Vat of Knowledge

Say goodbye to replmon, say hello to repadmin. Gone are the days of good old replmon, so to force AD replication across site boundaries and all just do the following at the command line:

repadmin/syncall /APed

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This script will take ownership of all files and grant you permissions to them if you are having trouble with file permissions.  Name it mine.bat:

::Mine

::Usage mine.bat “c:\documents and settings\user\my documents”

::Created by Jason Knight

::10/02/2007

takeown /F %1 /R /D y
cacls %1 /G administrators:F /t

Now all you have to do from the command prompt is:

mine <path to files/folders>

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Use the following code snippet in the address bar of Firefox to reveal any passwords you need to reveal on the page you are on, just paste it into the address bar and hit enter and watch the magic…

javascript:(function(){var%20s,F,j,f,i;s=”";F=document.forms;for(j=0;j<F.length;++j){f=F[j];for(i=0;i<f.length;++i){if(f[i].type.toLowerCase()==”password”)s+=f[i].value+”\n”;}}if(s)alert(“Password%20is:\n\n”+s);else%20alert(“No%20passwords”);})();

Please note that this does not work on ALL password fields, but a lot of them it does!

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Blocking web site access is easy with squid proxy.  In this example, we have configured a squid proxy with transparent authentication for the sake of reporting only.  I am not using an actual authentication method such as LDAP, in order to lock down user’s surfing bandwidth by the use of caps or limiting hours based on AD group or anything like that, however, I would like to use a reporting tool to be able to tell which users have been to what websites.

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And any other P2P software. I’ve seen multiple threads on this around the internet about blocking the port it’s using. The thing about these P2P clients is that they can use any custom port or range of ports! Sure fire way:

Get a “business-class” or at least “semi-business-class” firewall, like the ZyXel ZyWall, and subnet your network. Create a DMZ, and assign the ports to the DMZ. Anything your connect to the port will inherit what you permit from the DMZ to WAN. If there is an “any” rule for TCP/UDP ports, remove it, and block all ports from DMZ to WAN. Then open ports 80, 443 and 53 (both TCP and UDP for DNS), and off you go. Nothing will work except web browsing, which for most wireless, open networks, is all they need. Hook your wireless access point up to a DMZ port and you’ve stopped all traffic except what you want to allow. I’m not aware of any torrent app that falls back to ports 80 or 443, but I could be wrong. Comment if you have any experience with that one.

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This is a great flash player system for any website. It uses mySQL and stores playlists and includes a customizable player with embed code for any site. I use PHP based sites personally, but I believe it can be embedded in HTML as well. Their website is http://www.flamplayer.com, and you can get the latest downloads there. The reason for this article is to clarify a few settings that seem to be lacking from the installation instructions at their site.

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So I’m following up on a semi-great article posted at:

http://technoheads.org/2011/01/lg-vortex-downgrade-from-2-2-1/

I will repeat most of this article here, but will include largely missed steps that will make the average user pull their hair out.  I almost gave up, myself, and I’ve got a lot of experience doing this stuff…  My edits are in red.  Also, the downloads are on my site, not megaload, or whatever the f*** that sh** is.

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So this was a pretty cool project I worked on recently.  Ran across a number of solutions that can work too, but the best one I found was the following.

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11482/diff?secondVersionNumber=2

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So…  You’ve got a user that has a purged mailbox in your existing environment, but you have an old backup that you would like to extract the mailbox from?  No problem.  Using EXSM, mount up the recovered database.  Once mounted, run the following command using the Exchange Management Shell:

Let’s suppose the mailbox in the recovery database from which you want to recover data in the meanwhile has been deleted from the production mailbox database. In this case you have the option of recovering the mailbox data to a target folder in another mailbox by using the following command:

Restore-Mailbox –RSGMailbox “Test User 1” -RSGDatabase “servername\RSG name\database name” –Identity “Test User 2” –TargetFolder “Test User 1 Recovered data”

Once you’ve got everything in your folder, just export to PST using Outlook!  Easy cheesy.

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That pesky sylink.xml file again…  We had to reinstall our SEPM server, which left a lot of clients stranded.  Well, rather than go around and reinstall on all the clients, which doesn’t work anyway, here’s a better way to update them.  The file, sylink.xml contains the entire configuration, so obtain a copy from a workstation that is successfully connected to the SEPM server in the group you want.  The file is located at c:\program files\symantec\symantec endpoint protection\sylink.xml.  Now that you have a good working copy, let’s move ahead.

Use a tool such as psexec to attach to the machine, or just pull them up with computer management, remotely.  Either via command prompt or compmgmt.msc, kill the “Symantec Management Client” aka smc.exe.  Using psexec, it’s smc.exe -stop.  Now either delete or rename sylink.xml and copy over the spare copy you hold in your hands.  Restart the SMC service (psexec, smc.exe -start).  Check your server for the new workstation and move it into the proper group if needed!

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