TIENHUIS Networking

This summer I took my Dell Latitude D830 with me on holiday to view the movies that I recorded with a Panasonic HD video camera.
Frustratingly enough, in France it turned out to be impossible to play them on my laptop Spent hours fiddling with every imaginable setting. At home everything worked fine though.
Yesterday I had packed my stuff to go watch a movie at a friend’s house, and when checking the downloaded MKV again I noticed that VLC had huge problems playing it, both 720p and 1080i H264 files.
Everything started working when I accidentally swapped power supplies. Turns out the D830 (maybe other models too) severely slows down when you use the small 65 Watt power supply.
Tip: ONLY use the 90 Watt model, unless you want to experience Pentium 4 speeds…

I am cooking up an unattended Windows 7 installation image for our users. This is done by carefully preparing a Reference VM using the Audit Mode. This basically means it logs on as administrator, and after sysprepping with the new CopyProfile option, this becomes the profile for newly created users.

I ran into an issue that when the newly created user logs in after installation, Secunia PSI is not started any more.

The reason is that if you install it in Windows 7 (and probably in Vista as well), PSI is not a real service, but merely a task that runs with highest privileges at logon. The task is configured to run with the credentials of the user that installed it – in this case Administrator. However, that account is wiped during sysprep, hence the task cannot be run.

Since I consider Secunia PSI to be vital, I searched around but no solution. I guess because PSI is not meant to be sysprepped and all, and you need Secunia’s corporate version (CSI) for that.
Since CSI was not a suitable solution in our scenario, I worked around quite nicely.

In the sysprep unattended xml file, define a script to be run right after initial logon of the new user. This is done using the FirstLogonCommands option. Suppose it is C:\tmp\runonce.bat.

The new Task Schedular in Windows Vista and 7 is able to import and export its tasks as XML files. The trick is to remove the existing task, which is using the Administrator account, and create a new one using the same XML code, but with the credentials changed to the new user.

Since there is no sed/awk in Windows, I had to resort to a vbscript called SearchAndReplace.vbs, which you can download here: http://www.ericphelps.com/scripting/samples/

The relevant part of my runonce.bat looks like this:

C:\tmp\SearchAndReplace.vbs C:\tmp\Secunia.txt Administrator %USERNAME%
schtasks /delete /TN "Secunia PSI Logon Task"
schtasks /create /TN "Secunia PSI Logon Task" /xml C:\tmp\Secunia.txt

The Secunia.txt is an XML export of the original Secunia PSI Task, and has the string Administrator. This is replaced by the new user, and then imported back. For some obscure reason, the search/replace does not work when the file has an xml extension – that is why I use txt – whatever. You can create it yourself using schtasks.exe.

After the next reboot or logoff-logon PSI will happily start up

When installing Windows XP on a Mac, BootCamp creates a FAT32 partition for Windows, with ID “BOOTCAMP”.
When you remove that partition during the Windows installation process, and replace it with an NTFS one, Windows will happily install, but fail upon reboot with:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\system32\hal.dll
Please re-install a copy of the above file

The trick to get this working, is to leave the partition schema intact, and only reformat the filesystem.
What you should do, is select the FAT32 BOOTCAMP partition to install Windows on, then pick this option:

Format the partition using the NTFS file system (Quick)

Then press F to format the drive

This should give you a working Windows XP installation.

Op vrijdag 14 augustus verscheen in de HP/De Tijd een interview met Kees de Kort.

Kees de Kort (52), financieel analist bij AFS Capital Management en beurscommentator bij BNR Nieuwsradio, staat bekend als somberste econoom van Nederland. Een gesprek over onterechte koersstijgingen en falende toezichthouders. ‘De reële economie staat er nu nog slechter voor en dat kan nog lang duren.’
Lees hier het volledige artikel (PDF).

Usually vacation messages are sent from userland software, but that option has the disadvantage that you still receive lots of messages during your holiday. Also, because the mailserver accepted the message, you have the responsibility to handle it.

In order to get around this, configure your mail server with a custom permanant error for your address. This way your messages will bounce back to the sender, and you will not receive any messages.

People cannot claim that they sent it – and you can prove it. Presto – no more mailbox weeding after returning from holiday.

Postfix configuration: /etc/postfix/main.cf:


smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
    pcre:/etc/postfix/smtpd_rcpt_map


/etc/postfix/smtpd_rcpt_map:

/(dick|visser)@tienhuis.nl/ 550 User on holiday

Best regards