Driver Backup

If you have ever had to reload a Windows system and dreaded looking for CD's or figuring out what drivers to use, then this is the program for you!

DriverBackup! backs up all of your drivers and gives you a nice .bat file to run to install everything when you reinstall is complete. Haven't tried it yet but next chance I get I will definitely be using this. Oh and it's FREE.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

Came across another tool that looks promising.

http://www.slimdrivers.com/

VNC Server for CE 5.0 and up

If you have ever needed a VNC server on a CE 5 or greater device then efonvnc is for you. It's a basic VNC server with a few basic functions. It has worked well for me and it's free!

http://sourceforge.net/projects/efonvnc/

Fix WinXP Explorer settings not being saved

Today I came across a problem where the users explorer settings were not being saved on reboot. Settings like Screen resolution, monitor setup, and icon placement. I first made sure he wasn't using a temporary profile. Then I deleted the following registry keys:

HKCU_ software\microsoft\windows\shellnoroam\bagmru

And

HKCU _software\microsoft\windows\shellnoroam\bags

That will force windows to recreate them and should fix any corruption that would have been causing this problem. It would be smart to make sure that the local user has read/write access to those registry keys, but you will find that out when you try to delete the keys :)

Source:
http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/windows-xp-support/10283-windows-explorer-settings-not-being-saved.html

Use any webpage as your screen saver FREE

Looking for free screen savers is a virtual !MINE*FIELD@
Screen Saver sites in general tend to be full of "free" (Shareware != free) and spyware laden screen savers for download. So when I started looking for a free screen saver that would display a webpage, I cringed a little. I did some Google searching and found someone posted the following site on Digg (Yes it is useful once in awhile). This screen saver is FREE and as far as I can tell doesn't include any spyware. I haven't fully tested it, but it seems like a nice simple screen saver that allows you to display any website or anything that can be displayed in IE. Check it out and let me know what you think.

HTML Screensaver:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/djmclean/htmlscreensaver.html

Side note: I wanted to display a nice full screen weather map while in screen saver mode. http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/

Boot to any device even if the BIOS doesn't like it

PLoP is a boot manager that can be installed or booted to via just about any boot device, and allows you in turn to boot from any other boot device.

What does that do for you?
Well you can use a boot floppy with PLoP to boot to a USB on an old computer that normal can't boot to USB. You can also boot PLoP off a CD or install it as a boot menu for windows or linux.

It might come in useful if you are wanting to try out the new chrome OS on USB, or maybe just trying to boot from CD on an old computer that can only boot from floppy.


http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Thanks Steve for finding this and sending it on!

Lots of Logs

Linux/Debian:

This entry is one of those notes I talked about in my intro.

I was trying to forward my logs from a firewall that I setup using IPTables to a splunk server, and I ended up learning a good bit about the logging system. I'm sure I have not done things in the most efficient manner but for my purposes it worked well.

First I started logging some things using IPTables. I logged at the info level. As soon as I restarted the firewall the log messages started flooding my console. I logged in with putty and continued from there.

First to forward the logs I edited /etc/syslog.conf
I added:
kern.* @192.168.1.5 (Replace IPAddress with that of the server you are forwarding to)

This will forward all alerts coming from the kernal. You could be much more specific or do a *.* to forward EVERYTHING. See man syslog.conf for more information.

Next I restarted sysklogd:
/etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

That did it. The logs were forwarding just fine to the splunk server.

At this point I was getting all of my logs from the firewall showing up on my console, which made the console basically useless. First I checked my syslog.conf to see if there was an entry that was sending those logs to the console, but there weren't any. So I did some digging and found a few sites that talked about printk. It seems that printk controls what gets sent to your console along with any entries in syslog.conf that may point to your console.

So to fix it I typed:
echo "4 1 1 7" > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

That fixed the info level logs showing up on my console and to fix it for future reboots I edited /etc/sysctl.conf and added:
kernel.printk = 4 4 1 7

I then restarted sysklogd again:
/etc/init.d/sysklogd restart

A strange thing happened though. The alerts weren't showing up on the console or in the log files. I messed around for quite a while and finally fixed the problem by restarting klogd:
/etc/init.d/klogd restart

Update: It looks like depending on the version of klogd, and some other things I'm not yet aware of, when you restart klogd it might reset printk = 7 1 1 7 (Happened on one server but not the other). To fix this run "/etc/init.d/klogd stop" then run "/sbin/klogd -c 4" then run "/etc/init.d/klogd start"

That fixed things. Everything seems to work well now. Check out these web sites for further information and reference.

Information about changing printk
http://old.nabble.com/Suppressing-kernel-%27printk%27s.-td15280888.html

More information about printk
http://www.de-brauwer.be/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=printk

Great information about IPTables
http://www.faqs.org/docs/iptables

Edit PDF files using Open Source tools.

I recently found out that OpenOffice 3.0 has a PDF Import Extension that will allow a user to import a PDF and possibly edit it. It depends on how the original document was created but it may be of use if you need to edit a PDF document.

After downloading the Extension open OpenOffice, go to Tools, and select Extension Manager. Add the extension you downloaded earlier. Once you have installed the extension, you can open the pdf file using file open. Make sure you change the file type to PDF first. You can open the document in either Draw (The default) or Impress. Once you are done editing the document can be exported back out as a PDF.

PDF Import Extension:
http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/pdf-import-apache-openoffice (updated)

OpenOffice:
http://www.openoffice.org/

OpenOffice Portable (So you don't have to install anything)
http://download.cnet.com/OpenOffice-org-Portable/3000-2064_4-10526815.html