Active@Boot Disk and Active@Undelete

So it turns out, the instructions I posted last year for getting Active@Undelete on a Windows Deployment Services system work just as well for getting the Active@Boot Disk on there as well. The only difference is that you have to use the Active@Boot Disk Creator first to generate the ISO image so that it will include your serial number and registration info.

Exchange Backups

Awesome. We're about half way through moving from our janky Exchange 2003 servers to our Exchange 2007 Ultra Clusters... and the Exchange 2003 server decides to take a digger last night. Not just a digger (lost three! less then a year old SCSI3 disks in a 0+1 array in a matter of 2 days), but we don't have current backups... Using Active@Undelete to try and recover some data. It's a blast and a half. At least we've got affect people backup with a dial-tone mailbox on our hot spare 2003 box.

Moral of the story: nightly incremental backups are your friend.

Active@Boot Disk on Windows Deployment Services

We use a toolset from Active@ called UNDELETE. It's a nifty little program for recovering files off of hard disks that have been wiped, have a broken partition, etc.

One of the nicest features is the ability to use the program from a Windows PE 2.0 ISO to boot a machine and recover files. While this is nice, network booting it is a a much nicer solution that doesn't require you to have a CD on you at all times. After some tinkering, I've gotten it to sucessfully PXE.

What you need: Windows Server 2003 SP2 Windows Deployment Services server and the BootDiskEnt.ISO from the Active@ Boot Disk.

Process:

1. Mount the BootDiskEnt.ISO using your favorite ISO mounting utility.
2. Navigate to "X:\Sources\" (where X is the drive letter where you mounted the ISO
   
3. Copy the Boot.WIM file over the the deployment server.
4. On the deployment server, open up Windows Deployment Services MMC
5. Expand the tree to : Windows Deployment Services -> Servers -> Server Name -> Boot Images.
6. Right click and select "Add Boot Image".
7. In the wizard, click Browse and select the Boot.WIM file. Click Next until you complete the wizard.
   
8. It will take a few minutes to load, once it does you should see "Active@Boot Disk" listed as a boot image.
   
9. To use it, simply boot the system from the WDS server over PXE and select "Active@ Boot Disk" from the list of available boot images. It will boot just as if you had loaded it off of CD.

Powershell RTM is Hot.

I'll post more PowerShell scripts in the future, but the basic idea here is that PowerShell is awsome. Makes AD and Exchange managment cake. Can't wait to see what SMS 4.0 does with it. As an added bonus, you can now lord your Object Orientated Shell over the heads of those pesy 'Linux' people and their 'Bash'.

RTM is out here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/topics/msh/download.mspx

Logon Script to Set Windows Default Log on To Domain

Simple little Visual Basic script today. It writes the registry key to specify which Domain Windows will choose for displaying in the GINA Log On To drop down box. It allows you to specify two different choices, a primary and an alternate, but you can always comment out the alternate if you wish.

' NAME: setLogonTo.vbs
'
' AUTHOR: Charles Wastell
' DATE : 7/24/2006
'
' Updates
'
' 7/24/06 - Initial Revision
'
' COMMENT: Changes the default Logon To at the Gina login box to the default domain.
' You can comment out lines 27 and 43 if you only have one domain to logon to.
'
'
'
' **********************************************************************************
' Variable Declarations
' **********************************************************************************

Dim defaultDomain, defaultAltDomain
Dim WshShell

' **********************************************************************************
' User Customizable Section
' **********************************************************************************

defaultDomain = "YOURDOMAIN"
defaultAltDomain = "YOURSECONDARYDOMAIN"


' **********************************************************************************
' Variable Initialization
' **********************************************************************************

Set WshShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")

' **********************************************************************************
' Write Reg Keys
' **********************************************************************************

On Error Resume Next

WshShell.RegWrite "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\DefaultDomainName", defaultDomain ,"REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AltDefaultDomainName", defaultAltDomain , "REG_SZ"

WScript.Quit

Windows Command Line CDP Capture Utility

Cisco Discovery Packets (CDP) will give you a lot of valuable information if you can capture them: they will give you your IP, the switch your on, and the port on that switch you're connected to. When combined with a database that maps switch ports to datajack, you can directly locate where a computer is on your network.

The only problem is that capturing this little buggers is tough in Windows: CDPR will do it, as will Ethereal, but both require WinPcap to be installed. Luckily I found version of TCPDump for Windows thats built on the WinPCap SDK; this means the little 400k utility can capture CDP packets on a machine without any additional tools. You can get it from micoOLAP here. The manual page for WinDump (version of TCPDump that needs WinPCap ) can be found over here.

The final step is getting TCPDUMP to capture the CDP Packet. Command line we're using it "tcpdump -nn -v -s 1500 -c 1 ether[20:2] == 0x2000" (from another blog). It takes up to 60 seconds (depending on switch settings), but eventually pulls down the CDP Packet. I'll see if I can't wrangle up some VBS Login scripts to run it in a bit.

-Charles

Brother MFC-8440 Multifunction Windows Server 2003 Fax, Print, and Scanner Drivers

Brother International does not support their line of multifunction printers in Windows Server 2003. Well, they do support the print functions, but if you want to use the Fax or Scanner functions you are SOL. I would guess it has something to do with them offering a nice network fax and scanner driver as an optional but expensive accessory, but I digress. I wanted to share the Fax Machine off our Brother MFC-8440 printer with the rest of our IT Department, but being that it wouldn't work with 2k3, and XP doesn't allow you to share faxes.

So what I did was methodically combine the Windows XP Drivers with the Windows Server 2003 Drivers so that I was using the most up to date file versions, then edited the associated INF files so that it would install. After some tweaking and some wall to head interaction, it's working great and we can fax from any of the computers in our office using the wonderful Microsoft Fax Services. The driver files are available here: http://www.alwaysnetwork.com/wss/brother-mfc-8440.zip.

While editing the drivers, I think I have made the correct changes so that it will work with Vista, but I am unable to check as I don't have any Vista boxes laying around. Also be aware that these drivers, while tested on my systems here, come with no guarantee that they won't hose up your system and come with no warranty what so ever.


-Charles