For those of you that have ever tried finding anything on HP’s homepage you know that it can be virtually impossible 🙁 thus I am often struggling to find the download link for “HP ProLiant Support Pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2003”, well no more my friends 🙂 here is the link to use 🙂
And as a bonuslink, here is how to install it on a “Server Core” (the one without the Win GUI)..
I had to upgrade a server today from Win 2003 to Win 2003 R2, this should be a simple task however as with much IT this proved a no go 🙁
————————— Windows Server 2003 R2 Setup Wizard ————————— Setup cannot continue because this product disc is incompatible with the service pack installed on this computer. To complete the installation of Windows Server 2003 R2, you will need to insert the latest version of Windows Server 2003 R2 Disc 2. ————————— OK —————————
A quick google search however led me to;
http://blog.stealthpuppy.com/windows/windows-2003-r2-and-integrated-service-pack-2
where it was explained that a Windows 2003 Slipstreamed SP2 installation could cause problems with subsequent R2 installation, the solution is simple just modify the file “R2INTL.INF” in the \CMPNENTS\R2 directory like this;
change;
R2SPLevel = 1
to:
R2SPLevel = 2
and the installation will work without a problem. Easy as pie (when you know what to do that is ;-))…
If you have Windows 7 you have some interesting new options when it come to moving applications (eg Games etc) to other locations, namely the “mklink” command.
Read the whole story/guide here
(Screenshot is from an older version than the current 4.9)
Yet another free partitioning CD (why in the world pay for Partition Magic), this CD will let you boot from it and resize your partitions and much more (free).
As primary a Windows admin I get a bit discouraged by products like Nagios – although it’s definitely a cool product installing it seem complex and with little knowledge on Linux maintaining it even more so.
So are there any Windows (free) alternatives out there?
Yes, and propably more than one, however is there any open source/free versions among these?
I found two;
http://opennms.org/wiki/Installation:Windows
It claim to run on windows and have basic capabilities, I have not looked into details so I can’t say just how deep it goes (Nagius supports SNMP and very detailed monitoring, OpenNMS at a glance seem more like superficial monitoring). Anyway, it’s free and may just be enough for you, so take a look at it.
Demo available at;
http://demo.opennms.org/opennms/index.jsp
user and password is both “demo”
http://www.spiceworks.com
I actually tested this once (a previous version), it is quite fine for smaller sites (and seem more extensive than OpenNMS), but when it come to wan connected sites it seem a bit heavy (works without agents installed). Then again, it’s free and this one is quite easy to setup and manage.
Yet other alternatives (Non windows though) is;
http://www.zenoss.com/
http://www.zabbix.com/
And this one that seem commercial;
http://www.groundworkopensource.com/
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);
————————————————————————————————-
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947242
To resolve this problem, follow these steps:
If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type your password, or click Continue.
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.
After you log on to the system, the profile folder is re-created.
————————————————————————————————-
After this I could login without a temporary profile..
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 🙂
If you have the need to create MS VPN tunnels from your Linux box, then this link may be interesting to you;
http://www.ghacks.net/2010/03/02/connecting-to-a-microsoft-vpn-with-linux/
I 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/
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