Unduly Noted

So you want to create a profile to distribute to new users as they login to their account in your lab? I have a windows 2003 server and Vista Clients (soon to be 2008 server). Go into your clean vista install and get everything setup PERFECTLY. Logout. Logon with a different account with admin rights. Right click on Computer. Click Advanced system settings. Under the Advanced tab look for “User Profiles” and click the settings button under that. High light the account that you just setup. Click the “Copy To…” button. Choose where you want to put it “Copy profile to” (we will get to where it’s supposed to go in a second). Next click the “Change” button underneath that. Type “everyone” (without quotes) into the object name text box. Click “OK” (or you can click check names, make sure you are bound correctly). If you are part of a .local domain you may have to pull your internet connection or just put the AD server IP in the first DNS entry and leave the 2nd one blank. Click OK again and it may take a few seconds depending on how big the profile is. It should now be in the location you specified earlier.

Proper placement of this file on windows server 2003? Place it in your NETLOGON folder: %systemroot%\SYSVOL\Sysvol (if you don’t know where your system root is just click start, run and type %systemroot% and hit enter, it will automatically take you there). If it is not there then go to a remote computer, open my computer and type your server into the address bar: \\servername . You should see the netlogon folder here. Rename your profile to “Default User” for windows XP/2000 (no quotes) and “Default User.v2″ for windows vista. Now when a new user logs into your domain they will automatically get this profile.

This is of course if you don’t want to setup ghost console.
One of the problems I have had with single machine ghosting is that you can’t boot from the ghost CD and also use a usb storage device to either put your images on or copy your images from. So you are stuck using dvd’s, and that can be fairly slow if the image spans across 8 of them. I came up with an easy way to make the USB drive visible in ghost, boot from it.
USB format/boot tool/utility is the proper HP tool. A few different sites link to the wrong tool that forces the fat drive to be a few gigs. This will let you take a external USB disk and get at most a 120gb partition out of it, which is plenty for my ghosting needs.

First thing we need to do is pop a floppy (yes i said floppy) into a windows XP or earlier machine. Format it and make sure you check the box to make it a bootable disk (this gives us the files needed for the USB drive). When you open the disk it will be blank, this is normal (you can also get the dos system file from anywhere else on the web if you don’t have a floppy). Next open up the usb format tool that you just downloaded. Choose your device, choose the filesystem (FAT32 if you want a large drive), name it, click quick format, click create a DOS startup disk and click the radio button that says “using DOS system files located at:”, now click the browse button and choose your floppy drive and hit “ok”. Click start and ok/yes through the next prompts. Now copy your GHOST folder (that conatins ghost.exe) to the usb drive. Reboot the machine and pull up your boot menu (sometimes F12 or just configure the bios to boot first from USB). It will boot you right to a command prompt. Type the following: cd \ghost\ghost.exe
Thats it. Go ahead and do your magic, the huge USB drive will show up in ghost now.

This happened soon after the 10.5.6 update came out. Having a stupid moment and not testing the update on one machine I wen’t ahead and upgraded them all from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6. Then I started to notice that when a user would log out it would put up the gray kernel panic screen (reboot your computer by holding down the power button in several different languages). A few solutions. The problem was in 2 folders, the frameworks and the fonts folder in ~/Library (thats /Users/username/Library). If they are deleted you can logout fine. In 1 case that would not fix it so a removal of the entire /Users/username/Library folder did the trick. Don’t worry, when you log back in 10.5 server will repopulate that folder for you.  I did it from the terminal on the server before the user logged in. Just cd into the users directory and type:  sudo rm -r Library
There are some server side tools to mass delete this, or you can just write an automator script to run at logon.

Kind of ugly but it does the trick. If you can’t rip a DVD with anything that you have tried via some sort of new copy protection VLC to the rescue. In VLC go to open disc and choose your dvd. At the bottom of this window you will see a box that says “Streaming/Saving:”. Check that and then open the settings button next to it. Configure what codec/wrapper you would like to use and tell it where you want it to save. Thats it. Watch your movie and stop it when its done. Warning, This thing will keep on recording after the movie is done so you have to babysit or else you will end up with a 100gb mpeg file that needs trimming.

EDIT:
Jut released a version compatible with 3.0 Installed and works great. Don’t even need helper app. Just create ad hoc and connect to it with iphone. Then run iphonemodem3 (addition) on you iphone. less flakey than pdanet even.

OLD EDIT:
As of 3.0 this app would not launch for me - use my guide here for an alternative

From my experience the helper app is flakey. Doesn’t always work or create an adhoc network. Easy solution is to create an adhoc network on your own and name it whatever you like (ex: mynetwork). Now on the iphone connect to that network. Next click the arrow next to the name of the network (on the iPhone). It will take you to a page where it lists your IP address. By default it will be on DHCP. Wait until the IP address self populates. Once it does hit the static button (instead of DHCP) and those numbers should now stick. Now back on your mac go ahead and configure  your socks (port 1080) http and https (port 3128) with the IP from the phone (If using firefox you have to do it in its own preferences under advanced -> Network -> Settings. The same for Windows Firefox). That should do it. Open the iPhonemodem 2 app on the iPhone and it should connect. Now every time you have to connect via iPhone make sure you create a network with the exact same name (ex: mynetwork). The iPhone will automatically assign that static IP to it. If you want to connect to another wireless access point make sure to uncheck the boxes from the earlier steps here. Don’t worry, when you want to go back just check them again, mac os x remembers your config. This also works for windows of course, just make the changes in your network config.

Bonus: iPhoneModem 2 can serve out interent to several computers at once as long as you configre them like above and stay away from the helper app.

ALSO: If you want to tether your iPhone to play games like word of warcraft (WoW) or FFXII or any other MMORPG with this app it is doable. Just download this program called Proxifier (mac and windows). Start up the app and go to “Options” ->”Name Resolution” and check it. Also “Options”->”Proxy Settings” and fill it in with the settings above. I have had great luck with this. Ventrillo even works while in a 10 man raid with an EDGE connection. Granted you get latency of around 600ms but as long as you are not a healer and you don’t have a constant stream of noob chatter, this is doable. Just make sure this app is running before any other apps.