Take a closer look at OpenBSD
by on 21.Aug, 2006 under Uncategorized
A great article at IBM DeveloperWorks about OpenBSD. To few administrators take a look at this really lightweight, fast and secure operating system. If you have questions about it I suggest you read trough this article since it will give you a great view into OpenBSD.
Link: IBM developerWorks
How does VPN work?
by on 20.Aug, 2006 under Uncategorized
I work quite alot with VPN tunnels at work and many wonder how they work. I find that this article at Alliance Datacom explains simply how the tunnels work. The article is written by Jeff Tyson.
I suggest anyone who is going to use VPN and doesn’t understand the magic have a look at their article.
Quote:
"The world has
changed a lot in the last couple of decades. Instead of simply dealing with
local or regional concerns, many businesses now have to think about global
markets and logistics. Many companies have facilities spread out across the
country or around the world, and there is one thing that all of them need: A way
to maintain fast, secure and reliable communications wherever their offices are."
Link: How does VPN work?
Why doesn’t Linux need defragmenting?
by on 19.Aug, 2006 under Uncategorized
OneAndOneIs2 answers a common question about the Linux filesystems. The article is really well formed and easy to follow. I suggest you take a look.
Quote from OneAndOneIs2
"It’s a question that crops up with depressing regularity: Why don’t
Linux filesystems need to be defragmented?. Here’s my attempt at
answering once and for all.Rather than simply stumble through
lots of dry technical explanations, I’m opting to consider that an
ASCII picture is worth a thousand words."
Link: OneAndOneIs2
Introduction to network protocols
by on 18.Aug, 2006 under Uncategorized
Understanding the basics of networking might seem like a easy thing for us who already know about it, but many out there who should understand it still don’t. A article at Windows Networking.com is going trough the basics in networking. The article is quite short but still manages to show us the basic in networking.
Anyone who works with networks and still doesn’t how TCP/IP protocol works or what OSI is should have a look at this article.
Link: Introduction to network protocols
Using Windows User state migration tool
by on 16.Aug, 2006 under Uncategorized
Managing large networks with Windows desktops can sometimes
be a hassle, at least when 10 users might be using the same desktop, when you
update you have to copy every single users settings and email etc to a new
desktop. This is where the User State Migration Tool comes to rescue. You can
migrate user setting in just about any scenario possible.
In this article I will try to show you some of the basic
scenarios in using USMT. This is just a short article and there is a lot more
you can do with USMT. I wrote this to have a cheat sheet of the usage somewhere
public.
The USMT is a free tool provided by Microsoft, it works much
in the same way the files and settings transfer wizard does. The idea in using
USMT is that the administrator does not have to login as the user to the
workstation to migrate the user also we can migrate more than one user from a
computer.
I’ll show you 3 different scenarios that I’ve been forced to
use. All of them would have been a lot more hassle if the USMT wasn’t
available.
First of all I installed USMT on my workstation, after that
I moved the C:USMT folder to a public area of a locally public network
server, this ensures me that I can access USMT from any workstation in our
network when I need it. I can use the command line “net use” or mount the
network drive with Windows Explorer, anyway I’ll get the binaries to the
workstation easily without any installation. I also published a temporary store
for the profiles I might migrate on the same server. So shortly the serverUSMT and servermigration
is now available to me whenever I need it.
USMT basically works with two commands, scanstate to migrate
the user information and loadstate to import the users settings.
Now let’s take a look at a few of the scenarios.
Scenario 1:
- A workstation that has 7 users and is already in the
domain needs to be replaced, all 7 users will continue to use the new
workstation. So we just need to get the profiles to the new workstation.
First login as the administrator and mount the USMT share to
the workstation, in all of these examples I’m using z: drive for this purpose. After
this we just migrate every user settings and files by running the following:
scanstate
servermigrationworkstation /i:migapp.inf /i:migsys.inf /i:miguser.inf /v:1
/x /f /s /o
NOTE: This will not migrate the user you are logged in as.
When scanstate is done you can log in to the new
workstation, mount the network drive again to access the binaries and run
loadstate
loadstate servermigrationworkstation
Restart the workstation and you are done.
Scenario 2:
- A user Ann Anonymous who is currently a user in the NT
domain DODAA needs to get a new workstation, also the new workstation is in the
AD domain DADA, her username in the NT domain was annan and in AD her user name
is annanony. We will use USMT to do this and it really easy.
First we mount the network drive to access the binaries
after that we run scanstate.
scanstate
servermigrationannan /user:DODAAannan /i:migapp.inf /i:migsys.inf /i:miguser.inf /v:1 /x /f /s /o
That’s it, now let’s bring her settings to the new
workstation by running loadstate.
loadstate
servermigrationannan /md:DODAA:DADA /mu:annan:annanoy
Easy isn’t it? If you are like me you copied and used Files and
settings transfer wizard earlier, in that case you should love this software.
Again, restart the workstation and you are done.
The switch /md modifies the domain name, and /mu modifies
the username. By combining these few commands you should be able to migrate
almost anything. If your company uses many programs and you want to migrate the
settings for those as well take a look at the help files. The .inf files can be
modified to migrate just about anything. As I said this is just a very short
introduction for USMT so I’m not going to go into .inf files here.
Hope this tool will be as useful for you as it has been for
me.
Links and further reading:
