dot.help Lab
Sometimes Ghost is truly the best tool
Lately I’ve been loving Clonezilla for rolling out refurbed Dell workstations. It’s been really cool, boot from USB “liveCD”, clone disk to disk directly over gigabit ethernet, reboot, repeat. But after doing 10 of them, I ran into the true limitation of Clonezilla. Clonezilla relies on ntfsclone and partimage (great tools) but they share a [...]
Fix slow connections to Ubuntu SSH servers
As of Ubuntu 8.10 and older, connections to SSH servers with default configs can be annoyingly slow. This is because the OpenSSH daemon uses DNS to run a reverse lookup on the client to be sure that they aren’t faking their hostname. You can disable most look-ups by implementing the following setting:
As root edit “/etc/ssh/sshd_config” [...]
Hide Administrator from Welcome Screen in Vista
By default the Administrator account in Vista is Disabled – everything is run in a sudo fashion without actually logging in to the Administrator account. Some times due to external password recovery systems or other various reasons the built-in Administrator account is enabled, causing it to show up on the Welcome Screen.
In order to stop [...]
Fix Vista Update Loop
Symptoms include this message on boot:
“configuring updates stage 3 of 3. 0% complete”
and then an automatic reboot and the same message over and over again in an endless loop.
Missing User Accounts in Windows XP
So this time they weren’t hidden ’cause they weren’t in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList
But they didn’t show up in the Accounts Control Panel or in Run > control userpasswords2.
But they do show up when you run the command:
net user
aaand each account is active.. BUT they had no groups assigned to them and since it was [...]
Useful find Commands
Recursive, multi-file find and replace with grep and xargs for performance:
Source: http://www.jonasblog.com/2006/05/search-and-replace-in-all-files-within-a-directory-recursively.html
grep -rl 'what_to_find' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/what_to_find/what_to_replace_with/g'
Put a not in front of that expression:
find ./ ! -type d
Escape wildcards to avoid the shell expanding them:
If you just quote it; “*.avi” you can often run into trouble.
find ./ -name \*.avi
Prune empty directories
find ./ [...]
