MH Consulting

Starting with Firefox 13 when you click a new tab it will display your favorite and most-visited websites. This give you an easy and quick way to access your favorite websites. On they other hand some people don’t like the new tab feature in Firefox and I have been asked by a few people if there is a way to disable it. Luckily there is an easy and permanent way to change it back and make it behave as it did before. All you have to do is change one setting in the Firefox about:config page.

Here are the steps:

1. In the address bar in Firefox type: about:config
2. Search for: browser.newtab.url
3. Change the value to: about:blank or about:home

Note: The about:home will open your home page when you open a new tab and about:blank will open a blank page when open a new tab.

If you later decide you would like go use the “favorite and most-visited websites” tab again just go back and reset the value back to: about:newtab

Now that most computers are being shipped without any CD/DVD drive it can be hard to reinstall Windows. You have few options, get a USB DVD drive, install from a network or make an installation USB drive. Most of use by now have a plethora of extra USB drives because we keep buying larger and larger ones. All you need for this is a 4 GB USB drive. At the time of writing this you can pick one up for about $10 if you for some reason don’t have one. This tutorial will explain how to make your USB drive into a bootable installation drive for Windows 7.

If you have an iso of Windows 7 you should consider using Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool as it does this for you and is very easy to use.

If you don’t have an iso or you just want to do it the old fashion way here is what you need:

• About 30min. to 45min. (this is due to the time it takes to format and copy all the files)
• A computer running Windows 7
• Windows 7 DVD and a DVD drive in your computer to read it
• Administrative Rights on your computer
• 4GB or larger USB drive

First get your USB drive and stick it in the computer. I am using a 4GB ScanDisk in this example.

Open command prompt with elevated privileges
To do this click your start/windows button and type: cmd
Right click command prompt and select “Run as Administrator”

In command prompt type: diskpart

Now type: list disk
This will show you all the disks on your computer. One will be your computer’s hard drive and one will be your USB drive. You may have more if you have more hard drives or other USB drives on your computer.

This next part is extremely important. Look for your USB Drive and make sure it is the correct drive. If you choose the wrong disk you will delete everything on it.
In the example above I have shown you see I have one disk that has 298GB and one that has 3827MB. The smaller one (3827MB) is my USB drive and the larger 298GB is my hard drive. Make note which disk your USB drive is you will need it in the next steps.

In this step make sure you use the disk number that corresponds to your USB drive otherwise you might wipe out your computer’s hard drive. Please note when you format the drive it may take a while. Mine took about 20min for a 4GB USB2.0 drive.
now in command prompt type: select disk 1 (assuming your USB drive is disk 1)
now in command prompt type: clean
now in command prompt type: create partition primary
now in command prompt type: select partition 1
now in command prompt type: active
now in command prompt type: format fs=ntfs
now in command prompt type: assign
now in command prompt type: exit

If you haven’t already, put your Windows 7 DVD in to your disk drive.
Open “Computer” from the start menu or press the Windows Button and “e” at the same time. Note the drive letter or your DVD drive and the drive letter of your USB drive.
If you look at my example my Windows 7 DVD is in drive G and my USB drive is drive D
It is unlikely your drive letters are the same as mine, in fact it is more likely they are the opposite of mine.

In this step use the drive letters that correspond with your system not mine.
In this next step where it says G you will use the drive letter that corresponds to your DVD drive and where it says D you will use the drive letter for your USB drive.
Back in command prompt type: G:/boot/bootsect.exe /nt60 D:

This last step you have the option to do it via command prompt (Option 2) or using the regular Windows interface (Option 1). Either way this will take a while. On my computer it was about 15min.

Option 1 – Use Windows Interface to copy the contents of the Windows 7 DVD to the USB drive
Open the Windows 7 DVD and open your USB drive. Copy and past all files from the DVD into the USB drive.

Option 2 – Use Command Prompt to copy the contents of the Windows 7 DVD to the USB drive
At this point you should check your drive letters again because your computer may have change the drive letter of your USB drive during the previous steps. In this example Replace the G with the drive letter of your DVD drive with Windows 7 in it. Also replace the D with the drive letter of your USB drive.
To copy using command prompt type: xcopy G:\ D:\ /h/i/c/k/e/r/y

Once the copying is finished you are done. You can put the USB drive in a computer and use it as you would a Windows 7 installation disk. You may have to login to your BIOS to enabling booting to USB drives before you computer will boot to a USB drive.

I decided to compose a list of common Linux commands as an easy way to find them.

Please note depending on the Linux installation you may need to run these with an elevated prevailed mode such as root or sudo.

