Free Nintendo Wii Points cards / codes
| Right. Just thought I’d chime in with information on offers of free Wii points cards and codes.
Unless given away by a third party as a gift, they simply don’t exist! Even as gifts, they cost a significant amount of time and money and only run for a short period of time. The only ‘genuine’ offer I’ve seen is where a guy had to sign up to a dating site – even then, the benefit to the company is obvious. |
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Points cards are available cheaply enough from Amazon UK, Amazon USA and even on eBay (although your mileage with eBay will depend on the seller). So why bother spending countless hours chasing ghosts?!
Oh, one last thing to remember if you’re still searching for freebies – codes can usually only be used once!!
MS-DOS boot disk with network support
Here’s a little gem that I seem to be perpetually working on! An MS-DOS boot disk with MS-LAN Manager, various NDIS network card drivers & DOS TCP/IP support. Currently, the following network cards are supported, but it’s really easy to add your own – as long as you’re not afraid of batch files 
- Intel PRO/100 (earlier versions)
- Intel PRO/100 (when the above doesn’t work – this does!)
- Intel PRO/1000
- Dlink DFE-650 (PCMCIA)
- Realtek 8029
- Realtek 8139 (covers most of the 8100 range)
- BroadCom B57xx
- 3Com 10/100 MiniPCI (early Thinkpad)
- 3Com 3C90X (3C905, etc)
- Dlink DFE-530TX
- Realtek 8169 (As used by NetGear GA311)
- DEC Digital DC21140 (As emulated by Microsoft’s Virtual PC)
- AMD PCNet (As emulated by various flavours of VMWare)
- Accton/SMC EN1207D
- Generic NE2000 compatible (it’s worked on a few oddball cards!)
- SIS 900
- SMC 1211
- Dlink DFE-670 (PCMCIA)
- National Semiconductor DP83815
- Broadcom Netlink 4401
- VIA 10/100 ‘Rhine’
Originally, this was written for a set of floppy disks (which is why you have the option to change your computer name), but currently I use it in the lab to PXE boot (google tFTPd32 and pxelinux! I might write a how-to on this one day). I hope everything should be pretty self explanatory – machine boots, starts DOS, loads himem, a RAM disk and a few other drivers, extracts the base network stuff from net.zip to the ramdisk, throws up a prompt asking what network card you’ve got (yes I could autodetect – but pciscan or equivalent hurt the footprint. This was destined for a regular 1.44MB floppy!), extracts the drivers from the relevant zip, creates protocol.ini and system.ini to match your chosen card, starts the network, grabs an IP with DHCP, and asks for a username/password. Job done!
If you’ve not got a DHCP server on your network (if so, get into the 90’s!) then I wrote protini.exe in VBDos and added support to handle parameters (IP and subnet). I forget what format they had to be in – but seem to remember is was fairly easy.
As for adding drivers for new cards – just edit selcard.bat and bung a zipped copy of your NDIS drivers into the \NICs subdirectory.
You can grab a copy of the image here:
http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.imz
or
Use it at your own risk, blah, blah, if your wife divorces you, blah, blah, don’t blow up, blah, blah, not liable, blah, blah, etc, etc – insert the rest of a usual disclaimer here.
Why would you use this? Well, I’ve found it useful for many reasons – mostly when trying to take or apply images from PC’s and servers. But you wouldn’t be reading this is you didn’t have a use for it – right?
How to remove passwords on Microsoft Word documents
Ok, so you’ve found yourself in the situation where you can’t update an MS Word document that you created years ago and can’t remember the unprotect password! D’oh! Well, don’t be drawn in by premium/commercial solutions to this problem – when you can solve it for free! Forget dictionary attacks, you weren’t silly enough to use a plain word - right?! Also, forget cracking by brute force – because you don’t have the time!
Simply follow these steps:
- Open the protected document in Word as normal.
- File/Save As…
- Select ‘Rich Text Format (RTF)’ from the ‘As Type’ drop-down list box and save it.
- Close Word
- Open Notepad (Start/Programs/Accessories/Notepad)
- Open your RTF file in Notepad
- Do a text search for ‘password’. It should return something like:
{\*\password 5edc3b9c}
(Obviously your password data will be different!) - Delete this entire section, save it and close Notepad
- Open the RTF document in Word and hit ‘Unprotect’. If you get a password dialog box – just leave it blank.
- Now, do a ‘Save As’ again – but this time save it as a regular word document.
All done!
Is this legal? Well, I’d say so. It’s your document – and not your fault that you forgot the password! I think a slap around the back of the head is due though!
Disable movie/video thumbnail preview under Windows XP
Rather annoyingly, the explorer.exe process under Windows XP can sometimes hang, stop responding, crash or just plain terminate/close itself while it tries to display video/movie thumbnails in any given folder.
The reason for this can be a multitude of issues – like a dodgy codec, etc – and seems to be rather in-discriminant as to which file type it decides to screw up with (AVI, MPG, WMV, ASF, etc).
To get around this problem though, it is possible to easily disable this feature. Either fire up a command prompt or execute this straight from the run dialog box:
regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll
And if you want to re-enable it again at a later date:
regsvr32 shmedia.dll
Now, the only knock-on effect is that you’ll no longer be able to see summary information in the file properties. In my opinion though, it’s a small price to pay!!
Configure NTP time server synchronisation on Cisco routers
Maybe you want an accurate time source on your internal network for your servers to sync against. Or maybe you just want your Cisco box to report the correct time! In either case – you’ll need NTP.
