IT Dribble

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

Part of works server migration has meant that we are working on a new Terminal Server. I liked the old one better because:

• It had a run command
• I could view the system drives
• I could type H: in the address bar and it worked!
• It had command prompt access!
• No firefox installed (Hardened IE installed! OMG WTF!)

And the list goes on….. What I find mose stupid is a work for an IT company and they lock the shit down which make us less productive!!

(more…)

Had a client whose print queue would jam up and they couldn’t restart the printer spooler until you manually cleared the spooled documents. So I stole this piece of code and put it in a batch file. Works wonders!

@echo off
net stop "print spooler"
del /q "%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*"
net start "print spooler"

Update: The reason the spooler was dying was because when he printed a PDF document he would close Acrobat before the document finished and in turned killed the Print Spooler. Because we charge by the hour, he didn’t want it to be investigated any further, which is fine by me!

With my OpenSuSe and SLES Linux installations I was trying to remember how to add the rc prefix to MailScanner so I didn’t have to type /etc/init.d/MailScanner restart. All you need to do it add a symlink in /usr/sbin called rcmailscanner pointing to /etc/init.d/MailScanner. I cant believe Im forgot such a simple thing! DoH!