IT Dribble

Had an interesting scenario at a clients yesterday. After a recent upgrade of their infrastructure of Blackberry Enterprise Server to Service Pack 2 MR 2 they couldn’t sign into the BES Console with both Active Directory credentials or local BES accounts. It seems that they had two compounding issues (more…)

Here is a great list of tools for troubleshooting Citrix Issues: http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX107572

So I was having a hunt around for the modified version of Netcat which is called Ncat developed by the lovely people who wrote the infamous port scanner Nmap. I needed the Win32 binaries for it and after a brief internet trowel it couldn’t be found. So I downloaded the source and compiled it and made it presentable for download for everyone else. Version 1 – Packed with UPX Packer. Version 2 – Not Packed. Happy Ncatting

I was using Windows based SSH box the other day and I needed to get some files, but the only options on a limited Windows (XP) box are ftp and the files I wanted were on HTTP so I hunted around and added to a vbscript which created a Wget type script which works via VBScript (which is avaliable on a limited XP Box)
Something else which is good about this script is that it uses Internet Explorer Proxy settings automatically, so if you are behind a corporate firewall and need to go through a proxy it does this automatically for you!

' VBScript based WGET - Changes by Cam McKenzie
' cam.mckenzie --at-- gmail --dot-- com
 (more...)

Its seems that Google have changed some of their code for maps website and users are experienicing a dialogue box popup with the message:
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en
Operation aborted

It seem the solution is to install Microsoft’s MS10-071: Cumulative security update for Internet Explorer (KB2360131)

Using this website PCI Database.
Just enter the Vendor or Device ID and boom thats the unknown hardware device!

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