First, we’ll sync the router time against another NTP time source. It’s as easy as specifying an IP:
phbrtr#conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
phbrtr(config)#ntp server <IP address>
phbrtr(config)#exit
phbrtr#
Incidentally, you can find a list of public NTP servers at:
To tidy things up, you might want to prevent NTP synchronisation attempts on a per-interface basic. To do this, you can ‘ntp disable’ on the relevant interface(s):
phbrtr#conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
phbrtr(config)#interface fa1/0
phbrtr(config-if)#ntp disable
phbrtr(config-if)#exit
phbrtr(config)#exit
Finally, heres how to check that everything’s working as it should:
phbrtr#sh ntp status
Clock is synchronized, stratum 2, reference is 129.6.15.28
nominal freq is 250.0000 Hz, actual freq is 250.0005 Hz, precision is 2**24
reference time is CE89F9F3.27B5E326 (21:21:55.155 GMT Wed Oct 21 2009)
clock offset is -13.4327 msec, root delay is 99.40 msec
root dispersion is 21.27 msec, peer dispersion is 7.83 msec
phbrtr#
Did you find this hint useful? Are you looking to learn more? Well, here’s a few books that I’ve found useful – have a goosie!
 Cisco: A Beginner’s Guide |
 CCNA – Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide |
 Cisco Networking for Dummies |
 Cisco IOS in a Nutshell – O’Reilly |
Terminate current VPN sessions on Cisco router/ASA
Many a time I have to kick remote users off a Cisco router / ASA box. This depends on your configuration – but here’s how to close one or all VPN user sessions on the PPTP setup we created in an earlier how-to. First, we’ll check to see who’s online:
phbrtr#sh vpdn session
PPTP Session Information Total tunnels 1 sessions 1
LocID RemID TunID Intf Username State Last Chg Uniq ID
32 32768 37 Vi3 user estabd 00:00:18 31
phbrtr#
That pesky user!! Lets disconnect him..
phbrtr#clear vpdn tunnel pptp id 37
Starting to clear the tunnel
phbrtr#
Note here that we’ve used the TunID from the previous command (in this case – 37). Another quick ’show vpdn session’ (or for the lazy: ’sh u’) will show that your user has disappeared.
If you’ve got a lot of users, looking up their id and clearing can be quite tedious. To clear ALL PPTP sessions:
phbrtr#clear vpdn tunnel pptp all
Clear all PPTP tunnels? [confirm]
Starting to clear the tunnelphbrtr#
Simples!
Dynamic DNS – phirebird.net
Like the domain phirebird.net? Well why not grab yourself yourhost.phirebird.net as a DyDNS name?
phirebird.net has lent it’s name to the free Dynamic DNS service blazingbox.com. Have a mosey on over there and sign up for a freebie account!
Add an email address alias to an Exchange account
Just a very quick one. Most people probably know this already – but just to show how to add/manage email address aliases:
- Fire up “Active Directory Users & Computers”
- Locate the user and look at the objects properties
- In the Email Addresses tab - you’ll have a list of various entries. All of the ‘SMTP’ type are email addresses / aliases. The one in bold is the primary account.
- To add a new alias: click New, select ‘SMTP address’, click OK and enter the desired email address.
Simples!
Did you find this hint useful? Are you looking to learn more about Exchange? Well, here’s a few books that I’ve found useful – have a goosie!
 Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Training kit |
 Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 |
 Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Training Kit |
 Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for Dummies |
Adding new / Changing existing email domains in Microsoft Exchange
If this isn’t a once-in-a-blue-moon task that needs mentioning – I don’t know what is! How often do you get a new domain or rebrand your company? After Finance have done their bit and Marketing have diddled around with PR mumbo jumbo, the real work down in the IT department is to tell your Exchange server to start accepting email for a new domain. Well, it’s quite simple:
- Open Exchange Sytem Manager
- Goto Recipients -> Recipient Policies
- Right-click / Properties on your default policy
- Look under the “E-Mail Addresses (Policy)” tab
In here, you’ll have a list of domains that your exchange box accepts and sends email for. The SMTP entry in bold is your primary domain. From here, you can either editing an existing domain – or create a new SMTP ‘address’. Be aware that setting a new domain to primary (especially in large organisations) will take some time! (as it’s got to go through every AD account and set the primary domain)
Did you find this hint useful? Are you looking to learn more about Exchange? Well, here’s a few books that I’ve found useful – have a goosie!
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Training kit |
Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 |
Configuring Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Training Kit |
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 for Dummies |
Map drives based on user’s AD group membership using IFMEMBER
Login scripts are very handy – but when it comes to mapping drives (or processing other commands) based on the users active directory group membership – it can be a bit of a pain.
Thats where Ifmember.exe (part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit) comes in.
You can get this to work for you in one of two ways. The first is to have it call it from within your login script and then evaluate the errorlevel (Errorlevel 1 if they are a member or 0 if not) – which is multiline and not very tidy. The other option is to use conditional execution (executes additional commands depending on which errorlevel the command returns).
Perhaps the best way to explain this is through a few examples:
ifmember Finance || net use f: \\server\finance
Assuming that the current user *is* a member of the ‘Finance’ group – it will map drive F. Similarly, you can use && instead to process commands if the user is *NOT* a member of Finance:
ifmember Finance && net use f: \\server\someothershare
Of course, these examples both assume that ifmember.exe is in the local machines search path (or it’s being called from the same directory as the script). Another option is that you could call it through a UNC path:
\\server\tools\ifmember.exe Finance || net use f: \\server\finance
Which works quite well!
You can obtain ifmember.exe either as part of the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit Tools from Microsoft here (which is well worth doing!):
Or you can get just the file itself from:
Did you find this hint useful? Are you looking to learn more? Well, here’s a few books that I’ve found useful – have a goosie!
 Active Directory for Dummies |
 Microsoft Windows Shell Script Programming |
 Microsoft Windows Script Host |
 Mastering Windows Server 2003 |
