Archive for June, 2008
HTC Cavalier / Dopod C730 brought back to life.
Jun 20th
Yours truly was downgraded back to Edge and (…GASP…) GPRS these last two days.
My Dopod was acting sluggish so I rebooted her and she never came back up. It would get me to the Windows Mobile screen vibrate and reboot again…
A sad endless loop. My poor little Dopod! I grabbed a Tmobile Wing I had in the closet when we got a few demo units way back when. It still had the sticker over the touch screen. I unlocked it using GSMLiberty (After searching endlessly for free ways to unlock it.) I coughed up the forty buckeroos and it was unlocked in a few minutes. I trusted them because they unlocked my Wing previously in a similar incident!
I popped my SIM card and 4gb Mini SD card into her and was syncing in no time.
The touch screen was nice. Don’t get me wrong it’s great and all but not something I am normally
willing to replace size for especially since I know my way around the Smartphone so well. But the 200 mhz processor and the SUPER slow speeds were horrible. What year is this?? But. as usually I digress…
Back to the poor dopod. I found out that it could possibly be a corrupted rom and a hard reset should do it. I tried it once… Nothing. I was holding down the 2 soft buttons (above the call and end call buttons) powering off and then on again. Making sure to press keep holding down the soft buttons when doing it.
I tried it again and Nothing. I almost gave up and I gave it one last go.
Booyah! We were back in business… I was a happy camper. I felt like I jumped into the 21st century with the switch back to HSDPA! It was like a nightmare. Have you ever tried to download a 5 mb file over GPRS? Not fun. Not fun at all.
_TheFeelingProductiveAdmiN_
Friday’s Funny Video
Jun 20th
Found this today on Fark. It’s worth a view, and it will be sure to give you all bad ideas.
The Great Office War – Watch more free videos
Windows vs Mac: A not unbiased showdown!
Jun 19th
I’m Abhi Garg and this is my first post on AsktheAdmin.com.
Most of us have already read numerous articles on how Windows OS and Mac OS X fare against each other, and it’s unfair to pick one as the winner unless you’ve been to both camps i.e. worked on a Mac and a PC with the same agenda. This blog will not announce a winner but will focus on
my experience with Mac OS X (having been a Windows user for over 12 years).
Since it’s possible to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware (Apple despises hates this), and the fact that Apple machines (now) run on the Intel platform, the hardware differences and that whole discussion can be safely ignored.
1. Let’s start with the pricing and versions.
To run Windows, you can either buy a pre-assembled PC (Gateway, HP etc.), custom build it (Dell) or DIY (gather the parts, get your hands dirty and put them together).
If you buy a PC from a reputable hardware vendor, then your machine will arrive pre-loaded with a version of Windows that you chose while ordering. You may also opt to build a PC yourself and buy Windows off-the-shelf/online.
The latest version of Windows, Vista, has many flavors – Basic, Home, Business and Ultimate. The previous Windows version, Xp, had multiple flavors as well. This is the where Mac OS X draws first blood. With Mac OS X, there are no versions; you get a single OS release with all the features (Leopard is the latest). Why should a user have to make a choice between networking and media center capabilities?
Yeah, our lives are so simple, we really need this version complexity.
Max OS X Leopard retails at US $129.00.
Windows Vista starts at US $146.00 (for the Basic version). Windows Vista Ultimate costs around $279.00
From a direct cost comparison perspective, it would appear that Windows is more expensive than Mac OS X but there’s a catch to this.
Two things:
- These are full version prices; if you are already running legitimate Windows Xp, you can go with the upgrade route, which knocks down the price.
- You can run Windows on pretty much any kind of hardware that meets the minimum requirements of Windows OS. With Mac OS X, you need to buy Apple hardware unless you are an expert user, and can make a patched copy of OS X run on any PC hardware. That, of course, would be a pirated version of OS X.
Apple computers, as we know, are expensive so that offsets the cheaper OS X price. Windows scores here. It’s cheaper to own (not necessarily cheaper to run though. Don’t worry I’m getting there).
2. Reliability and software installation.
Without going into a lot of detail about kernels and platforms, I’d like to highlight that Windows and Mac OS X are inherently different. OS X is based on Unix kernel, which, unlike Windows, does not have any registries or COM/DCOM libraries. It relies on common file paths, copy/unzip to install and delete to uninstall. Yes, that’s how simple it is with Mac OS X. To install a software, all you have to do is unzip the package (if it’s an archive) or mount the image (if it’s a .dmg file) and just drag drop the software folder in /Applications. All applications on Mac OS X reside in Applications folder under / (root)
With Windows, it’s the install shield, registry, COM, COM+ and what not.
Mac OS X does not understand an .exe file, which may sound like a limitation but in practice, that’s a huge plus. No .exe means No viruses, No spy ware and No unauthorized activity. In fact, you do NOT need a virus scanner on Mac OS X.
Unlike Windows, you don’t have to patch Mac OS X every few days. The applications that run on Mac OS X like iTunes, FireFox etc. may need updates but the OS X itself is pretty stable.
Mac OS X scores.
Historical insight: Windows shifted to pre-emptive scheduling** starting with Windows 2000 but Mac OS X has always been on this model.
