ECS Computer Solutions, Christchurch

Often when working on remote VMWare servers and you want to boot an ISO from the datastore it doesn’t give you enough time to press ESCAPE and select the CD-ROM. There is an easy fix… Add / Edit the VMX file for the server you are trying CD boot and add the line: bios.bootDelay = "boot delay in milliseconds" - Save the file back in the datastore and your done!

Currently I am entrusted with developing a Windows 7 Professional Image for deployment and have until recently been stuck with getting the default user profile to ‘keep’ pinned start menu items.

While I was copying them to C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\StartMenu they still wouldn’t show up. There is actually a complementary Registry key which makes the magic happen. So without further ado: How to set Pinned Start Menu Items for Default Profile in Windows 7 (more…)

Upon Sysprep-ing our first test image of Windows 7 using an unattend.xml our WDS enviroment would produce the error ‘Windows could not apply unattended settings during pass (null).’ At first I thought my unattend.xml file was wrong BUT the actual problem was that WDS was using a Windows Vista Image for the Image Deployment. The required fix was copy boot.wim from the Windows 7 DVD\Sources directory and add that to the ‘Boot Images’ within WDS. After that you PXE boot as per normal and select your newly appointed image!

This post was inspired by this blog post

After a colleague of mine installed WDS at a client site they found that certain laptops and desktop PCs would not be able to pick up the images that have been captured.

The problem lies in the HAL Type of the PC that was captured and then WDS finds the HAL type for the PC asking for an image and if one doesn’t match then you will most probably get the error: “There are no images available”

My scenario was that we had a generic image built and working for Single CPU and MultiCPU PCs but only the Multiple / Newer PCs could see the image in WDS - that is because the HAL type was “Advanced Configuration and power interface (ACPI) PC” but these older PCs were being recognised as Uniprocessor HAL Types.

The solution: Get the image onto the Older PC type (via Ghost or Clonezilla etc) login to the system. Download DevCon and extract into C:\Windows or any other %PATH% variable you like.
Then run:
devcon sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +acpiapic_up !acpiapic_mp
devcon update c:\windows\inf\hal.inf acpiapic_up

Reboot and Login two times then Sysprep and capture again!

Hopefully your good to go!

Reference: http://www.ngohq.com/processors/11891-how-to-update-the-hal-without-reinstalling-windows.html

Keywords: WDS, Force HALs, Force HAL, Windows Deployment Services, WDS, ACPI Multiprocessor PC, acpiapic_up, acpiapic_mp, No Images after Capture, Change HAL Type

Can’t open this item. The text formatting command is not available - Outlook. This error was received when trying to open an Outlook item. Also it seems that Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) couldn’t render a page and it would just be blank. After trying to remove profiles and repair office etc I traced the fault to a recent Windows update KB978207 for IE to be exact. After removing the update and rebooted everything worked again!

I came across a Windows 7 Skins for KDE - It looked really….exact but the install script was crap it installed a new user and was only Kubuntu based and was pretty brutal at overwriting stuff so I (more…)

After ’successfully’ upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 (64bit) on my laptop KDE4 failed to start with error: Kstartupconfig4 does not exist or fails. The error code is 127.

Gnome still worked but KDE and KDE apps failed to load. Trying to run dolphin in terminal produced libssl.so.8 & libcrypto.so.8 shared library missing errors.

The resolution is put in the symbolic links that are missing

cd /usr/lib64 (64bit) and /usr/lib (32bit)
ln -s libssl.so.1.0.0 libssl.so.8
ln -s libcrypto.so.1.0.0 libcrypto.so.8

and reboot

Seems I’m in fix it mode tonight - amazing what you get done when you don’t have women distracting you!
Anyway it seems that my fail2ban has been broken for quite a while, the resolution of this was me running:
fail2ban-client -x start and that worked ok

So I modified /usr/sbin/rcfail2ban and added the line:
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;

Here it is in context:

case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting Fail2Ban "
[ -e $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET ] && rm $FAIL2BAN_SOCKET;
/sbin/startproc $FAIL2BAN_BIN start &>/dev/null
rc_status -v

Well you get the drift. Happy Banning!

Recently I came across a new file format called RSDF, these appear to be txt files which have a bunch of links in them, so called link containers.  I wanted to access the URLS in these files, but I didnt really want to entrust my computer to just “any” application. (more…)

Hooray! I did it!
I have managed to boot my bootable usb pendrive (BackTrack 3) under QEMU within Windows XP.

For those of you who want the magic one liner here you are:

qemu.exe -L . -m 512 -std-vga -hda \\\\.\\PhysicalDrive2 -soundhw all -localtime -M pc -kernel ../../boot/vmlinuz -initrd ../../boot/initrd.gz -append "root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=../../boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 vga=0x317"

• This gives you TextMode with 512 MB Ram and Mouse Support!!
• You will need to change PhysicalDrive2 to what ever drive number your USB key is. (Hint look under the DiskManagment snap-in)
• You require administrative rights also
• My Qemu directory lives under USBDriveLetter\BT3\QEMU FYI
• QEMU Version Win32 PreCompiled 0.9.1

Hopefully this saves you a few hours