Archive for category Tools
Remotely Enable Remote Desktop
This is for those ‘oh shit’ times when you can’t get to a computer when you need to. If you can get to the remote registry of a computer, you can change this key to allow RDP access to the computer, even if the box is not checked.Â
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Autopatcher, a Better Way of Staying Updated
Today, another really nifty tool for update deployment. Weather you have a computer that missed a few patches, or a fresh install you are trying to catch up to the rest of your network autopatcher is a easy solution. All you have to do is download a little exe and it will connect to Microsoft.com, and get the latest patches. When you run the application it will automatically determine what you are missing on the computer.  These are automatically selected, then check any add-ons you want to install, and away you go. Now what makes this nifty is once the patches are downloaded once, it works offline. If you have a few computers to update it doesn’t bottle neck your bandwidth. Even better than that it will run off a thumbdrive or a network share and does not require install of the patcher application on the client side. Just another solution when you need to process a update quickly, or update a few computers at a office that is running a low bandwidth WAN. Also it is another substitute to windows update that does not require you to go through the validation process.  It supports windows 2ksp4, vista, server 2003, and xp sp3, in a few different languages and over both X86, and X64 architecture.
http://www.autopatcher.com/
Inserting a Wait in a Batch File, Using Netstat in a Login Script
So you want to pause a batch file for a few seconds. Unfortunately windows doesn’t provide a very simple way of doing this.  I wanted to run ‘netstat -b’ 25 seconds after a user logged into their computer as to give the computer enough time to start up all background applications. But, there is no wait function in batch files. Well I found a workaround. If you use the ‘-n’ argument with the ping command you can specify the amount of time to run a ping for. Thus ping -n 60 127.0.0.1 will ping your local host for 60 seconds. This will more or less keep the batch file at a standstill for a specified number of seconds before continuing. In my case I used it for a pause in a login script.
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Curling: Installing Adobe Reader With cURL
Don’t worry, you wont need a broom for this.  cURL is a free opensoure, crossplatform, tiny application used for file transfer over urls, and browser emulation form command line.  It is avaliable here http://curl.haxx.se/ .  I happened across this while back while looking for a way to remotely download files from microsoft without user intervention and this has proved to be very useful.  So heres how it works to do a basic download. In this example we are downloading Adobe Reader 9 from adobe.com.
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