RogueSpear

The only TLDs that are really regulated seem to be edu and mil. My main work is registered under .org, .net, and .com and it's a government organization. I just went ahead and got all three to keep others out. I had wanted to get .us but at the time, it wasn't available and .gov would have involved months of red tape (hence the government part of it ). I think the the TLD assignments are most a guide really. Most people associate .com with a commercial entity and .org with a non-profit of some sort.

Your boss needs to learn what "micromanaging" is Seriously, when I first started to read this, I was going to suggest using group policy, but that would only do precisely what he said he doesn't want done. You could do what you want to do with a VBscript that leverages ADSI. Either a text file that maps users to computers, or a good long CASE/SELECT would do the trick. This isn't something I've scripted before, so I don't have anything ready made to show you. But if you're handy in VBS you should be able to work it out.

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No, I've never bothered with those files before. As far as setting local user/admin passwords, I made an .HTA program to do that. However it runs from RunOnceEx, which I think is too far along for what you're looking for.

Going on the presumption that if you're RISing, your target computers are domain members, I would suggest disabling the local administrator account.

What sort of router sits between your ADSL and your network?

In every single instance I've ever seen that particular error in a blue screen, it's been because of a device driver. Whether the driver was coded sloppy or there was just some sort of conflict between multiple drivers, I'm not sure. But usually an updated driver or a swap of hardware has always fixed it for me.

Very bizarre. All of the computers I've installed Defender on have been updating themselves every couple of days or so via Automatic Updates.

If this post has something way way off, please pardon me. I'm in like my 23rd (or somewhere around there) hour of restoring a blown active directory environment. Can it be made for the computer to boot into Safe Mode automatically the first time? If so you could make a single RunOnceEx entry from cmdlines.txt that would just reboot the computer and import the registry entries for your subsequent RunOnceEx. That's certainly a mouthful, so step-by-step: 1. During cmdlines.txt, make a single RunOnceEx entry that points to a batch or VBscript file. The script would have basically two purposes - make more RunOnce entries, then reboot. 2. After GUI setup is done, the computer reboots for the first time. It boots into Safe Mode. 3. The script from step 1 creates your RunOnceEx entries for the next reboot and then performs the reboot. 4. The computer reboots into "normal" mode of operation. BTS_Finish and other RunOnceEx entries are allowed to run. The part I don't know how to do is making the computer boot into Safe Mode automatically. I just checked out the command line options for SysInternal's Psshutdown and didn't notice any such option.

You may want to take a look at PeToUSB. Contrary to what the name may indicate, you can simply format your USB drive with this. You don't have to copy over WinPE or BartPE. The format process with this is slightly different than with the HP utility.

Well in that case, probably the best option would an AutoIt script that is compiled to an .exe file. That way you can at least sort of keep the WPA key secure.

I've been filling up a DVD9 for months now. It works just fine provided you're creating the ISO image properly. What are you using to create your image? While it's not free, I've been using UltraISO for years now. I guess I'm sort of stuck in my ways. Anyhow, there's a couple of options in there you need to have NOT checked. One in particular is "Add Joliet volume as needed." I won't pretend to know what that or most of the other options mean, but after a ton of trial and error, I seem to have the settings down to where I can make these dual layer DVDs. I've asked this on MSFN before and I'll ask again - has anyone found a detailed and definitive resource where all of this stuff is explained?

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Perhaps I "don't get it", but I really fail to see what's so great about all of the this new Live stuff. I've been using Windows Live Messenger for a while and hardly notice any difference in what it can do or how, with possibly the exception of the sharing folders feature. Nothing else about this new marketing campaign has really overwhelmed me either.

Yea the first week I had service, I had no special setup at all. It was just plugged right into the back of my router. That must have been the honeymoon period for me. After about a week, it stopped working. I went to the Vonage web site and sure enough there was an announcement that there were problems "with a local carrier" and that they were attempting to resolve it ASAP. I guess they didn't want to embarass the local carrier. Well the next day it was still down, yet the web site had no indication of problems. Figuring the PAP2 device is really just a specialized computer all it's own, I rebooted it. Still nothing. Then I put the PAP2 into the DMZ. Suddenly I had service again. I'm going to give it another go at some point in time without any forwarding (or in the DMZ) and see what sort of results I get. I'm just afriad of having another outage and not knowing about it for a day or two. I guess if that happens the port forwarding will end up being a permanent solution.

I would assume that if it is stored in the registry, it must be stored encrypted. You may want to give RegShot a try or something similar to see what the results are. My only concern would be that if it is stored in the registry encrypted, would it be stored the same every time? Or is there some kind of hash function going on that makes it machine dependant.

