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On alot of systems (especially mobile ones!) it’s often useful to use the ‘Automatically detect settings’ in the Internet Explorer configuration, so that if a proxy is available on the network it will get detected via WPAD, and if there isn’t one, the system connects directly.

I configure this setting on alot of clients using group policy, and it works as you’d expect with IE6. However, after rolling out an upgrade to IE7 to a handful of test systems I noticed that this setting was being ignored, despite it showing on a RSOP for the user/system – although other IE settings such has homepage etc do still continue to be applied to IE7.

Apparently the proxy settings are not being applied because standard users cannot change them after installation. A workaround for this is to set the following GPO:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer\Make proxy settings per-machine (rather than per-user) = DISABLED

 This needs to be set to disabled – not configured won’t cut it! After setting this ‘gpupdate /force’ might be your friend too!

Failing that, run RSOP.msc on a computer with the issue, and navigate to the ‘Automatic browser configuration’ section in IE maintainance under the user policies, then look under the ‘Auto-cfg detect precedence’ tab, ensure that none of the policies set here are set to disabled.

In previous versions of Windows, we could install the Windows Server 2003 administration/management tools in order to perform administration tasks on remote servers from your workstation. With Vista these tools kind of install, but don’t fully work. Luckily with Vista SP1 Remote server administration tools (RSAT) is now available as a MS download.

RSAT – 32-Bit version (KB941314)
RSAT – 64-Bit version (KB941314)

Once installed, you won’t see anything new on your system… All the installer does is add some new entries in the windows features list. To fully enable them goto ‘Control panel’ > ‘Programs and features’ > ‘Turn windows features on or off’… You should hopefully see an entry in here that you can tick to install them.

I don’t understand why the isntaller doesn’t just automatically turn the feature on if you’re installing it anyway, but it doesn’t bother me that much – it’s not like i’m rolling this out to hundreds of users!

If you’re rolling out Vista to client systems using MS WDS (Windows deployment services) it’s quite useful to ‘inject’ drivers into the image, so that Windows recognises extra devices from the start.

You’ll need the Windows AIK (Automated Installation Kit) installed in order to get the tools required – It’s a free download from Microsoft.

The first thing to do is mount the .wim image. From the start menu, open a Windows PE tools command prompt, then use the following command:

imagex /mountrw "d:\path\to\install.wim" 1 C:\mountDir

This will mount the image into c:\mountDir (You’ll need to have this dir created beforehand remember!). Now that the image is mounted we can inject drivers into it, you’ll need to have the drivers in a directory, and they must contain .inf/.cat files etc. A standalone .exe or .zip won’t work here! Inject them like this:

peimg /inf="d:\path\to\drivers\*.inf" C:\mountDir

This should go through all the inf files in your drivers directory and inject them into the image, now we need to unmount and save the changes to the wim image:

imagex /unmount /commit C:\mountDir

At this point the .wim image is updated with the drivers, and it’s ready to be stuck on a WDS server for deployment to clients!

To keep active directory clean of old computer accounts, I run a script on a monthly schedule that finds computers that haven’t sync’d passwords for their machine accounts in 120 days or so. It also does some other clever stuff like working out which user the system belonged to, and if they have a new system, then emails the output and action is taken appropriatly (I doubt many people want auto-deletions of system accounts!).

Someone pointed out to me that a very old system wasn’t getting picked up by the script, so I had to do some debugging…

Running Microsofts AD LDAP browser (adsiedit.msc) let me find the system in question, and looking at the properties of it there was a value for ‘pwdLastSet’, but it wasn’t in a standard date format. After a bit of research, it turns out that this is in the Integer8 format,  this is a 64-bit / 8 byte number that stores the date/time in 100nanosecond intervals. Great. But when the hell was ’128509137717192405′ ?!

Easy… You can convert a Integer8 date format by using the ‘w32tm’ command….

Z:\>w32tm /ntte 128509137717192405
148737 10:16:11.7192405 - 25/03/2008 11:16:11 (local time)

So that explains why the system wasn’t appearing in my old systems list, it had sync’d passwords only a couple of months ago.

If you’ve got a directory on a system that you don’t want the Altirs inventory solution to process when the software inventory runs, it’s quite easy to get it to exclude it. For example, A SAN volume that is mounted as a local disk on a server with userfiles on might cause the fileserver to incorrectly appear in custom inventory collections because of this.

You need to locate the the ‘auditpls.ini’ file in the inventory package on the Altiris server, and add an additional EXCLUDEDIR line under the [LOCALMACHINE] heading, then update the distribution points for the package. Hopefully your clients running the inventory agent should download the updated ini file when they next check in, and next time they run the scheduled inventory the exclusion will be taken into consideration!

I had a problem today with one of our FTP servers… We have a client that has an automated process set up that uploads data to our server, which is then processed by us.

I had to recreate the account used for this, but then realised I didn’t know the original password, and getting the client to find it wouldn’t be an easy option!

After a bit of digging for a packet sniffer, I came accross Smartsniff and was instantly impressed!

It’s one of those tools that you can pick up and start using right away, without having to spend ages installing dependancies or figuring it out, and it’s just a single exe, so very portable. I also really like the fact that it assembles certain TCP communications into a readable conversation (See above) – very easy to recover a saved FTP password that you don’t know!

Get it from nirsoft.net, along with a whole stack of other neat tools!

I really hate it how digital cameras now create files that are stupidly big, every photo that I use - and most of those that others use only ever stay on the screen. So why do we need them saved at 5120×3825 eating about 4Mb each?!

In a large multi-user environment these massive images quickly eat up alot of disk space. I figured you could save alot of disk space by automatically resizing the images down if they are bigger than a certain size, so I got cracking on a VBScript to do this for me. Read the rest of this entry »

New blog. I’m going to try and stick geektips on here, y’know, wierd commands I might have spent a while looking for, or some useful script that I’ve cooked up. I grab enough stuff off the www and have never contributed anything back, so here we go! I might also try and rope a few others into it too so that it fills up nicely!

g.