Microsoft SMS Sender

, ,

sms2 Bit of an oldie here, and still untested with newer GSM Phones, however should you want to have SMS capability in your organization this may be a cheap way to go.

It requires a compatible phone (and cable) and then you can fire off scripts (or commandlines) to send sms messages.  Seem easy enough, but sadly I don’t have a data cable to the old Nokia phone in our storage room 🙁

Do let me know if you try it and it works 🙂

 

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/outreach/dnloads/smssender.mspx

SMSSender.msi

Update:
I finnally had the chance to test this (I had no data cable for my cell phone), anyway it is all very straight forward until you try to send an sms from command line, this will fail with a message like this “there is no device previously used by SMS sender…….”.

Unfortunately the SMS sender software has a bug that causes it NOT to write your choice from the GUI to registry :-(,  so you need to enter the device name manually to registry.

smsreg

 

 

 

 

 

 

The keyname is;
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\SMSSender
The key is a sting;
DeviceName
And the value is the name of your device/cell phone (as displayed in the GUI)
eg. “Nokia 6230i USB Modem” (without quotes)

once this is done you can send command line sms’s (as shown below P=phone number M=message L=Log message);

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SMS Sender>smssender.exe /p:12345678 /m:"Hello World" /l

smsreg1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are more details plus some C++ code for semi implementation into your own software here (it’s a rather basic launch routine for the exe file);

http://veskokolev.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-send-sms-under-windows-using.html

One problem with the SMS sender software if you use it in scripting, it will once the SMS is send bring up a message window telling you that the sms was send succesfully, now this is not that practical it this actually ‘halts’ thr process until the message window is closed (the above C++ code will as I can see solve this by killing the window afterwards).  Another issue, ONLY ONE sms can be send at the time, if you try to send several SMS’s in a row the software will fail – guess that is logical enough but not that practical if the script that sends the sms can somehow be called several times at nearly the same time..

Aparantly there also exists an Outlook 2003/2007 extention (MOSA) that will do something similar vai Outlook, I have not had time to test this but as it’s also from Microsoft it should work just as well or maybe even better(however this requires Outlook);
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/confirmation.aspx?familyId=240080b4-986e-4afb-ab21-3af2be63508b&displayLang=en

/4 Comments/by

Creating and using a custom Policy file (adm template)

, , , ,

So you for some reason or other need a custom GroupPolicy template (.adm template) to set some strange setting for some odd software.

You can use a Policy.ADM file to set custom registry values either for your own pc (may seem like a bit overkill) or more likely for your domain.

Well I have created a few of these back in the good old NT4 days and it was not all that difficult once you got the hang of it, and thus when I had the need again lately I was confident I could get it to work without too much of a hassle.

I was wrong :-/

Ok, creating a simple policy.adm file is easy;

policy1

And if you enter a keyname like;
”SoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftwhatever”

Things will work brilliantly, however lets say you want to change some obscure value for the adobe reader!?  This is outside the “Policies” section of the registry.. things will look like this when you enter the GPM MMC console.

policy2

This is where I lost my temper and started cursing at my monitor, see again once I put “Policies” in the keyname everything worked like a charm (but my setting was NOT in the Policy region of the registry)..

So Google to the rescue, it would seem that things have changed since the good old Poledit days, and that you need to do a bit of editor tweaking to get those ‘dirty’ settings available under NT4+ systems now-er-days.

Here is the secret;

policy3 
View, Filtering, “Only show policy settings that can be fully managed”..

Once this is done you can see everything – just like in the good old days 😀

policy4

Also it’s worth noting the other filter settings, I did not even know they existed, now you can actually limit your view to only those settings that are set, and this DO make it a lot easier to overlook the more complex policies.

Good luck making your new policies its easy as pie you know..

Links;
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/12009443/m/645000852731/inc/-1
http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/ADM-Template-Repository.html
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738443.aspx

/by

MRT – the shortcut to Malicious Software Removal Tool

, , ,

MRT1 So you would like to run MSRT manually (the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool, the one that comes once a month from Microsoft via Windows Updates and cleans different infections from your pc), well as written in an earlier post https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=463 you can download a version straight from Microsoft, however it turns out there is an even easier method, simply go to your “start menu”, select “Run” and enter “MRT” and hit enter..

There is even the option to launch it with parameters so you could schedule it to run at regular intervals if you would like.

.

/by

Robocopy GUI – for the faint hearted

, ,

So you did not grow up with MS-DOS 3.2 like the rest of us, and when it comes to copying files you stick to the good old Windows Explorer.  Well that is all well and good, however if you suddenly need to copy a LARGE number of files or some very large files this can become an issue, the error handeling capabilities of Windows Explorer just aint that great.

You may have heard about Robocopy, a cool little – rather old by now – utility from Microsoft. Robocopy stands for Robust file copy, and it has the ability to mirror directories event down to ntfs rights, very nifty (I have used it since the good NT4 days) however it’s a good old MS-DOS commandline utility so you have to write pages with switches to tweak it just for your task.

To my amazement however I just realized that Microsoft actually released a GUI for the util back in 2006 :-) well well, so now there is no excuse not to use it and save yourself a lot of time and pain..

