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majormashup

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Everything posted by majormashup

  1. dard, citrix is going to be a massivley over-complicated solution for your needs (I distinctly remember posting pretty much everything you could need on your post a few months back. please re-read that post and investigate the avenues I mentioned there. (all you need to get running is windows with smartlaunch and daemon tools but there are other thing's I mentioned which will give your infrastructure some kind of resillience)
  2. dard, you are running a gaming centre yes? what software are you using to run the game from the server? I was under the impression you needed a citrix like environment to do this. If you want to store images on your server that is fine just map the server share to a drive on the client PC. I would highly recommend running all .exe's from client PC's though. I can only offer you limited help as you have not answered my previous questions like what cafe management software you are using. Please be more specific and remember your server in that environment should only be used for administering your network with your selected management tools, storing files and looking after your database regards, MaSHUP
  3. AutoIT scripts may be worth a look, not the most elegant solution but should do the job
  4. did you look into smartlaunch at all? what do you want the client PC's to be able to access? In the past I have set up cafes with no file sharing at all so it would help if you could tell a little more about your configuration
  5. hmmm... in that case I'm out of ideas, you can probably get away with only giving the afforementioned VM a minimal amount of resources if all else fails. I'll keep an eye on this thread as it sounds like quite a curious issue..
  6. do you need this as a long or short term solution? if it is short term I would run a small VM on vsl(very small linux) mount the physical drive and give it network sharing with write access using samba.
  7. Well, yes, but in this case you protect your business thus you better be not allowing every webpage that exists. The customers that complain can go find their crap somewhere else as it's for sure not straight. I´m using it now for over 2 years and I'm really happy with it, I can even resolve DNS requests fasten then by using the DNS server of my ISP. hehe we probably will never agree but I've found that by using deepfreeze on all non-linux machines and storing all files and data on an ubuntu box I have been able to eliminate any risks that openDNS would prevent. Down to personal preference regarding how much freedom you want to give your users I guess
  8. I beg to differ. Due to the way most cafes manage their game licenses you will also need to store images of discs (ISO's etc) on the drives which will take up considerably more space. In addition to that the steam cafe system offfers you ridiculout amounts of games and remember you will be getting new games as time goes by with customers still wanting to play some of the older ones. I would go with AT LEAST 500gb and by a spare one or two with your build pre-imaged for rapid deployment incase of failiure (in my experience HDD's are normally the first thing to die) oh and check out deepfreeze/drivesheild or similair to keep your build "as new" no matter what your customers decide to try and do to it in an ideal world that's great but people pay to use net cafes so they can access what they want. I've found content filtering to be a pain from a customer service standpoint in the past.
  9. I've been invloved in LAN centres for a number of years and would recommend smartlaunch for license/stock/software management. I've found it to be a little buggy with vista so go with xp if you can. The smartlaunch forums are pretty good for helping you set things up (license management is becoming increasingly difficult so I'd highly recommend you get adept at using .bat and .vbs scripts and familiarise yourself as much as possible with the windows registry) The steam cafe management solution is a must have as well in my opinion as it does its own license management. It is also worth investing in a decent server and running smartlaunchs database on a virtual machine using mysql (linux is preferable) as opposed to the standard .mdb config (back up the VM regularly and do not allow any traffic other than to the db to that vm so that if your server goes tits up you can recover quickly) I would also advise you are VERY strict on user file storage. Smartlaunch offers you to do this in a similair way to an AD roaming profile but due to the nature of your business you risk infection from malware as a lot of users will be accessing sites beyond your control (unless you are strictly gaming with no other web access) Unfortunatley smartlaunch server only runs on windows but try and keep as much of the rest of your critical services running on linux to maintain stability of critical services (I would recommend running the SL server on your 'till' PC with the admin module and directing the DB and user files to a seperate debian\mysql\samba box if you can although this will also mean you have to run you CAS [steam cafe] server from your 'till' box) I know this is a bit of a rant but I have fixed a lot of issues in a number of UK gaming centres and it is worth getting a decent topology in place to avoid your centre failing in future. Feel free to PM me if you need. hope some of this helps. Mashup
  10. ....also for future reference if you don't have the local admin password (something I have come accross at work where previous techs have not used a unified passwording system) download and burn ophcrack. Ophcrack is a bootable linux image that will reveal all passwords (up to 15 chars) on a machine - hella useful Remember to be responsible with this disc though - I keep mine locked away
  11. I have used pstools psexec in the past to run psexec on msiexec.exe with the silent unattended switches. it's a bit clunky as you will have to put a txt file together with a list of all of the PC's you want to deploy to but if you're handy with batch files you can quite easily put something together which will meet your requirements and have some basic error reporting etc. here is an untested example you may wish to tweak: @echo off set /p username="please enter username: " cls set /p password="please enter password: " cls set /p logfilepath="please enter log file path: " cls set /p msipath="please enter msi path: " cls pause psexec -t /accepteula \\examplePC -u %username% -p %password% msiexec.exe /a /l %logfilepath% "%msipath.msi%" /qn remember to replace the \\example PC with @file (linked to a text file of PC's you wish to install to) if you want to install to multiple machines
