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.

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.

Let me start out with the download link and the main site. If you manage a ton of computers then these tools can really help you out. Search for Rootkits?  Remotely Restart all windows machines? Remotely Shutdown? Send a file to hundreds of machines at once and initiate that install? Just the tip of the iceberg. Another tool that I have had limited success with on windows XP is Logon.exe. Careful, antivirus will probably think this is a virus especially if you put it in system32. If i use this in conjunction with the psexec tool i can logon to the machines ONLY after the logon process has been initiated at least once after reboot. So its a good thing to run at the end of the week after you are sure all the computer have been logged into at least once. I am not sure why you need to initiate a manual login/logoff before but it blue screens if you don’t (XPsp3, don’t even try it on vista). Anyway, this tool allows you to login a ton of machines at once so you don’t have to do it manually.

example:
psexec //ipofmachine or @filnameOFip’s -u domain/username -p password -i -s -c -d Logon.exe -u domain/username -p password

this puts Logon.exe in the client’s system32 folder and passes the logon that follows it to the logon screen.
you can of course specify a different folder to copy it to.

example:
psexec //ipofmachine or @filnameOFip’s -u domain/username -p password -i -s -c -d ”c:\temp\Logon.exe” -u domain/username -p password

This will copy it to a temp folder on the root of the c:

Of course with all these tools if you need help just type into the command line:  toolname /?

And it goes without saying that you need to be cd\’ed into the directory of the tool to actually run it. Simple tip, just copy cmd.exe to the sysinternals folder that you download and run it from there. That will automatically start you in the correct directory.

I noticed this problem soon after one of the 10.5 upgrades. Running deepfreze on the macs that were bound to a 2003 AD server. These macs were also dual boot with XP but it doesn’t matter if you have a single boot setup the problem still occurs. After a few days the mac would unbind its self from Active Directory (or Open Directory if you are running 10.5 server). Apparently the mac needs to update the trust account password with the server. So every few days it changes it, but after a reboot deepfreeze of course reverts to the old file making it a bad trust and forcing you to rebind.

Without further ado….

on the UNTHAWED macs….

1. login locally

2. unbind from the directory (you have to unbind or it won’t work)

open terminal and type the following (hit return at the end of each line)

sudo rm -R /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService

sudo dsconfigad -passinterval 0

3. rebind to the directory

4. in the terminal again  (hit return at the end of each line):

sudo cp /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ActiveDirectory.plist ~/Desktop

sudo chmod 777 ~/Desktop/ActiveDirectory.plist

4. now open the new file on your desktop in textedit called ActiveDirectory.plist

look for this…

<key>Password Change Interval</key>

<integer>0</integer>

Make sure it reads 0  <—yes that is a zero

if it does……

5. freeze and reboot

this essentially is telling the mac never to change the trust account password.

remember…when you run some of the commands you might not get a confirmation

This was a bear with my macs and an 10.5 open directory server with deep freeze on the clients. I finally removed DF and just used proper group policy restrictions (which I recommend over deep freeze for a lab setting any day). But i revisited the problem when a colleague had the same problem.