SecretNinja

A quiet afternoon looking for the shortest path to our nearest speedtest.net server.

You could have a logon script that's run first time they logon to make the file. Something like this would work @echo off echo [DeleteOnCopy] >"%userprofile%\My Documents\desktop.ini" echo Owner=%username% >>"%userprofile%\My Documents\desktop.ini" echo Personalized=5 >>"%userprofile%\My Documents\desktop.ini" echo PersonalizedName=My Documents >>"%userprofile%\My Documents\desktop.ini" attrib +h +s "%userprofile%\My Documents\desktop.ini" and then change the default user profile HKCU\%username%\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVirsion\RunOnce and put a key in there to run the batch script

No probs. And I took no offense The irony of windows how opaque it is

try looking in the desktop.ini in the my documents folder. iirc this is what it uses to do the auto renaming. In my default user folder that file does not exsist. so i would guess removing it from yours will fix this. (its a hidden file so make sure they are visible)

:/ possibly too late to help but for future readers, in xp64 there is a folder called c:\windows\SysWOW64 Think of it like system32 but they store 64bit library files there, and also the other half of the system hive (ignoring the user hives which are stored in %username%)

You could use a live cd from http://www.memtest86.com/download.html and do the test in a proper environment. This way you have direct memory access and can test on a block by block process with out windows doing any memory management for you.

Hi Redhatcc, Your question was understood, however for the example usage you gave DNS spoofing or a proxy server are both much better methods. If you want to intercept the packets and modify the data in real time i think you will find that substantially harder. For one each packet has a check sum to verify its not been tampered with which would be beyond most peoples skills to spoof. Far better would be acting as a man in the middle as either a router or a proxy. For example using something like squid 3 and an ICAP server you can rewrite webpages in real time so that, for example, all html tags defining the font colour for black are changed to pink, or all txt sitting between <p> tags is reversed. You could also use a url rewriter to redirect people to different parts of a site or different sites altogether. for example you can enforce google safesearch with a simple url rewrite that appends &safe=active to the end of your query string. both these methods are limited only by your own inventiveness. I saw one setup that processed the webpages via a filter to render them upside down as a joke on a wifi freeloader. I manage a substantial estate of proxy servers which is why i personally would use that method to intercept and modify traffic. but im sure that much of that can be accomplished by a router as well. Can you clarify what exactly would would like to accomplish by editing the raw tcp traffic?

Yeah, Its called outlook. Every CAL for exchange includes a licence for Outlook. If you have a recent version of exchange with all the correct licensing then you can use a recent copy of outlook. As to using something other then outlook as far as i know there is nothing that can talk using the same protocols and so wont have the same functionality but you should be able to use any pop3 email client to get the email.

Hiya, Rather than edit the hosts file you could set the 2k3 server up as a DNS server and then spoof the domains that you wish to block and redirect them to a web server (that could also be hosted on the 2k3 server) with a holding page explaining that the site is blocked. To enforce this if you block port 53 outbound on your edge firewall and allow only the 2k3 server out over 53 then all the internal client computers would be forced to use DNS from that computer and so could not bypass your block (well not with out a little more effort, short of whitelisting i dont think its possible to filter traffic if your determined). Personally i would use a proxy server though as it is much more powerful for filtering, and gives you the added choice of logging people going to sites that should be blocked. Tris

the ram could be dyeing - try memtest86 or its over heating cos the cpu fan has packed up, heat sink is not fitted right etc (i favour this as it would fit with the bios being fine. no load on the cpu)

There are 2 ways i have heard of doing this. 1 is to do it as a website and have either a thin client, UMPC, etc attached to a monitor. the webpage can be made to refresh periodically to reflect changing pictures. 2 is to use a screen saver (though i know of no custom screen saver application tht can connect to a db) Regards

Ok, restricting to 2 sites is dead simple. squid. set it up as a transparent proxy for those computers and you can limit it to 2 sites no problem. With regard to limiting the programs that you can run, i know we use ready state for our library pc's (though don't know how far we lock those down) and if you want you can do it with GPO's, though i suspect it would be time consuming locking it down totally that way.

I know its not ideal, but you could have a separate shortcut set like this "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" [url="http://site.com"]http://site.com[/url]

cant you use something like Wininstall LE 2003. this alows toy to take before and after snapshots of the system state when installing programs. this will record all registry keys added removed and changed. iirc (i dont have any examples to hand to check) it saves a reg file that you can then use to rewrite the reg.