  12. Personally I would back up all of your important data and rebuild the PC from scratch (I tend to do mine every 6 months or so) but if you want a good reg cleaner/Av/firewall check out the Comodo product range. Be very very careful with reg cleaners though as it's very easy to just kill your PC by deleting the wrong keys etc. As for "Bad" software do you have any examples? are you talking about malware/spyware etc? Ad-aware and spyware doctor are both good candidates and again comodo will tell you a lot about what incoming/outgoing connections you have to/from the web which will help you pick up a few. It may also be worth checking out regmon from sysinternals (this is a free download from the M$ site) that will tell you everything that is writing to and quering you registry. Hope some of this helps. Mashup
  13. Hey guys, just thought I would update this post. The server in question has recently been moved (physical location) and from what I can gather from my manager this has happened before when we moved the box (I don't know why it keeps being moved I'm just a minion for people who put up red tape). either way I just put a 2kpro disc in to try and troubleshoot the box and guess what?! IT BOOTS - no recovery console needed no boot from CD just straight to logon screen. I suspect it may be a problem with the disc array so needless to say I'm going to back up the data and move this install to another box for the time being. Thanks for the help and keep up the good work
  14. Ok thanks guys. I will have a look in the next few hours and update if I have anymore issues
  15. Hi guys, My apologies if this sounds like a stupid question but I would like to know if I can recover ntldr (that age old missing file) on my windows 2000 server from a windows 2000 professional cd. This box contains a lot of important data and unfortunaley some genius has scratched up our svr 2k disc leaving me with no dev server and no way to recover it. Help is greatly appreciated
  16. I would say it sounds like you have some kind of malware on the system but if you want a batch file to kill the process just copy the following into a text document and save it as whatever.bat: @echo off echo This will kill the firefox process pause taskkill /im firefox.exe the echo and pause bits are just a safeguard to stop you accidentally closing it so take them out if you wish.
  17. ok, not AHCI/ATA operation modes? I've had similair problems before with Dell machines when AHCI is enabled (hence why I said sata OPERATION modes) but if you don't have that option it won't help xD
  18. do you have an option in your bios for different SATA operation modes?
  19. I have been in a similair situation before and I have found the easiest thing to do is to share an image of your xp disc over a network and use Bart's Network boot disc to boot into dos with windows file sharing and run setup.exe from a dos prompt. Sorry if this is a bit of a dirty solution but it does work. Have fun with it. N.B. it's probably feasible you could use a bart PE disc for the same thing but having never tried it I can't advise.
  20. johnhc, sorry about that. I was under the impression that timmin had an OEM license for windows xp but no disc (I have since re-read the thread). What I was trying to tell him was how to turn his retail/VLK copy of xp into an OEM one so that he could use the current license without having to get an OEM disc from his hardware manufacturer. Had I been trying to assist him in illegally using xp I would probably have told him to use the MSFN copy (which I would not advise anyone does because if too many of these keys are abused we may be in danger of losing MSFN for testing purposes which is something my job pivots on). Either way he does claim to have the OEM disc from the manufacturer so I would advise he uses that as his nlite source (remember to be very careful with the unattended options on OEM discs as they can break if you're not). Apologies again for the confusion
  21. DL.. I would be inclined to use Bashrat the sneaky's driverpacks for your drivers As far as removing stuff goes it's all trial and error, nlite will usually alert you if you are going to do something dumb and also gives descriptions of most components and services. Remember is all else fails you can google the component to find out what it does and then remove it when you know it's safe to do so. I've lost count of the amount of nlite builds I've done because I've left out important components so my advice to you would be to document what you do and if it breaks you can refer to it next time Have fun edit: did your laptop come with an OEM xp license? if so you may want to check out my blog for a guide to integrating the OEM bios files needed to automatically activate your product (will save you loads of time if you frequently reinstall)
  22. it doesn't sound like your laptop is attempting to boot from the optical drive at all. either check the drive (as mentioned in the previous post) or get barts network boot disk (and a usb floppy drive if nessecary) and boot into that, using that access a network shared optical drive with your xp disk in it and run setup.exe from there (note some xp disks can have the ability to install from a non-optical drive disabled so if setup gives you an error message that's probably why) Hope this helps
  23. change the last 3 digits of your PID in setupp.ini to OEM (as opposed to the last 3 numerical that I can't remember because I'm not awake properly yet ) and your OEM key will work. Also MSDN keys are for testing purposes only so you can't legally use and MSDN key either.
  24. hmmm... I'm kinda clutching at straws here but at what stage of the install do these errors occur? is it after the installer has asked you for the administrator/tim password? if so I would maybe take a guess that windows for some reason needs to give itself admin permission to copy/register msgr3en.dll but stores the username to grant permission as administrator (rather than a variable that can be changed to "tim") therefore when is tries to copy/register and finds no password bound to administrator it freaks out.... Just a thought, I'd be interested to see the outcome of this as I wasn't even aware you could change the admin/guest usernames.
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