Various cool software and more

Unable to logon Windows 7

I just had a few hours of cold-sweat experience with my Windows 7 installation;

I had to remove my machine from the domain and reinsert it into a new domain with the same name.  This ought to be straight forward, it however proved to be a nightmare 😐  No matter what I did the above error was presented to me again and again “You have been logged on with a temporary profile” even after deleting the profile under c:\users\<profilename> the error kept coming.

Well a bit of googling came up with the solution (intended for Vista but works for Win7 also);

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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947242

To resolve this problem, follow these steps:

  1. Log on to the system by using an administrative user account other than the user account that is experiencing the problem.
  2. Back up all data in the current user’s profile folder if the profile folder still exists, and then delete the profile folder. By default, the profile resides in the following location:
    %SystemDrive%\Users\UserName
  3. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
    Collapse this imageExpand this image

    User Account Control permission

    If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type your password, or click Continue.

  4. Locate the following registry subkey:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  5. Under the ProfileList subkey, delete the subkey that is named SID.bak.

    Note SID is a placeholder for the security identifier (SID) of the user account that is experiencing the problem. The SID.bak subkey should contain a ProfileImagePath registry entry that points to the original profile folder of the user account that is experiencing the problem.

  6. Exit Registry Editor.
  7. Log off the system.
  8. Log on to the system again.

After you log on to the system, the profile folder is re-created. 

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After this I could login without a temporary profile..

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Trinity rescue Kit – Malware cleanup disk

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I just learned of a new antivirus/malware cleanup CD/iso, with support for NTFS and more.

Trinity Rescue Kit can be obtained from here;
http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12 or http://trinityhome.org/

It sounds like a cool CD with numerous cleanup utilities, definitely worth a visit.  I for one is going to download a copy and check it out.

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Delete files older than XX days

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Do you have a temporary directory on your pc/server, you know one of those places where you put stuff to look at later but always forget to delete again?  It is likely that your answer is yes, but the more important question ought to be how do I automate cleanup of this directory?

There are numerous ways to do this, but I’ll just give you one here – google the rest if you are not satisfied..

It’s actually not as hard as it sound, you need to download a utility called “forfiles.exe” (put  it in c:\windows\system32 or similar) and then create a script much like this (here I presume the directory to cleanup is C:\tempdata);

rem Delete files on the server older than 14 days.
forfiles -p c:\tempdata-s -d -14 -c "cmd /c del /Q /F ""@FILE"""
or
rem Delete files older than 90 days
forfiles -p c:\tempdata-s -d -90 -c "cmd /c del /Q /F ""@FILE"""

And that is about it 🙂

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Super ORCA

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super_orca_screenshot_2If you have ever worked with .MSI files you must have touched Microsoft’s utility ORCA.  Well it proves there is an alternative to this with a few extra features Super ORCA, so if you ever mess with .MSI files you may want to give Super ORCA a spin at http://www.pantaray.com/msi_super_orca.html

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Yubikey now with AD integration

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yubikeyI got a newsletter some time ago informing me that www.Yubico.com (or rather one of it’s partners) had added AD integration to the Yubikey, this should allow you to use the Yubikey to login to windows something that could be quite interesting..

Read more here;
http://www.yubico.com/news/100204/

ps.
I also seem to recall stumbling across some PAM and RADIUS implementation, so you might want to check their forum if you are into Yubikeys.
http://forum.yubico.com/

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Microsoft App Virtualization – the fun never ends

So as described earlier I was messing with Softgrid (now Microsoft Application Virtualization) and had some issues getting it to work, so I decided to move to the latest version (thus the name change), we was using 4.2 and the latest version is 4.5.

Anyhow, I upgraded the sequencer and everything seemed fine, I started a capture and everything seemed fine until I started the Java installer, i now got an error from the MSI installer;

javafejl

Error 1719.The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.

Odd I thought and tried different approaches which all led to the same error.

A bit of googling led me to this;
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/appvbeta/thread/1c5f8f8f-d431-4b7f-9601-40c1aef0409c/

The problem is simple yet bizzar, you can’t use remote desktop while doing a capture!?!?  I was using a virtual pc (HyperV) and used remote desktop to connect and do my capture, however once I restarted the Virtual Machine and did the capture via the HyperV console there was no problem!?  Odd…

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Softgrid tool and guide

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So I had to brush a bit up on my Softgrid knowledge for a package build and I came across a few things I’d like to share;

  1. A super guide to Softgrid building by one of the Guru’s on the field (Chris Lord).
    http://myitforum.com/cs2/files/folders/120058/download.aspx
  2. A neat util to explore Softgrid packages without installing the sequencer. SFT Explorer.
    sftexpl_screenshot_tb
    http://www.virtualapp.net/sft-explorer.html

As of right now I haven’t really gotten my package to work, I have to include an old version of Java with a link to a web-site.  But even if I set the registry to override it still fail to launch the old java, if no java is on the machine in advance it works like a dream..  We are currently using the old 4.2 sequencer so I might try the 4.5 version to see if any improvements has been made.

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Keyboard confusion

Have you ever had to support users with a different national keyboard than yours?

If so you may have noticed that national keyboards can vary quite a lot!?

Anyway, here is a few links to graphical depictions of national keyboards, then you at least stand a fighting chance 🙂

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc195104.aspx

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