /f reg unload HKU\UserLoad )</code>
This assumes that all of your users live in \\domain.local\users and that you are cleaning up vista profiles. Needless to say, you’d probably want to adjust this if you need to do something similar.
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 the Ranger computer info. Just save the code as DeRanger.cmd and run it on any machine that you want to uninstall Ranger.
If you’re having trouble logging into a workstation, either logon as a local administrator or use the Task Manager to stop rgrUIniut.exe in the Processes tab.
DeRanger.cmd
<code> @echo off ::Stop ranger services Net Stop ClntCMan Net Stop SecMon Net Stop RMNETMON Net Stop RMNetworkMonitorService ::Remove ranger from winlogon and reset Windows Shell reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /v UserInit /t REG_SZ /f /d C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon" /v Shell /t REG_SZ /f /d Explorer.exe ::Disable ranger services reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ClntCMan" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /f /d 4 reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SecMon" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /f /d 4 reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RMNETMON" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /f /d 4 reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RMNetworkMonitorService" /v Start /t REG_DWORD /f /d 4 ::Rename Ranger Registry reg copy "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Hyperion Security Software" "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Hyperion Security Software_backup" /s /f reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Hyperion Security Software" /f ::Rename Rnager Installation Folder rename "%programfiles%\Ranger" Ranger_ ::Now restart shutdown -f -r -t 0</code>
Webdav is a very handy protocol for writing files back and forth across the internet.
I’ve never really had much call for it – but I’m all for it lately as I’m trying out Alfresco and would really love to see a better way to upload files than the basic web-bsaed uploader that is provided.
As Firefox doesn’t had webdav support, I’ve had a go at mounting webdav folders in Linux. The results have been good, with a couple of small caveats that are remedied fairly easily.
First of all, you need to install the davfs2 package. Once done, we can start connecting to a webdav folder on t’internet:
Open up the terminal and create the mount folder:
mkdir ~/webmount
Now run the mount.davfs command to connect as root
sudo mount.davfs http://yourwebsite.com/webdav ~/webmount -o rw,uid=john
Now, let me quickly explain the paramters.
yourwebsite.com/webdav is the server and path
~/webdav is your local directory where you want to webdav files to appear
-o rw,uid=john is the options to set the webdav as re-writable and allow me (john) to have user-level access to the files. Make sure that you put your own username here.
And that’s it.
When you copy files, you might get an error such as this:
cp myfile.pdf ~/webmount/
cp: cannot create regular file `~/myfile.pdf’: Input/output error
This is caused by the server not supporting file locks. You will need to edit the /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf file and add the following line:
use_locks 0
Remount your webdav directory, and you should be able to create files with no problems.
I’ve just been tweaking with SSH. One of the common things that I have to do is reconfigure my SSH tunnels while I’m working remotely to gain access to desktops and the like.
In this situation, the cumbersome but easiest way always seemed to be to disconnect and change the command line. However, having used Putty I was fairly sure that there must be an easier way.
AND THERE IS!
Changing the port forwarding in ssh is as easy, if not easier, than in Putty.
While you’re connected to the host, type a tilde (~) and an uppercase C.This will open the ssh shell. Just type in your port forwarding command like you would when you are typing in the command line option. eg:
<code>-L 3389:localhost:3389</code>
to tunnel an RDP socket to the machine that you are connected to.
And that’s it! If you’re stuck, type a question mark (?) and press ‘Enter’. This will show you the options available.