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160891.aspx

Now Robocopy is a VERY nice utility and still the most reliable I know of, however as mentioned in an earlier post Terracopy is quite a competitor, and I would be sure not to miss giving it a go too (its somewhat easier to work with).

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

/by

Scheduling issues – back to good old NT4

, ,

In this day in age everything has wizards, this also being true for creating a new scheduled job on a server. 

Now I did not research this in great detail, so bare with me if I overlooked something, but I had problems omitting an account and password when creating a new scheduled job.  I wanted to create a schedule witch would run under the systems account, and let me tell you it got old REALLY fast, damn wizard would not let me create the job.

So back to the good old dos AT command I think, but wait I thought was there not an old utility in NT4 that had some kind of GUI..  Google->Search->Found :-)

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/ResKit/nt4/x86/winat/winat.exe

So if you like me experience problems with those damn modern wizards, download this and be happy (its even a bit nostalgic to work with an NT4 util again :-))..

/by

McAfee ePO agent uninstall

,

I keep forgetting how to uninstall the ePO agent, so this is mostly a reminder to myself;

Command line to manually remove ePolicy Orchestrator.
FrmInst.exe /REMOVE=Agent

FrmInst.exe is in the “program filesmcafee…..” directory…

And no you are right its generally not a good idea to remove the ePO agent, however as we are moving to Microsoft Forefront Client Security we sometime come across a remaining ePO agent which makes not much sense 🙂

Useful Command Lines;
Uninstall McAfee Virus Scan 8.6
MsiExec /X{35C03C04-3F1F-42C2-A989-A757EE691F65} /q
Uninstall McAfee Virus Scan 8.0i
msiexec /uninstall {5DF3D1BB-894E-4DCD-8275-159AC9829B43} /qn
Uninstall McAfee Virus Scan 7.1
MsiExec /X {59224777-298D-4E9C-9AEB-4A91BDA01B27} /q

Uninstall ePO agent;
"C:\Program Files\Network Associates\Common Framework\FrmInst.exe" /forceuninstall
or
"C:\Program Files\McAfee\Common Framework\FrmInst.exe" /forceuninstall

If you are lazy (like me ;-)), then I have created an uninstaller that will do all the work for you,
it was created in the AutoIT script language, you can download it both as a
stand alone EXE and an AU3 (the script file);

https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.au3
or the compiled EXE version here
https://readmydamnblog.com/downloads/McAfee_Uninstall.exe

Want to know more about the AutoIT script engine? look here; 
https://readmydamnblog.com/?p=966

If uninstall FAILS, then here is McAfee’s own guide for manual removal;
https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB58597

/1 Comment/by

Batch job troubble (%~dp0)

, ,

kedit.png
Just spend a few hours on a simple batch job issue 🙁

I had a job.cmd file I executed, but the containing commands was not executed as Windows could not locate the filename.exe files 😐  The problem was rather simple, the current directory (%cd%) while executing the job.cmd file was “c:windowssystem32”..  doh 🙁

Anyhow, found out that there is actually a simple way around this;

@Echo off
set IDP=%~dp0
set OLDDIR=%cd%
cd /d %IDP%
filename.exe /S
cd /d %OLDDIR%

This is rather simple, IDP (%IDP%) is set to the executing batch file’s directory via the IDP=%~dp0 and finally OLDDIR contain the ‘before’ current directory.  If you need to set the %cd% at the end, well no probably not (but hey I’m a nice guy 😉 )..

For further details;
http://weblogs.asp.net/whaggard/archive/2005/01/28/get-directory-path-of-an-executing-batch-file.aspx

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/97731e49-ffa3-4918-87fb-5318743f29321033.mspx?mfr=true

/by

Unpack .EXE files (uniextract)

, , ,

If you ever worked with deployment, you know the issue where you need an .MSI file or other driver files but all the vendor is supplying is a SETUP.EXE file.

Well many .EXE files can via some obscure parameters /Extract /B or whatever be extracted, but as all vendors use different utilities to create their .EXE files it can be hard to figure out how to expand them, plus some .EXE files actually can not be extracted (or is not designed to)..  Usually WinRAR is a good bet, it can actually extract many .EXE filetypes..  but not all 🙁

Fear no more, Uniextract to the rescue…  maybe it wont extract ALL but atleast it extracted many of the files I had problems with, so big thumbs up from me..  It is quite easy to use, once installed just right click on the .EXE file and select extract to subdirectory..  Easy as pie 😀

http://legroom.net/software/uniextract

/by

TeraCopy – Filecopy the safe way

, ,

teracopy.jpg

Finally someone got around to writing a useful program to assist in file-copying 🙂

We all know the feeling, we start a ‘drag-and-drop’ file-copy and somewhere along the line an error occur, bad luck if you are using Windows XP (Vista is just a tad better, but still not perfect) you can start from scratch again because you have no way of determining what actually was copied before it failed..

Well this program claims to take care of this along with numerous other nice features (like pause copy job etc).  I have so far only done a quick test, but it seem promising.

Freeware for personal use and a pro version is availabe for corporate use with additional features.

The program adds itself as right click options.
http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

/by