**Pre-emptive scheduling – when an application runs on an OS, it requires resources (RAM, processor, network etc.). Under a pre-emptive scheduling model, the OS can forcefully withdraw the resources allocated to an application (Ctrl + Alt + Del -> End Process in Windows and Force Quit in Mac OS X). Users who’ve had to live through Windows 95 and Windows 98 would know the difference. In Windows 95 and Windows 98, the applications ran under non pre-emptive scheduling system i.e. the OS could not force an application to free the system resources.
3. Third party applications requirement and misc. items
Mac OS X comes bundles with almost everything you would need to get going immediately. Professional users may need to purchase software per their field of specialty but other than that, you are set. From a decent text editor to Terminal that fires a SSH connection, from a brilliant inbuilt iSight camera that comes with Photo Booth software for conferencing, chats and photos to Time Machine that automatically backs up everything on your hard drive to an external drive, from an inbuilt firewall to block unwanted incoming connections to iMail, iCal and Address Book – you get everything.
Windows comes bundled with Media Player, Games, NotePad (oh my god, I hate myself for mentioning notepad), a patch hungry Internet Explorer and other goodies. However, quality wise they do not meet Apple’s standard.
Plus, Windows DEFINITELY needs an anti-virus scanner, anti spy ware tool and probably an external firewall to protect itself. I think more resources are spent on protecting Windows systems than the queen of England.
Add this cost of additional software to the base OS.
Finally, the cost of Apple hardware: Apple charges a lot of money for a Mac. However, the quality is super good. The mighty mouse, the keyboard and the displays are excellent. When you get OS X (with a Macbook or iMac etc.), you are not just getting an OS but a whole new experience in the form of hardware + software.
Mac OS X scores.
Everyone should work on an Apple machine. At least once. You may not want to return to the Windows’ patch-y world.
Begin the comment war now!
Using group policy to map network drives.
Jun 18th
Yesterday we had a brief introduction to what Group Policy is and what it can do for you. Today we are going to actually make it do our work for us. Back in the day if you had to map a drive on several machines you did it via the Autoexec.bat or as a login script from your domain controller.
Now I will show you how you can add a map network drive to a computers on your network depending on what OU they are in. An OU is an Organizational Unit in your Active Directory or simply put a container to hold similar stuff.
Why do we put things into OU’s? To make our lives as Admin’s that much easier.
By grouping all of your Accounting users into one OU you can then assign a Group Policy to that OU. Now if there are 5000 people in one department or 5 it is the same amount of work to add a mapped drive (or any of the other GP tasks we will do) to there machines. You can nest OU’s in OU’s like seen above here with the Accounting OU. It holds an AR and an AP department. You can apply policies to all three OU’s at once or individually. You control how GP trickles down like permissions.
By having OU’s and group policy on your network users can have their mapped drives and other resources no matter where they are logging into on your domain.
Are you frightened? Don’t be this is pretty simple! Log into your AD machine and open up your Active Directory Users and Computers Console. It is located in the control panel under administrative tools.
Get in there right click on your OU choose properties and then the group policy tab. Depending on how your AD machine is set up you might have to click on a a button that says open Group Policy Management.
Once you are there you can create and link your Group Policy by right clicking on the OU like seen here.
You will be prompted for a name for this policy
Go ahead and name her anything you want. But try to be descriptive so when you have 300 policies later on you can differentiate!
Now you see your policy appear on the right… Simply right click and edit it.
Navigate down to The User Configuration folder and choose Windows Settings and then Scripts and finally Log-on. Hit the add button. Now you will need to point your GP to a script to run. Create a .bat file with the following line in it. Obviously changing the drive letter and the share name to your own.
net use i: \\AskheAdmin\newaccounting$
Save this file to your domain name under the SysVol folder and into the Scripts folder.
So if your domain name is AskTheAdmin.com it would go into
\SYSVOL\ASKTHEADMIN\SCRIPTS\
Save it as logon.bat and simply type logon.bat in the box below:
Hit OK and OK again. Make sure to close out of any open Group Policy windows. Then log the user into any Domain machine and watch the drive mount for you. Of course if the user does not have the proper rights to the drive you specified it won’t work!
If you want to do this to a machine that is not on AD stay tuned for more in our GP series.
_TheGroupThisAdmiN_
Get your Ping.FM Beta Code while they are hot!
Jun 18th
What is Group Policy and how can it help me?
Jun 18th
I am sure all you readers out there in Admin land have heard of Group Policy or GP/GPOs before. A lot of people know what it is but do not know how to use it well enough to make their lives easier. At the request of one of our loyal readers Bavat0r I have decided to create a series of posts starting with this brief introduction and guiding you through setting Group Policy up, utilizing it to install applications, map network drives and do pretty much anything you want it to. The possibilities are endless!
Think of group policy like your Bitch Underpaid Intern. Microsoft describes Group Policy as:
Group Policy is an infrastructure used to deliver and apply one or more desired configurations or policy settings to a set of targeted users and computers within an Active Directory environment. This infrastructure consists of a Group Policy engine and multiple client-side extensions (CSEs) responsible for writing specific policy settings on target client computers.
Before we get into the lessons I wanted to tell you that most of my examples will be of Domains running Active Directory BUT you can still do a lot of these tasks on Windows 2000/XP Pro/Vista Business even if they are not part of a domain. You can use the Group Policy editor to connect to a local machine and set this up.
What do you want to see us write about? Now is the time to send me your Group Policy questions!
