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.

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!!

1. Intel PRO/100 (earlier versions)
2. Intel PRO/100 (when the above doesn’t work – this does!)
3. Intel PRO/1000
4. Dlink DFE-650 (PCMCIA)
5. Realtek 8029
6. Realtek 8139 (covers most of the 8100 range)
7. BroadCom B57xx
8. 3Com 10/100 MiniPCI (early Thinkpad)
9. 3Com 3C90X (3C905, etc)
10. Dlink DFE-530TX
11. Realtek 8169 (As used by NetGear GA311)
12. DEC Digital DC21140 (As emulated by Microsoft’s Virtual PC)
13. AMD PCNet (As emulated by various flavours of VMWare)
14. Accton/SMC EN1207D
15. Generic NE2000 compatible (it’s worked on a few oddball cards!)
16. SIS 900
17. SMC 1211
18. Dlink DFE-670 (PCMCIA)
19. National Semiconductor DP83815
20. Broadcom Netlink 4401
21. 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

http://www.phirebird.net/files/mnbd.exe

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?

Simply follow these steps:

1. Open the protected document in Word as normal.
2. File/Save As…
3. Select ‘Rich Text Format (RTF)’ from the ‘As Type’ drop-down list box and save it.
4. Close Word
5. Open Notepad (Start/Programs/Accessories/Notepad)
6. Open your RTF file in Notepad
7. Do a text search for ‘password’. It should return something like:
   {\*\password 5edc3b9c}
   (Obviously your password data will be different!)
8. Delete this entire section, save it and close Notepad
9. Open the RTF document in Word and hit ‘Unprotect’. If you get a password dialog box – just leave it blank.
10. 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!

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!!

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:

http://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Servers/WebHome 

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

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 tunnel

phbrtr#

Simples!

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!

1. Fire up “Active Directory Users & Computers”
2. Locate the user and look at the objects properties
3. 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.
4. 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

1. Open Exchange Sytem Manager
2. Goto Recipients -> Recipient Policies
3. Right-click / Properties on your default policy
4. 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

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!):

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

Or you can get just the file itself from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=07C2F6D7-815E-4FA0-9043-4E4635CCD417&displaylang=en

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