How to reboot Windows 8 using a touch screen. Your browser does not support the video tag
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Powershell Goodies From Vexasoft
There are a number of features that make mass deployment of Mac OS X pretty easy. Some of these would be great to have in Windows. These range from systemconfiguration to networksetup and the ability to look at packages that have been installed and review their bills of material. Well, the good people at Vexasoft have built a number of Powershell libraries that, while they aren’t named as such, do a number of the features that these commands do, just for Windows clients via Powershell. And the best part is, a number of them are free. Let’s look at what some of these commands do: First, there are the cmdlets…
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And The Badass Award Goes to CrashPlan…
Over dinner one night, Matthew Dornquast, the CEO of CrashPlan, was running something by a few of us sitting around the table. Basically, giving access to files that are backed up in CrashPlan to other systems. I don’t think I fully understood what he was talking about (I mean, you can already restore data on any system you install CrashPlan on, right?) and didn’t pay much mind to it. Then, I heard about the CrashPlan app for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch). After downloading the app, I realized it wasn’t just showing me when my machines last backed up (which it does very nicely). It’s more than that. You can…
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Disable autotuning in Windows
Microsoft has a great feature called autotuning. Autotuning though can be problematic when it comes to network connections with Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer 7, RDC and even some file sharing protocols over the WAN. This is mostly because not all firewalls support TCP Window Scaling for non-HTTP-based protocols. If you’re running into problems where these applications give you errors like “Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server Exchange_Server_FQDN” then you can try disabling autotuning to see if that is your problem (usually this involves wan connections, btw). To disable autotuning, use netsh to set tcp for autotuninglevel to disabled: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled To…
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NTP, OS X, Windows, Cisco and You
At this point, most Mac admins know to how to enable ntp on a Mac OS X Server and set clients to the server. Most Mac admins also know how to use managed preferences to set ntp as well. We all know that time is pretty important and most are using ntp at this point. Network time should, almost by definition, be continuous, which allows ntpd in Mac OS X can update clocks in small denominations. Thus, managing corrections with little overhead or impact to the system enables ntp to be an inexpensive method for managing clocks. But ntp is also built to keep things running smoothly even when there…
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Subversion Cheat Sheet
I’ve done a few articles in the past on different tasks in svn and git, but I have a little cheat sheet of sorts I’ve been using for awhile for Subversion on Mac OS X and thought I would share it. Before you get started, check your version. I use 2.0 but I seem to remember all of these are about the same as they were previously: svn --version To get started, Subversion uses a repository to store projects. Each client needs a repository and these should be on direct attached drives. The repository hosts a Berkeley database a folder per project you check out, or import. To create a…
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The Most Elite Hax0r Evah!
This came across the UUASC email list. It is a video my a kid who seems to have the most awesomest understanding of IP and traceroute that I have ever seem. The use of a “dot dot” to reference a colon, or as he calls it, semi-colon also shows his strong command of the proper way to reference the system as well. I stand in awe of his l33t skillz! Next up, how to use ping to see how many people are watching his video on YouTube…
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Change Listening Port for RDP
In Windows 7 (and previous versions for that matter), you can change the port that RDP listens on for new Remote Desktop connections. To do so you would fire up regedit and then browse to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-TcpPortNumber Here, you would change the PortNumber to a new decimal value that is the port you wish to listen on. Save, reboot and you’re good to go.
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Gmail + IE6
Got an email today informing me that Gmail will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. Nice of them to let us know rather than randomly killing support for it ’cause it’s old as crap like most vendors do. A win for Google there I’d say. Point of this article being, if you use IE 6 just stop. And if you’re an enterprise admin who doesn’t think you can pull off a massive IE 6 upgrade, this is Google’s way of having an intervention for ya’… MSI installer + a GPO = happier users anyway (be that MSI a newer IE 6, Chrome, Firefox or Safari). PS – Over 5%…
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Windows 7: Disable USB Storage
In a number of environments, especially MPAA or DoD environments (in the US we rank nuclear bombs right up there with pilfered copies of unreleased movies, especially ones that cost a lot of $ to make), users should not be able to mount any local removable storage. While Group Policy is typically the best way to keep users from mounting said storage, you can also do so without assigning GPOs. Simply make the permissions on the following files set to Deny (assuming your c:Windows directory = %SystemRoot%): C:WindowsInfUsbstor.pnf C:WindowsInfUsbstor.inf You may also need to add the System account to the Deny list for those files, but in my experience you…