Archive for November, 2005
Temporarily Bypass Windows Activation to Backup Files
by on Nov.28, 2005, under Uncategorized
If you are like me, you reinstall Windows XP at least 10 times a year
or more on you PC to keep the system fresh and get rid of those pesky
registry experiments gone so very wrong. Microsoft doesn’t allow you to
activate your copy of Windows XP more than 4 times per year over the
Internet, and phoning in to talk to Microsoft is a time consuming
process. In this article, I will show you two different ways to get
into Windows XP one more time before you either take the plunge and
re-install Windows or call Microsoft to explain – again – why you need
to activate your system.
**Please read and follow the disclaimer**
In This Article:
Disclaimer
How Activation Works
Activation Bypass: Option One
Activation Bypass: Option Two
Further Reading
Disclaimer
This
article was written only to provide you with a last resort to backup
your files or complete final tasks once your Windows Product Activation
(WPA) grace period has run out. This has proved helpful in situations
where phone and Internet access is not available.
In one
situation, I was hired to implement a network infrastructure for a
hotel. I had the network and all of the computers setup before the
telephone system was operational, so the processes outlined in this
article was the point of last resort for me. I didn’t have a cell phone
on me.
Always activate your copy of Microsoft Windows XP and use only genuine and legally purchased copies of Windows.
How Activation Works
Microsoft
requires activation of all Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 editions
that were bought either in OEM or Retail packaging. A thirty day grace
period is allowed before the lack of activation will cripple Windows
and prevent the user from logging in.
During the Windows
installation, Windows Setup uses the 25-character product key to
generate a unique 20-character PID or Product ID. This is then combined
with a 20-character hardware ID that is generated based on your
hardware configuration. The HID and PID are concatenated to form the
Installation ID. When activation occurs, your Installation ID is
checked by a Microsoft licensing house to make sure that your copy of
Windows is valid and that it is not already running on a different
computer.
For the purpose of this article, the method of activating Windows over the Internet will be used.
Microsoft
allows you to activate a single copy of Windows XP up to four times per
year. In the case of a major hardware upgrade, you may be required to
reactivate Windows even if you have not reinstalled the Operating
System. A major hardware upgrade can be described as one of the
following:
- If you replace your Network Interface Card (NIC),
you may replace up to three additional pieces of hardware without
having to activate Windows again. - If you do not replace your NIC, you can replace up to five items
In
order to activate Windows, you must have TCP ports 80 and 443 open in
your firewall. Because these are common ports, HTTP and HTTPS
respectively, they should already be open.
Activation Bypass: Option One
The
first option is actually quite obvious if you know where to look. I
actually stumbled upon it by accident. This method will only work if
you have already exceeded the limit of activations per Windows XP copy.
In
the Activate Windows window, proceed through the steps to activate
Windows. Once it has been verified that you are over the limit of
activations for that copy of Windows XP, you can simply click on the
‘Microsoft Activation Assistance Web Site’ link, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Microsoft Activation Assistance Web Site Link
Regardless
of your default web browser, the activation window will launch Internet
Explorer. This works to our advantage because Internet Explorer and
Windows Explorer work very interchangeably: you can type an URL into
Windows Explorer and you can type a local resource path into Internet
Explorer. As you can notice in Figure 2, by typing ‘C:’ into the
Internet Explorer window, you are actually able to access your hard
drive through Internet Explorer.
Figure 2: Your hard drive displayed in Internet Explorer
From
here, you have unrestricted access to any program of file on your hard
drive(s) as long as your user account has the necessary permissions.
It
should be noted that Alt-Control-Delete has no effect on the computer,
and Control-Shift-Escape will not bring up the Task Manager. We will
discuss why this is important in the second option. By default, you are
not
able to see the Start Menu or Task bar through this method. One way I
found to bring it up is to go the the Control Panel and right click on
My Network Places > Properties. This will bring up the Desktop,
Start Menu, and Taskbar, but only for a little while. After a minute or
two, Windows figures out you’ve tricked it and hides the Desktop, Start
Menu, and Taskbar.
Activation Bypass: Option Two
Option
number two is a little more complicated and not quite as usable in some
respects. In order for this option to work, we must enter Safe Mode
with Command prompt. To do this, wait until the Power On Self Test
(POST) screen has disappeared, just before the Windows XP logo appears,
press the F8 key on your keyboard. Windows will start in Safe Mode and
allow you to login to your user account or the Administrator account if
you have the correct password.
