DHCP provides IP addresses to clients. DHCP is critical to a number of Mac OS X Server technologies, most notably with NetBoot. In doing so, communications are comprised of 4 steps: Discovery, Offer, Acceptance, and Acknowledgment. In the Discovery step, a computer that needs an IP address sends a broadcast request to the environment. These typically remain local, although most routers will allow for configuring the gateway in such a way that UDP traffic is forwarded on to other subnets. The request also includes all of the options that the client will need, with options being anything beyond an IP address, each potential option with a numerical identifier per this…
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H1N1 and Computer Labs
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (Athens, Georgia), I worked in computer labs. And I don’t think we cleaned the keyboards but once in the year before I moved into more department-specific IT. But now I’m a parent. And I keep hearing that we need to wash the hands of our children, that we need to keep everything they come in contact with sanitized and that we need to be prepared to take 7 business days to stay with them if they get sick or if something happens at their school (not that mine is in school yet). It isn’t that they want to keep our…
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Bubble Alerts w/ Silent Installs
When you push software to a Windows computer there’s an annoying little alert that pops up to tell the user that new software was installed. In one organization I was recently at this accounted for approximately 20 calls to the help desk every time they pushed out an update (patch Tuesday for them is one week after patch Tuesday for Microsoft). To turn off the bubbles in your image, right-click on the start button and click on properties. Then click on the Customize button. Click Advanced and uncheck the box for Highlight newly installed programs. Not too bad. But don’t want to touch all of the existing machines. Open HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced…
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Change H: on SMB PDCs
Samba can be a PDC, allowing Windows clients to join a single line domain name and then access domain resources (such as roaming profiles) as though the domain were Windows NT-based. When you set this up the default behavior for Mac OS X Server based domains is to create a drive mapping for H: to the users profile path (as specified in the homeDirectory attribute) on the server. H: is kinda’ low for some computers with a lot of drives and it can also conflict with other drive mappings you may choose to use. Therefore you may find that in some cases you need to change the H:. To do…
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Delegating DirAdmin to Windows Clients
The default behavior of a Windows Server NT4 through 2008 based domain is to allow a Domain Admin account to manage Windows clients. A number of environments have been moving over to using the PDC emulator on Mac OS X as a means of replacing aging Windows servers. One of the biggest annoyances is that the Open Directory administrative accounts they use to bind the Windows computers to are not local administrators. When you bind Mac OS X to Active Directory you can specify which Active Directory groups are administrators of Mac OS X client systems so you would imagine you can do the same thing on an OS X…
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Windows Login Screen Customizations
OK, OK, you’re right – if I’m going to cover customizing the loginwindow of Mac OS X then the least I can do is cover Windows as well. Because the registry is basically a bigger, more monolithic version of the defaults domains, we’re going to do pretty much the same stuff at the login screen for Windows. First, open the registry editor (regedit) and browse to HKEY USERS .DEFAULTControl PanelDesktop Then edit the value for wallpaper, typing in the path to the image you’d like to use. To set it as tiled add TileWallPaper and set it to the integer 1 or to stretch add WallPaperStyle and set it to the…
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Keystrokes for Windows 7
Windows Keys: Alt+ Enter: shows properties for selection Alt+ Esc: switch between applications in the order they were opened Alt+ F4: closes the active window Alt + Shift + F4: closes all open windows of the type matching the Active Window Alt + Spacebar: shows the System menu Alt + Tab: switch between open applications Control + Escape: opens the Start Menu F1: requests help Shift: while inserting removable media, skips auto-run Shift: while logging in, bypasses startup items Shift + Delete: deletes the selection permanently Windows Key: opens the Start menu Windows Key+D: shows Desktop Windows Key + E: opens Internet Explorer (or the default browser if it is…
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Move My Documents in XP and Vista
We simply don’t always want My Documents to point to the same location. Maybe we want to move it to external media, or maybe to a network drive. Either way, it’s simple to move. Right Click My Documents, click Properties and then click on the Target tab (in Vista it’s the Location tab). You can then change the path to the My Documents directory. Quick and easy. To do so en masse is going to require a GPO: Go to the Group Policy console for an OU, open up the User Configuration then Windows Settings and finally Folder Redirection items. Then right-click on the icon(s) for the personal folder(s) to…
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Disable Aero Machine Check
I use Windows 7 in a virtual machine most of the time and occasionally I’ve been finding that the machine checker is disabling Aero. Now, you might argue that I shouldn’t be running Aero in a virtual machine (and Windows 7 does seem to agree), but occasionally I need to test this, that or the other and besides, the iron that the VM sits on has no problem running anything else I throw at it. So, I find myself looking to disable that pesky check, which apparently I need to use a registry hack to do. So go to the following key in the registry (regedit), HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsDWM and create a new…
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Making Windows 7 Look Like Mac OS X
Not sure if it is kosher to actually distribute a theme pack for Windows 7 that makes it look like Mac OS X. But in lieu of doing so I can explain how it is done. Basically, take your images from the icons of Mac OS X and copy them into files, copy them to Windows and assign them as icons. Once you’re done, set the background to one from, let’s say, Mac OS X and make your icon placement similar. Then, export your theme pack by going to the Appearance & Personalization Control Panel for Windows 7 and clicking on Personalization. Under My Themes, right-click on the theme and…