In Ubuntu prefix these command with sudo to run them with elevated privileges. Example: to shutdown your server type: sudo shutdown -h now

Linux Administration:

• Update Ubuntu: sudo apt-get uupgrade
• Update CentOS/Red Hat: yum update
• Shutdown Ubuntu: sudo shutdown -h now
• Shutdown CentOS/Red Hat: shutdown
• Reboot Ubuntu: sudo shutdown -r now
• Reboot CentOS/Red Hat: shutdown -r now
• View IP Address Configuration: ifconfig

Linux File and Folder Management

• View contents in a directory: ls
• View permissions on all contents in a directory: ls -l
• Make a directory: mkdir DirectoryName
• Delete a directory and all contents: rm -rf /path/to/DirectoryName
• Change directories: cd /path/to/DirectoryName
• to change permissions on a file or directory: chmod

Managing a school can be challenging and you always have to keep up with new security. Students are now stick their cell phone in their bag with the hotspot turned on and then connecting the computers to their hot spot to get to websites like Facebook. There for it is necessary to control which wireless networks students can connect to. There are the more sophisticated ways such as setting up a RADIUS server but in this post I will describe the simplest way of forcing computers to connect to a defined list of wireless SSID’s and pushing them out via a Group Policy object (GPO).

Please note this works with Server 2008 and even Server 2003 if you have the updated version.

Steps to Control Wireless Networks using GPO:

1. Fist put all the wireless computers you want to control into one organizational unit (OU).
2. Now open the Group Policy Management Console.
3. Navigate to the OU that contains the computers you wish to control
4. Either create a new GPO and name it something like Wireless Policies or use a GPO already created for those computers.
5. Edit the GPO and navigate to: Computer Configuration –> Policies –> Windows Settings –> Security Settings –> Wireless Network (IEEE 802.11) Policies
   
6. Right click the policy or in the window and click “Create a New Wireless Network Policy for Windows Vista and Later Releases”. You can also create XP policies but I am only going to go over Windows Vista/7 as you should be using Windows7 by now.
7. Now there are 2 Tabs: General and Network Permissions
8. In the General Tab: Give the policy a name and description
   
9. Do not  add your networks here. This would be for more advanced settings like 802.1X or Microsoft Protected EAP, etc.
10. Now that the policy is named and has a description click on the “Network Permissions” Tab
11. Under the “Network Permissions” Tab click “Add” and type in the SSID of the wireless network you want them to connect to. For network Type choose “Infrastructure” and for Permission choose “Allow”
    
12. Now click ok and place check boxes next to the settings you need. I suggest enabling these settings:
    Prevent Connectoin to ad-hock network
    Prevent connections to infrastructure networks
    Only use Group Policy Profiles for allowed networks
    Don’t allow hosted networks
    *note this settings will block them from connecting to new wireless networks. If there is a wireless network allowed through another GPO you will need to specifically disable that wireless network. To do that use the “Add” button to add the SSID and then choose deny permission to block users from connecting to that wireless network. In the below screen shot it will block users from connecting to the Linksys network while allowing access to the MySSID network. The check boxes this this screen shot keep the user from connecting to new wireless networks.
    
13. Choose Ok and once all the computers update with the new GPO these settings will be applied.

This documents the procedure for performing a password recovery on a Cisco 2950 switch (and probably other models, as well).

1. Unplug the power cable

2. Hold down the mode button while replugging the power cable

3. Type flash_init over the console

4. Type load_helper

5. Type Dir flash :

//make sure to type the semi-colons

6. Type rename flash:config.txt flash:config.old

//the password is contained in the config.txt file

7. Type boot

//this reboots the system

8. Type n to skip the initial setup configuration

9. Type enable

//this takes you to the enable mode

10. Type rename flash:config.old flash:config.txt

11. Save config.txt to system

#copy flash:config.txt system:running-config

12. Enter config mode and change the password

# config t

# no enable secret

//this applies only if the enable secret password was created\

13. Finally, write the changes to memory

# write memory

To reset a forgotten administrator password on a Windows Computer, follow these steps:

1. Boot from a Windows 7 installation CD or other boot disk.
2. Find the drive letter of the partition where Windows is installed. In Vista and Windows XP, it is usually C: in Windows 7 it is D: in most cases because the first partition contains Startup Repair. To find the drive letter, type C: (or D: respectively) and search for the Windows folder. Note that Windows 7 CD usually resides on X:.
3. Type the following command (replace “c:” with the correct drive letter if Windows is not located on C:):
   copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\
   This creates a copy of sethc.exe to restore later.
4. Type this command to replace sethc.exe with cmd.exe:
   copy /y c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
5. Reboot your computer and start the Windows installation where you forgot the administrator password.
6. After you see the logon screen, press the SHIFT key five times.
7. You should see a command prompt where you can enter the following command to reset the Windows password. net user your_user_name new_password
   If you don’t know your user name, just type net user to list the available user names.
8. You can now log on with the new password.

I recommend that you replace sethc.exe with the copy you stored in the root folder of your system drive in step 3. For this, you have to boot up again with Windows PE or RE because you can’t replace system files while the Windows installation is online. Then you have to enter this command:

copy /y c:\sethc.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

I would like to give props to the original author of these steps. You can find his post here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_xp-system/i-lost-my-user-account-and-when-i-rebooted/5e835aed-ae26-488a-970d-d24ea32ec810