Log into a user account and you will see only
a command prompt window. That is ok, though. Simply press
Control-Shift-Escape to launch the Task Manager. Once the Task Manager
is open, click File > New Task. This will bring up the Run command
window. Enter the path of any local resource. This will bring launch
the Windows interface including the taskbar and desktop. From here you
can do almost everything except for where services have been disabled
because you are running in Safe Mode. I have not yet figured out how to
‘trick’ Windows into becoming ‘not Safe Mode’ from this point, so if
you know how, please leave a comment.
Further Reading
From installation to Active directory client with CentOS 4.2 – Part one
by on Nov.28, 2005, under Uncategorized
I’m personally quite new to CentOS but I have been using RedHat from
time to time and find their product to be easy to set up and very
compatible in corporate networks. In this article we will go trough the
steps off connecting the RedHat based CentOS to an Active Directory
domain. I know there are many…
From installation to Active Directory client with CentOS 4.2 – Part one
I’m personally quite new to CentOS but I have been using RedHat from
time to time and find their product to be easy to set up and very
compatible in corporate networks. In this article we will go trough the
steps off connecting the RedHat based CentOS to an Active Directory
domain. I know there are many administrators out there using Microsoft
products who are wondering about the usage of Linux in their network.
Personally I tend to have the following policy, use the best
software for the job. Sometimes this might be Windows sometimes it
might be Linux. If one is able to use the same authentication protocol
and authenticate even the Linux users in Active Directory this
operating system becomes more attractive.
In this article:
- Getting the media.
- Starting the installation.
- Installation language and keyboard.
- Installation type.
- Partitioning.
- Configuring the boot loader.
- Network configuration.
- Firewall.
- Additional language support.
- Setting the timezone.
- Root password.
- Installation packages.
- Ready to install.
- Done installing.
- First boot.
- Setting the time.
- Monitor settings.
- System user.
- Sound card.
- Additional CDs.
- First login.
- Launching up2date.
- Conclusion.
First of all you need to start by downloading the ISO images from CentOS mirrors.
You can choose between CD ISOs or DVD ISOs. The DVD version seems to be
available only as a torrent. After downloading burn the ISOs to a media
with you favorite CD burner application. I usually use K3b.
When done you are ready to start the journey to a fully working Linux desktop authenticating against Active Directory.
Put the first disk or the DVD into the drive and boot up the soon to be
Linux desktop. You are presented with the CentOS loader; here you can
choose a few different types of installation and pass the linux kernel
a few different bootup parameters.
Normally all you need to do is hit enter. If your on a old machine and
don’t want to use a lot of recourses on the graphical environment you
might consider typing
| linux text |
and start the text based installer. I will use the graphical one in
this article but they do exactly the same so you can choose the one you
see fit. The next step is to test the installation media. It’s not a
thing you have to do but doing so ensures you that the medias are
working and you won’t get disappointed later on. If you choose to test
the medias just hit ok, if not just press skip.
The anaconda installer starts up and you are greeted with a nice
GUI. If for some reason this doesn’t work start use the linux text
option stated above. You might have a non compliant graphics card.
Installation language and keyboard.
Now let’s start the configuration and get this workstation up and running. Click next on the first screen.
The first thing we are going to do is select the language to use during the installation.
This has nothing to do with the system language as it will be set later
on. I choose English. Next we configure the keyboard, I will use the
one I have, Finnish (latin1) so I can have my euro sign.
Now we need to select the installation type. I use the preset choice
Workstation since it has most of what I use in my Linux desktop. You
can choose one that describes your needs. You can add packages later on
in this installation so don’t worry. Just select one, you can add
packages later on.
Next we need to partition our hard drive. I will do this manually, but
if this is the only operating system you can safely choose the
automatic way.
For those of you unfamiliar with the linux file system I will have
a brief introduction to this. First of all for servers there are more
things to think about than for the average desktop. For our little
desktop installation I’ve chosen to make a very simple partition schema.
| Mount point | Name | Size | Filesystem |
| / | Root | 4000Mb | ext3 |
| /home | Home | 730Mb | ext3 |
| SWAP | Swap | 384Mb | swap |
Note: If you are going to dual boot with Windows you need to have
Windows installed on the first partition. Called /dev/hda1 or
/dev/sda1. hda stands for the first drive on the IDE port and sda for
SCSI or SATA drives.
