Archive for 2007

This is just a quick note. Microsoft has just announced that the Release Candidate for Vista SP1 has been released to the general public.

Download and install from here

I lied. I read in a press release that they were doing this. I went and filled out the 15 minute form to find out the only free software I get is the spyware that collects information about my computer usage.

Originally you could apply to the Windows Feedback program, and then for the trouble of letting them watch everything you do – you could get a free copy of Vista, and/or Office 2007.

After filling out their huge survey and giving away my first born I couldn’t find anywhere on the feedback site where I could download the software. I started googling. It looks like starting today (My luck eh?) they quietly discontinued the program.

The funny part is they left the website open. That way suckers like me could fill out all the info, and only after the fact find out there is nothing on the other side.

Not that I need it – since our MSDN subscription gives me all the Vista, and Office I need. I just wanted to see what this free offer looked like.

Now I know

Microsoft announced today the release of Windows XP SP3 RC1 (Is that enough acronyms for you?)

If you are a Technet, or MSDN subscriber you can download it now

I have started testing it with a fresh XP install. No big changes over SP2. No speed increase or decrease either. It includes all of the latest hotfixes and patches so once this thing is released it will reduce your setup time for new XP machines considerably.

I will continue to test, and let you know if I find anything noteworthy about this release.

Microsoft has released a set of documents for Vista SP1.

This is the most comprehensive amount of information released so far. There are 5 documents in total. They are:

-Deployment guide for Vista SP1

-Enterprise Guidance for Application Compatibility Testing

-Hotfixes and Security updates

-Notable Changes in Windows Vista

-Overview of Windows Vista SP1

Download and open the hotfixes document. I had no idea it would contain almost 70 pages of hotfixes. Haven’t had a chance to read through the whole thing…so I am not sure if they have zapped some of my major pet peeves.

They all can be downloaded from here

Microsoft has announced the release of Windows 2008 RC1 beta.

This release candidate is open to the general public for testing. You can download a 30 day evaluation from any of the links below:

Windows Server 2008 Standard RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 Datacenter RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Web Server 2008 RC1 (x86 and x64)

Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-Based Systems RC1

Not all of the links above were working at the time I wrote this. They should be within the next 24 hours. If you are still having trouble…visit this download page

I stopped using Vista for my day to day work about 6 months ago. I only fire it up in a virtual machine for testing with our remote control software.

I have realized it is keeping me from experiencing the pain of Vista, and finding solutions for it.

I decided I needed to start using it every day. That way I know exactly what my customers experience when running Vista. To make this mission more appealing I splurged and bought a dream system.

I finally made my choice – The Sony Viao TZ Series.

It is the white edition – looks a lot like a very thin Mac book (Surprise surprise). The hardware itself is awesome. The similarity ends there.

Unfortunately I cannot run Mac OSX on this fine piece…and I am stuck with Vista. Yes…that was my original purpose, but after I made the plunge I was swearing at it for at least a few hours.

The first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t telnet into my FreeBSD based Asterisk server. Hmm. It says the command is not recongizied.

Could it really be that Microsoft has removed telnet from Vista?

Yep. Yes they took it out. Perfect. It makes me love Vista even more.

Here is how you get it back:

1. Get to a command line

2. Type: start /w pkgmgr /iu:”TelnetClient”

3. Click Continue on the User Access Control Prompt

4. Wait while Vista churns and churns thinking about it

5. Bam. Now you have telnet back

Microsoft said on Monday it is going to disable two methods hackers are currently using to pirate Vista (No word from them as to what those two methods are)

They claim that the new anti-piracy features in windows Vista have cut piracy in half (From Windows XP). Not sure if they asked those pirates if the reason was that they didn’t want the new operating system

Microsoft plans to make it even harder for legitimate customers to activate the software they paid for. Oops. I meant they will make it harder for pirates to get free copies of Vista.

Thankfully they have decided to change the way they deal with invalid versions of Vista. Instead of downgrading features, they will give the users recurring notifications that their version of Vista is not genuine.

If a user of pirated software wants to purchase a genuine copy of Windows from Microsoft, they can buy the Home Basic edition for $89 or $119 for the Home Premium version.

Lets hope SP1 fixes problems with legitimate users getting deactivated :<

I received a note from a reader yesterday:

I saw your post (below), but didn’t see a way to make this screen appear. Can you tell me how to access that screen?

He is talking about this post:

http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/12/adobe-releases-acrobat-reader-8.html

I went back and read the article and realized that this settings page is very difficult to find within Acrobat Reader 8.

Here is how you can get to these settings. Open up Acrobat Reader, and click on Help then “Check for updates”

You will have to wait through at least one attempt at an annoying update.

