Display a Start Up Message in Windows XP before logging in.

Before someone logs into your machine a message can be displayed. This is meant to inform you that you are being monitored or you are bound by some formal code of conduct.

You can use it to display a message in your absence to remind your buddies you are an all knowing Admin. You can do it pretty easily by displaying what Microsoft refers to as a legal notice at system start up.

• GO TO RUN
• REGEDIT
• Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system]
• Change legalnoticecaption”=”Legal Notice“
• legalnoticetext=”AskTheAdmin is watching you.”

obviously you can replace Legal notice or AskTheAdmin is watching you with any text you want. The editors over here are pretty sure you can find some Funny Practical uses for this on your, or a public, PC…

_TheAlwaysWatchingAdmiN_

How can I view a web page that used to be there but isn’t anymore?

Don’t you just hate those Four Oh Four errors? This page can not be displayed…

We wont judge you. Whether it be porn or work related. For good or evil…

The page used to be there. But where did it go? Who cares - We are going to show you how to bring it back!

After being overwhelmed with emails, from amazed readers, after we resurrected the website about the torrent tracker infiltration by a security company. Reader after reader sent us emails inquiring about this magic cache and how to access it.

See the black circle around the word cached? Yup that is your time machine. You will get a snapshot of the page the last time Google crawled it.

Hit this trick/feature up after take down notices or traffic prevents you from seeing what you want to see… Get rid of that a big 404.

Its not always 100 percent functional but it will get you the guts of the site.

How long before Google gets those take down notices for their cache?

_TheAdmiN_

Ever wanted to edit a webpage to say whatever you wanted it too? So did other people.

The good people at Mosio pinged me yesterday with this awesome tid-bit from their summer intern. Check out how you can modify ANY website in FireFox or Internet Explorer. It is so simple it might blow your mind!

• Step 1: go to a website you would like to mess around in

• Step 2: in the address paste this line

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=’true‘; document.designMode=’on’; void 0

• Step 3: highlight and play with the page as if you were in Microsoft word.

Check out their changes to AskTheAdmin below:

Lets zoom in and check out their changes to AskTheAdmin…

I then went berserk modifying sites… Taking screen shots of modified websites and sending them along. Great tip Jay! Did you guys know about this?

_TheEditCrazyAdmiN_

Amazon is Down! - No redundancy while the shopping giant suffers a major outage

That’s right kiddies!

Ask The Admin brought it to you first. Don’t go knocking on Amazon’s door today. Nobody will answer.

Could it be that the Shopping GIANT of the net doesn’t even have server redundancy worked out right for itself?

Anybody out there know anything about this? Doesn’t Amazon offer hosting services as well?
Hit us in the comments people. Any speculations? DOS Attack?
You tell us…

Hit the comments, aaaaaaand begin!

(Edit they are back up at 3:05pm… Maybe all the Admin’s were out to lunch? Almost an hour down that has to cost some serious moolah!)

(Double Edit: 3:14 back down again…)

3:32 When you can get to the site we have a pretty little note posted…

And now Rumors are flying that it is PS3 related here and here… Anyone?

C64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on)

Make Outlook your biznatch using batch files and customized rules.

I have recently fallen in love with having outlook run batch files -depending on what an email from me to me says.

They say necessity is the mother of all inventions and that is certainly true when it comes to scripting. I have been using a WM 6 device with no push email support and popping a pop3 account on the run.

I make sure to offline my outlook before leaving my office. Too Bad The Admin has a horrible short term memory - I would often forget and this would lead to missed messages and angry people in need of support cursing my name.

Now we couldn’t have that, so I started looking for an app that would offline outlook for me as I locked my machine. That didn’t happen… Not even close.

So I looked into a batch file to shutdown outlook also no go. so I said fuck it and used pskill in a script to terminate the process called outlook as seen here:

taskkill /F /im outlook.exe

Next I went into outlook and created a new rule from scratch. When new messages arrive from a specific account, from specific sender and with the specific subject shutdownoutlook.

Now when I send a email to myself and outlook is open it will process the message see who it is from check the subject and run my script.

Bingo. Emails flowing into my handheld again. so I can do this on the fly. since then I created scripts for restarting my PC, IIS and other apps.

What do you script? Do you automate on a day to day basis?

Anyone know how to make a script run on lock workstation?

DONT BE SHY!! Comment Young Admins!

_TheScriptin’AdmiN_

Back From AtA’s Archives!

Use a free Exchange server to sync up your calendar with one person and task list with another.

Hi boys and girls,

Do you remember when Ask The Admin covered a very interesting topic of Free Exchange services? For those who don’t, you can look here, here and sometimes here.

In a nutshell, this article talked about how me and my fiance’ had to plan our wedding and had tons of appointments flying in from both directions.

In order to get our two phones talking to one another and playing nicely, I used a free Exchange hosting service called www.Mail2Web.com to enable my WinMo PDA and my fiance’s Blackjack to sync calendars every 10 minutes logging into the service through ActiveSync, as if they are the same phone. As a result, both phones would have the same calendar information, and keep it that way every ten minutes.

I’ve had this system going for some time now, and it’s been working just fine. I haven’t even had to login to the control panel for anything!While figuring out this howto, I noticed in my own phone that WinMo gives you 4 categories of info items to sync, (as illustrated by the image so cleverly placed on the top of this blog) - Contacts, Calendar, Email, and Tasks. I realized that my fiance’s BlackJack also had the choice of 4 different points of info to sync. This meant that every WinMo device can choose which information to sync with an ActiveSync Server Source and more importantly, which information NOT to sync with an Exchange Server. So we’ve established that my fiance’s BlackJack and my ATT 8525/Hermes were acting as if they had the same calendar - consider them synced.

So this was a real world problem solved by the fact that 2 people have phones with WinMo and Activesync, and the availability of a free exchange service @ www.Mail2Web.com.
Now onto the next real-world problem: The Admin and I have a lot of tasks involved with keeping our beloved website up and running, current and fresh. Throughout the months tasks have come and gone, but certain tasks fell through the sieve and got replaced by more current, more urgent tasks that took precedence at the time. So basically tasks were getting lost. Since neither of us used the built in Tasks application in WinMo, this presented the perfect opportunity to put my theory to the test.

I know that I already have 2 people logging into MY Mail2Web account to sync calendars. But what would be wrong with 3 people logging into that same account - except that my Fiance’ will only sync Calendar information, and The Admin will only sync Tasks information (and NOBODY syncs Contact information).

So I had the The Admin log into my Mail2Web account through his ActiveSync Server Connection and sync only Tasks, and I had my own phone begin to sync Tasks with the same service it was already syncing to for Calendar information, which coincidentally my Fiance’s phone was simultaneously syncing Calendar information with as well.

Problem solved:
Me and the Admin with synced Tasklist,
Me and the Fiance with synced Calendar.
Free.
Automatic.
Just the way we like it.

AskTheAdmin.com.
Free Tech Support for the Masses.

Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on.)