Steps to create a new XP OEM CD. Handy if you’ve lost the vendor’s original CD, and you want to use the key that’s on the physical PC. Using a retail or MSDN CD won’t help, as your key won’t be accepted. Steps below:
1. Copy the full CD contents to your hard drive
2. Point nLite to your source as per above, and configure to your heart’s content.
3. Modify the ‘Pid’ number in the file “setupp.ini” to match the key you’re looking to use (note the double ‘P’ in the file name) . It resides in the I386 folder. See below for a list of PID keys.
I’ve read that the CD Label sometimes needs to match the version of Windows on the disc in order for the installation to work. See below also for a list of CD labels
4. Burn/Create ISO and install.
Continue reading ‘Creating a new OEM Windows XP CD’
Published at 2 August, 2007
in Windows.
A quick way to stop Windows Update from asking you to reboot is to simply:
- Go to Start, Run
- Type ‘net stop wuauserv’, and click OK
This will stop the service. I don’t see this as a problem, as the Windows Update client isn’t going to download any more updates while waiting for a reboot anyway. Once you reboot, the service will start again.
Obviously this will only work if you’ve got the correct privileges to stop and start services in Windows.
You can filter out text strings in Windows command prompt by piping the output to the ‘FINDSTR’ command. See below for an example:
netstat -an | findstr 192.168.1.15
TCP 192.168.1.10:1088 192.168.1.100:8080 ESTABLISHED
SSL-Explorer’s Community Version doesn’t give you full network access like some commercial SSL VPN solutions, but that shouldn’t stop you from printing.
This assumes that you’ve got some sort of network-enabled printer - such as a HP with an internal JetDirect card. From memory, if you’ve got an external JetDirect device with multiple physical Parallel or USB ports, the network port number changes according to the physical port used.
The setup is as follows:
- Go to Access Control, Policies, and create a new policy. Assign some users to the policy if you like.
- Go to Resources, SSL Tunnels, and create a new Tunnel with the following properties:
- Source Interface: 127.0.0.1
- Source Port: 9100
- Destination Host: Printer’s IP Address
- Destination Port: 9100
- Auto Start: Ticked, if you want the tunnel to be enabled as soon as the Java client starts
- Type: Local
- Assign the policy that was created in step one to this tunnel.
That’s it for the SSL-Explorer side of things. In Windows, make sure you’ve got the driver for your printer handy, and follow these steps:
- Go to Control Panel, Printers and Faxes, and add a new Local Printer (untick ‘Automatically Detect’ if it’s ticked)
- Create a new Standard TCP/IP Port
- As the address for the port, enter 127.0.0.1
- Click ‘Custom’, and leave the settings as:
- RAW mode
- Port 9100
- IP 127.0.0.1
- Point the Wizard to the correct printer driver, and finish the installation. If you want to print a test page, make sure that the SSL Tunnel is activated first. This can be verified by right-clicking on the SSL client’s tasktray icon and selecting ‘Tunnel Monitor’. You should see and entry for port 9100.
The way this works is that once the tunnel is enabled, it listens on 127.0.0.1 on the port you’ve specified, and redirects traffic to the IP and port specified on the network behind the SSL VPN.
In addition to this, you can add a ‘Web Forward’ of type ‘Tunneled proxy’ to the printer’s port 80 if you’d like to check up on the printer’s status via the web interface. You can then add this ‘Web Forward’ to the policy created in step 1.
If you’re after a free helpdesk solution, give Spiceworks a shot. It seems to be targeted at smaller companies with under 200 users.
It currently sports:
- Helpdesk
- WMI-based asset tracking
- SNMP discovery of devices
- SSH login to audit *nix boxes
My only gripes with it at the moment are:
- A bit slow
- No updates sent to owner of tickets when the user replies (coming in V2, June 07)
The auditing features and functionality are mostly on par with the Open Source project Open-Audit, although Open-Audit does some things better, such as License Key retrieval, ease of viewing data.
Spiceworks is a closed-source project which is supported by sponsored advertisements on the right-hand side of the screen.
