It’s a pain to reinstall the operating system, because you not only have to load drivers, service packs and hot fixes, but applications, settings, and answer a ton of questions along the way. Well, this article is dedicated to creating a build that takes the questions away (unattended) as well as integrates all the service packs and hot fixes you need, and in some case drivers.
nLite
nLite is an awesome tool and you can download the latest version at their website http://www.nliteos.com/. This tool allows you to build a custom Windows XP build, and slipstream:
- Service Packs
- Hotfixes, Addons and Update Packs
- Drivers
- Components
- Unattended
- Options
- Tweaks
And at the end, it will create a bootable ISO image file for you to use. After you’ve finished, you can use either VMWare or Microsoft’s Virtual PC to test the ISO image before burning a finalized disc. So let’s have a look at the interface.
First of all it wants to know where your original XP files are at. I always keep an original copy of XP around to feed it. Then it will ask you where you want to put the files on your hard drive. Once you’ve worked with nLite, you can pull up previous sessions.
Second, you’ll get options of what you would like to do. I don’t always use all the options, I don’t care about options and components, so I skip those. (more…)
OK, might have bitten off a little more than I can chew with this topic, but here it is. Please bear in mind that I’m glazing over a lot of stuff here, as it’s a broad subject. If you have any specific questions, please comment! I’ve used several software imaging products over the years. One that comes to mind is Ghost, and another that is a bit more recent would be Acronis True Image.
Back in 1996, we even had a machine that we could hook up laptop drives to, in order to perform imaging. It had a connection for a master as well as up to two slaves. All it was, was a 486 system that had 3.5″ to 2.5″ drive converters and some proprietary software (could have even been Ghost for all we knew) and an LCD display to work with. It typically failed, so we ended up using Ghost anyway. (more…)
So when I started working in the computer field professionally, back in 1996, I landed a job with one of Toshiba’s 25 premier service centers in the United States, located in Dallas, TX, Quality High Tech Services. I worked there a couple of years, and specialized in laptop repair. Who would have known. I had desktop experience, as I mentioned to them in the interview, but what I ended up doing there, was far from the typical desktop PC arena. (more…)
I don’t personally use Movie Maker to render video, but ran across a problem when doing some work for a friend of mine and I thought I’d share the resolution. All credit for this fix goes to the following blog and forum:
http://www.bernzilla.com/item.php?id=884
http://www.windowsmoviemakers.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=105025
The answers are there, you just have to dig a bit, and I wanted to put the full solution in one place. What happens is, that when publishing a video, half of the screen is green. This is a codec rendering issue that is addressed here. From what I take from this blog and forum post, is that the XviD codec is used to render the video, and there are settings that have to be made in XviD to fix the problem. (more…)
HP servers have iLO capabilities built in to all servers I’ve run across, and it gives any administrator a lot of remote capabilities.
Setting up iLO
To configure iLO, all you have to do is plug your iLO, or management port into a switch. At the console, you can enter the iLO configuration by hitting F8 at boot. If there is an administrative password, don’t fret too much, it can be changed through the O/S as well. First of all, you need to make sure to have the iLO driver installed. This can be installed from the HP Smart Start CD. This ISO can be downloaded for your particular model at HP drivers and software downloads. http://www.hp.com/#Support This CD also has the HPONCFG utility which enables you to configure iLO from the operating system. By default iLO uses DHCP and DDNS. The iLO DNS name is iLO + server serial number. This will give you the IP address of the iLO in order to configure it. Some O/S will not work with HPONCFG, such as HP-UX. In this case you can reset iLO.
You can however reset the ILO buy pressing and holding the reset button on the ILO as follows: (more…)
Your servers! In all the years of administration, I can’t believe I overlooked this great monitoring tool. It was originally developed on the Linux platform, but now has support for the Windows platform as well as a Big Brother server. Clients can be of any flavor platform, including SNMP devices. It’s time I worked up documentation as we are using it at our office, and plan on rolling it out to all of our data centers to monitor mission critical operations. (more…)
This boot disc is worth mention on this blog, because it is an important disc for any network technician, PC technician or system administrator. It contains tools for Windows based systems and beyond, and has an arsenal of utilities you can’t do without. I’ll breifly go over some of the utilities that I’m familiar with in this article. Hiren’s Boot CD is up to version 9.6 as of this writing, and can be referenced at http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd (more…)
Using the SMTP command line is extremely useful to troubleshoot email issues, as well as script the sending of email. It is also useful to test your mail server to determine if you have an open relay. Just telnet to port 25 of the server like:
telnet mail.domain.com 25 (more…)
So you may or may not be familiar with how to download torrents. I won’t go into the inner workings of torrents, but if you’re interested, check out this wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.torrent
Download a client
I personally use uTorrent, and for the article here, I describe how to set up the RSS feed functions in uTorrent 1.8.1. Download uTorrent here.
(more…)