Now when it sees that there are updates, or it fails you will get a page that allows you to download the updates – or change your update preferences. Click on the link that says “Preferences”

Now you will see the settings page for updates.

You can set it for a more reasonable update cycle, or disable it all together. Remember that the updates are important since there have been numerous security flaws in adobe over the past two years. Any one of them could allow an attacker to install software on your computer by simply viewing a carefully crafted PDF file.

Considering the security problems, and the fact that Adobe is going to make PDF files even more annoying by adding advertisements (I am not joking). I suggest downloading an alternative PDF viewer. My personal favorite is FoxIt.

VMWare has actually had this tool for quite some time now. The VMWare converter for Windows was released in January of 2007. I just had a chance to use it, and it works great.

You can convert a physical machine to a VM while it is running. Thats right – no downtime to convert a system. This is perfect when you need to test something on a live production server…but don’t want to risk it.

A few things to watch out for when using it:

-If you have Windows 2003, XP, or Vista the switch to the Virtual machine will trigger product activation. If you don’t have an OEM license this can be a problem…and may prevent you from completing your task.

-You can’t run the converter on the same machine you are converting. You need to run it over the network, or create a boot disk. A boot disk would be bad since this would cause a significant chunk of downtime.

Obligatory features and benefits from VMWare:

-Quickly and reliably convert local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any disruption or downtime.

-Complete multiple conversions simultaneously with a centralized management console and an intuitive conversion wizard.

-Convert other virtual machine formats such as Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server or backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec LiveState Recovery or Ghost 9 to VMware virtual machines.

-Restore VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images of virtual machines to running virtual machines.

All in all I like this tool, and it has been a great help when testing or trying to isolate an issue without impacting users.

Get your free copy from here

I was doing some house cleaning on one of my systems and I noticed a few test accounts that had been sitting around for over a year. I don’t like having dormant accounts laying around since it creates a higher possibility that someone could use them to get in.

I wanted an easy way to list all accounts that have not been accessed within the last 60 days…on every computer on my network.

To start out I wrote a script that would output a list of dormant accounts on a single remote computer.

Here is my first crack at it:

‘Minimum age of account we want to report (In Days)
iDays = 60

Sub ReportUnusedAccounts(sComputer)
‘Get a connection to the remote computer
Set poComputer = GetObject(”WinNT://” & sComputer)
‘Used as a flag to see if we could see any accounts on the remote computer
bFoundAccount=FALSE
‘Loop through each account and see how old it is
For Each poItem in poComputer
 if poItem.Class=”User” then
  ’Update our counter so we know we found at least one account
  bFoundAccount=TRUE
  ’Get the number of days since the last login
  iDuration=DateDiff(”D”,poItem.LastLogin,Date)
  ’If greater than our trigger, then report
  if (iDuration > iDays) then
   sOutput = sOutput & sComputer & “, ‘” & poItem.Name & “‘, ‘” & poItem.LastLogin & “‘,’” & iDuration & “‘” & vbLF
  end if
 end if
next
‘If we saw no accounts, then we had a problem connecting
if (bFoundAccount=FALSE) then
 Wscript.Echo sComputer & “, ‘Could not connect, or access denied’”
else
 WScript.Echo (sOutput)
end if
end sub

When I call the function in the script, it comes back with a comma delimited list of accounts that have not been accessed for more than 60 days.

I needed to do this for every computer on my domain. So I added a script that would query the domain for a list of computers, and execute the above function on each one:

‘Make sure we got our argument from the command line
if (WScript.Arguments.Count=0) then
 Wscript.Echo “***************************************”
 WScript.Echo “* IntelliAdmin, LLC *”
 Wscript.Echo “* http://www.intelliadmin.com *”
 WScript.Echo “* (Unused Accounts Reporter) *”
 WScript.Echo “***************************************”
 WSCript.Echo “Missing Arguments. Usage shown below: “
 Wscript.Echo “UnusedAccounts.vbs “
else

‘Get domain object so we can query a list of computers
Set DomObj = GetObject(”WinNT://” & WScript.Arguments(0) )

‘Filter only computer objects
DomObj.Filter = Array(”computer”)

‘Loop through all computers and execute our ReportUnusedAccounts sub
For Each sComputer In DomObj
  ReportUnusedAccounts sComputer.Name
Next
end if

Now I can call the script (With my domain as the only argument) and it will cycle through all computers on the network. It reports the unused accounts in a nice CSV format:

(Note: It can take up to 90 seconds for it to fail on a computer that is not available. This means the report can take some time to generate)

Execute the script like this from the command line to output it to a CSV file:

cscript.exe //nologo UnusedAccounts.vbs >> UnusedAccounts.csv

Then you could simply open the UnusedAccounts.CSV with Microsoft Excel and sort it the way you pleased.

Download the script from here