18 Jun
XmlNotepad is a handy little tool that does pretty much what it says on the tin — it’s like Notepad, but aimed at correctly manipulating XML files. I’ve also found it to be a lot nicer to use a proper XML editor like XmlNotepad vs. a plain text editor when altering XML files; it makes […]
Posted in System Administration by: Quandary
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16 Jun
Ah, more integration. This time, I’m bringing ClamWin into the fold of SteadyState. Remember, SteadyState can “freeze” your drive, making it easy to recover from inadvertently installing malware and the like. However, sometimes it is necessary to update the machine — especially to get hotfixes and virus updates. SteadyState has support for running these kinds […]
Posted in Software, System Administration by: Quandary
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13 Jun
More, more, more little tools. The Sysinternals Suite is a large collection of handy little tools — including tools such famous tools as PsExec. It’s just a zip file, so it’s easy to install:
7z x -o”D:\program files\sysinternals\” SysinternalsSuite.zip
Then, simply add it to the path.
PATH %PATH%;D:\Program Files\sysinternals
SETX PATH “%PATH%” -m
Done. :)
Posted in System Administration by: Quandary
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11 Jun
Ah, another week of silent-installing tool goodness. The Windows XP Support Tools have some useful little tidbits, like windiff and depends.
First, unpack it:
C:\Temp\WST>WindowsXP-KB838079-SupportTools-ENU.exe /C /T:C:\Temp\WST\Unpack
Then, it’s just a matter of working the suptools.msi file (shame on Microsoft for again not using a default property to set the target directory):
C:\Temp\WST\Unpack>start /wait msiexec /qn /i suptools.msi XPSUPTOOLS=”D:\Program […]
Posted in System Administration by: Quandary
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09 Jun
I’m going to take a little diversion, because it really bugs me that ClamAV doesn’t register itself with the Security Center. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds this somewhat obnoxious. Furthermore, I have yet to find a clear description of how to handle all this WMI mumbo-jumbo, but it’s quite straightforward — […]
Posted in Software, System Administration by: Quandary
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06 Jun
So, here’s a little diddy you probably haven’t heard of: SteadyState. I recall way back in the day my CompSci teacher and his flunky (you know who you are) were hell-bent on locking down the lab so those ornery high-schoolers couldn’t break the Windows installations on those machines. They settled on DeepFreeze, but you can […]
Posted in System Administration by: Quandary
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04 Jun
Another anti-badware piece of software offered by Microsoft itself is good ol’ Windows Defender. This is an MSI that uses a somewhat standard property to control the installation directory, but there’s a twist in that it opens up a GUI after installation is complete. Thus, we need to take an extra step to kill the […]
Posted in System Administration by: Quandary
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