I want to keep the home partition on a separate partition for various
reasons but the main one is that if I ever need to reinstall the
operating system all users’ settings and documents can still be found
in their home directory.
We are now going to configure the boot loader. If you have Windows
installed on the workstation you should see it in the list. Choose
which operating system will be the default to boot up and click next.
Network configuration for me is done over DHCP. The only thing I want
to change is the hostname. I want to set it manually to
wrkst1.nixadmins.net.
I don’t want to use a firewall in this setup since the workstation will
remain inside the trusted network and I see no use of this. If you feel
unsure feel free to enable the firewall. Just remember to open the
ports for Samba if you are going to use it. I also chose to enable
SELinux. For more information on SELinux see http://www.nsa.gov/selinux
If you want to you can now add additional language support. I have the
default language set to English but I also selected Finnish for
compatibility.
Now select the closest city to set your timezone. This is really
important, if the clock between the Active Directory server and the
workstation don’t match you will have problems.
Root password
We are now almost done. Next we set the root password. The root user is
a god in a *NIX based system and is able to do anything to the system.
Remember to use a strong password here. For comparison the closest
Windows account would be the Administrator account.
Next the installer shows the default packages to be installed. I want
to add the Samba package so I choose Customize software packages to be
installed. If you don’t want to share files, folders or printers from
this workstation to the Windows network you can just install the
default ones.
After selecting the samba packages the system is ready to start the
installation. Remember, at this point no changes have been made to the
existing system so you can still abort if you want to and nothing will
change. When you hit next the installer will partition the harddrive
and start copying the packages to the harddrive.
After copying all the files to the harddrive the installer will inform
you of a successful install. Remove the installation medias from the
drive and select Reboot.
First boot and license agreement
When the system has rebooted you will be presented with the first boot
configuration, don’t worry this wont take more than a minute. First you
will need to agree with the License Agreement. ContOS is released via
the Gnu General Public License, you can read it here http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
Setting the time
After that check and verify the time. As I said earlier large differences between the client and the server results in problems.
Set your monitor settings. Choose the resolution and the color depth. Millions of colors 16 bit.
Now the installation wants you to create a system user. It is a normal
thing since using root for day to day tasks is a bad thing. You could
make a small mistake and mess up the whole system. This time however we
are not going to create a system user because we are going to
authenticate against the Active Directory server. Even if the button
looks tempting do not click the Use network login button. We will set
this up a little later. Hit next and the system warns you about leaving
the system without a user account.
Next is the sound card. It should have been auto detected and you can play a test sound just to be sure.
Just hit next at additional CDs.
You’re done. Just hit next and wait for the login screen to show up.
Login as the root user since this is the only user on the system and
it’s the one we will be using to set up the authentication against
Active Directory.
When logged in you will probably see the red update watcher.
There are updates for the system and I urge you to install them
before doing anything else. Double click the red update icon and it
will start the CentOS network alert notification tool.
This tool will show you the available updates. Click the Launch up2date
button to start updating the packages. The program will prompt you for
settings and then ask you to install the GPG key. Choose Yes.
The CentOS update agent will now startup. Click forward, on the
channels page you can choose which packages you want to update. I chose
everything on this fresh install to keep it up to date you might
consider doing the same.
Next the updater shows the packages chosen to skip. These are the
kernel updates because they require a reboot to become functional. This
time I select all packages since I still want the system to be up to
date.
Next it shows the non kernel updates. For now I will also update them,
so once again I select all packages. The installer now solves the
package dependencies and starts downloading all the packages.
When it’s done just click forward to install all the packages we
just fetched. Since we also downloaded the kernel updates we need to
reboot to get them applied. After the reboot you will have a up to date
linux system installed.
In the next part of this article we will go trough the process of
adding this workstation to the Active Directory domain and configure
some services like SSH to authenticate against it. Meanwhile feel free
to experiment with your newly installed system. And if you do it might
be a good idea to add the user we left out earlier in this article. You
can find the tools for that in the Applications-System Settings-Users
and Groups menu.