You know I have to eat a little humble pie here. Lately, RealTek seems to be making some definate strides with their driver sets. I found the V1.31 HDA drivers to be completely without issue. So far the 1.32 are the same. And their latest NIC drivers actually work within a domain environment. Let's hope this a continuing trend with them. <knock on wood>

As per Bashrat's request, I'm dropping the subject. I will let Killgore's history of posts speak for themselves as they present the argument quite well. I apologize to the board members who would rather not have seen posts such as this.

I poked around on there for a short while after posting this. I can't believe I didn't find it earlier either I don't know if this is the norm or if they are having difficulties, but it feels like I'm on a 300 baud modem with that site. And everytime I try a search, it times out on me. EDIT: There was definately something wrong earlier and I must have been getting a "Lo Fi" version or something. This certainly does look like the definitive source for all that is Vonage. Thanks for the link though

For those not familiar, reviewing the couple dozen odd posts that you have made should clearly illustrate what brought on my previous post. The first time I pretty much ignored it. The second time I started to get the feeling that a pattern was developing. By now I've pretty had it. I decided rather than have you running around, feeling as though the manners of a barnyard animal are acceptable, I would call you on it. There's a million reasons that he may not have posted updates to the Driver Packs. I'm fairly certain that as the creator and maintainer of them, he surely didn't forget and reminders wouldn't be necessary. Your reminder, as was the case with your previous "reminders", was nothing more than a poorly masked expression of impatience. Mailbomb? So it's passive-aggressive and paranoid with delusions of grandeur?

Certainly, installing Office from RunOnceEx is an option. In fact it would work out just like a CD based install. The difference being that you would need to point to the source somewhere on the network or place the source inside $OEM$\$1 so that it makes it to your system drive for installation. When you mentioned OSC, I took that to mean the RIS choice screens when you PXE boot. Where do you see this option by the way?

I can't believe how difficult this is to find, but I haven't found anything definitive yet and I don't want to experiment. Screwing around with my phone service tends to lead to domestic problems between me and the Mrs. What ports do I need to forward for Vonage? Currently I have my Vonage adapter in the DMZ of my router as that seems to alleviate intermittent connections issues. The problem is that I really need to keep one of my computers in the DMZ. Also if you find a good resource for everything Vonage, that would be even better.

Well you really have a few choices in order to accomplish what you want. First you could make multiple flat images and have one of them install Office while the other would not. Second, and this is by far my preferred method, you could "prestage" your target RIS clients into organizational units (OU) and assign Office to the appropriate OU. Last, you could utilize what is known as RIPrep, which is basically the RIS version of sysprep. I works very similar to Ghosting a computer. The first option would be quite similar to what you would normally do with a CD based unattended install. The second method follows what I consider to be known and prescribed. It follows Microsoft's way of doing things. The last method, while it certainly has it's followers, has never given me anything but grief. I gave up using sysprep years ago because cloning a complete installation has never been without problems in my experience.

I've determined that Office 2007 would require about the same amount of retraining of all the employees at my main job and at my client's companies as OpenOffice would require. The difference? Well at my main employer, I've calculated it at around $34,000 USD using Office 2003 pricing. This was not a hard decision. We've been migrating our Word templates to Acrobat forms anyway. And there's always Outlook Web Access. I've been a huge Microsoft fan and supporter since the days of DOS 3.3. But with everybody cutting IT budgets in a huge way combined with Microsoft getting even more profit hungry, this is the final straw. I'll be hanging on to Windows Server and Windows XP, but Office and Exchange are on the way out.

No. See NIC drivers in RIS act in a similar way to mass storage drivers with a CD install (and also with a RIS install actually). You need to have only the .inf and .sys files for a given NIC in the i386 directory. This allows the RIS installation to complete the text mode portion of the setup. The PnP enumeration during the GUI phase of setup is completely different. You need to use one of BTS' methods in order for this latter PnP device setup to complete properly. Here is an example of what I mean: I had properly setup drivers in the i386 directory that allowed a Broadcom NIC to boot into RIS and complete the text mode portion of the setup, however I forgot to stick my BTS DriverPDriver Packack 7-Zip archive files in the proper place before running an install. I set the install on it's way and went about my business. About an hour later I noticed the OOBE screen on the monitor. What happened was that the NIC was not properly detected or installed because setup was unable to find the drivers in the path defined in the registry (by SetDevicePath.exe from BTS Method 2). Years ago I never had to worry about this because all I was RISing was computers with 3Com and older Intel Pro 100 NICs. When it finally came time to start integrating drivers for both the RIS boot and for the PnP enumeration, it really took me a long time to understand what was going on. All of the documentation from hardware vendors really doesn't do a good job of explaining all of this. And as far as Microsoft's online documentation goes, well it's pretty vast to say the least, so finding all of the information in one place was rather difficult. Once you get the hang of things though, you'll be sailing along in no time.