Desktop Linux for small business
by on Nov.25, 2005, under Uncategorized
Peter Judge on ZDnet.co.uk writes "As desktop Linux becomes ever more professional, and with Microsoft still a year away from shipping its new Vista version of Windows, could now be the time to go open-source on the desktop? Of course, circumstances will vary from company to company, but if you’re ready to make the move, there’s a good crop of Linux distributions ready to accommodate your needs."
More Information:
http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/0,39023100,39237495,00.htm
A Brief Introduction to Cisco Routers
by on Nov.22, 2005, under Uncategorized
A Router is a piece of equipment that routes packets between networks.
Routers are important because routing makes the Internet possible.
Cisco is the world’s premier Router manufacturer. In this article, you
will find a very basic guide on how to get a Cisco router up and
running.
In This Article
The Cisco 2500 Series Router: A Brief Overview
Setting Up & Configuring Your Router
Routing Explained
You
can think of routing as mailing a letter. When you send a letter, you specify a
destination and a source address. You must take it to the Post Office (at least
where I live) and they take care of the letter from there. The post office is
your ‘Default Gateway’ to the postal network just as routers are usually the
Default Gateway in your network. At the post office, they have a list of
destinations – a Routing Table – and the ‘ports’ to send the letter out of in
order for it to arrive at the destination. From there, it gets sent out to the
appropriate destination.
The Cisco 2500 Series Router: A Brief
Overview
Though
outdated, the Cisco 2500 series router is still a very popular router, due to
their reliability, versatility and low cost. A Cisco 2500 series router can
easily be picked up on eBay for around $100 CND.
Figure 1: Cisco 2501 Router
Features
will vary based on model number so for this article we will focus on the Cisco
2501 router – one of the most common models out there.
When
you are talking about features on a Cisco router, you are usually referring to
the interfaces it has and the storage (RAM, NVRAM, Flash) that it has. An
interface, for the purposes of this article, can be thought of as the physical
port on the router. Let’s begin by discussing the different interfaces on the
2501.
The
first interface, to the far left in Figure 1, is labeled ‘AUI’ or Autonomous
Unit Interface. This is actually an Ethernet interface. How does it connect to
a standard Ethernet cable? It requires a piece of equipment known as a Transceiver. The only thing you really
need to know about a Transceiver is that it can be thought of as an AUI to
Ethernet adapter. This interface is known as Ethernet0 by the router.
Figure 2: A Transceiver
Next,
we have two Serial Interfaces, Serial0 and Serial1. These interfaces allow you
to connect via a synchronous serial cable to other Cisco routers within your
LAN. We won’t get into all of these details, but it is at least good to know
what the interface is for.
The
two RJ-45 connectors to the right of the serial interfaces are the Console and
AUX interfaces, respectively. The console interface is how we will connect to
the router for the first time to configure it. To do this, we need a special
console cable. One end is a standard DB9 and the other is RJ-45. It is
interesting to note that this cable is flat! This makes it easy to keep track
of the cable in amongst all of your Ethernet cables. The AUX interface will not
be discussed in this article.
Figure 3: A Console Cable
Setting Up & Configuring Your Router
Let’s
get started! First, you will need to plug your router in with a power cord.
Next, connect the console cable to the Console port on the router and also to a
serial port on your computer. That is really all you need to do to start
playing around with the router. You can go ahead and fire that router up.
On
your computer, launch Start > All Programs > Accessories > Communication
> HyperTerminal. It should be noted that Windows Server 2003 does not
include this application. You can copy the application and its DLLs from a
Windows XP or 2000 computer and it will work just fine.
In
HyperTerminal, you will be prompted with the New Connection window. You can
name the connection whatever you like and choose an icon for it. Select the
proper COM (Serial) port and continue to the next screen. You will need to set
the options like this:
Figure 4: HyperTerminal Session Options
After clicking on OK, you
will be brought to a white screen. Pressing Enter will initiate the session.
You will then have the first prompt:
Router>
This is known as User Mode.
From here, you can not perform any configure options and the commands you can
enter are limited. At any time in the Cisco IOS (Internetwork Operating
System), you can get a list of commands by typing ‘?’.
From User Mode, we can view
information about the router, such as its IOS version, the amount of memory
installed in it, the router’s Routing Table and a few more useful things. In
the User Mode, let’s try a commands to show you what type of hardware the
router has.
show version output from a 2514 router:
Production>show
version
Cisco
Internetwork Operating System Software
IOS
(tm) 2500 Software (C2500-DS40-L), Version 11.2(5)P, SHARED PLATFORM,
RELEAS
E SOFTWARE
(fc1)
Copyright
(c) 1986-1997 by cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled
Mon 07-Apr-97 17:39 by tej
Image
text-base: 0×03037DD8, data-base: 0×00001000
ROM:
System Bootstrap, Version 11.0(10c), SOFTWARE
ROM:
3000 Bootstrap Software (IGS-BOOT-R), Version 11.0(10c), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Production
uptime is 1 day, 2 hours, 24 minutes
System
restarted by power-on
System
image file is "flash:80135205.bin", booted via flash
cisco
2500 (68030) processor (revision L) with 2048K/2048K bytes of memory.
Processor
board ID 06033664, with hardware revision 00000000
Bridging
software.
X.25
software, Version 2.0, NET2, BFE and GOSIP compliant.
2
Ethernet/IEEE 802.3 interface(s)
2
Serial network interface(s)
32K
bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
8192K
bytes of processor board System flash (Read ONLY)
Configuration
register is 0×2102
Next thing we’ll do is log in to Privileged Mode. To
do this, you simply type:
enable
This changes the prompt to:
Router#
From this mode, we have many more command options to
choose from. You can type ‘?’ to get a list of the available commands.
I will let you browse around for yourself in the IOS,
but I will provide you with information on doing a few of the major tasks to
get the router functional.
First of all, lets configure your Ethernet interface
with an IP Address. To do this, we must be in what is called Global
Configuration Mode. To enter this mode, type
Router#configure
terminal
or
Router#config
t
To notify you that you are in Global Configuration Mode,
your command prompt changes to:
Router(config)#
You will probably want to set a password to get into
Privileged Mode so there can be no unauthorized changes made.
Router(config)#enable secret yourpasswordhere
Next, we must specify that we want to configure the
interface Ethernet0.
Router(config)interface
Ethernet0
Or
Router(config)#int
e0
Because you are configuring an interface, the prompt
changes to:
Router(config-if)#
From here, we can issue the command that will
configure the IP Address. I have included a sample address. You would use your
address in the command. Don’t forget to put the correct subnet mask!
Router(config-if)#ip
address 192.168.10.254 255.255.255.0
By default, all interfaces on the router are shutdown
Router(config-if)#no
shutdown
or
Router(config-if)#no
sh
We want to make the router aware of the networks it
is responsible for. To do this, we must configure a Routing Protocol on the
router. We will not get into great detail about Routing Protocols, since it is
a lengthy topic. For the purposes of this article, we will be using the Routing
Information Protocol (RIP) protocol. To enable this, we must first exit the
interface.
Router(config-if)#
exit
To enable RIP, two steps are required. First me must
define which protocol we are using, and secondly we must specify which networks
the router is to concern itself with.
Router(config)#router
rip
Router(config-router)#network
192.168.10.0
Notice that the prompt changed to tell you that it
was in router configuration mode. The last thing we will configure is Telnet
access so you can work on the router from an IP address rather than through a
console cable. You must exit router configuration mode:
Router(config-router)#exit
Do to the scope of this guide, I will simply list the
commands required to allow Telnet connections. In a future article, the theory
behind this may be covered.
Router(config)#line
vty 0 4
Router(config-line)#login
Router(config-line)#password
yourpasswordhere
Now that we’ve got a working router, it is important
to save the configuration from RAM to NVRAM. To do this, we type:
Router#copy
run start
Now that you have configured your router, you can telnet
to it from any computer in your network.
Start > Run > cmd
telnet 192.168.10.254
Figure 5: A Telnet Session
Further Reading
-
Todd Lammle (2004) Cisco Certified Network
Associate Study Guide 4th Edition. Sybex
IT Gigolo
by on Nov.22, 2005, under Uncategorized
I had to add a no topic topic just to be able to post this. People really seem to do crazy things just to get their computers fixed. Se article on Syncmag.
More information:
The IT Gigolo
Just for fun I had to ad a poll to this little link. Had to put categories just to compare.
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About the author
I'm Mats Hellman and I'm systems administrator working for Folkhälsan, a healthcare organization in Finland. If you like the posts subscribe to the RSS Feed
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