Tutorials – Darwin Mach

By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged access, denied, event 1521, microsoft, path, profiles, roaming, slash, trailing, vista, windows, windows 7, windows xpwith 1 Comment

Roaming Profiles: From Windows XP to Vista / Windows 7

Quick, short post today, but this will probably save you a lot of time searching for a pretty much non-existent answer to a new “feature” introduced in roaming profiles for Windows Vista and Windows 7. It cost me an hour to figure this out. Hopefully you’ll see this and solve the issue in a jiffy…

SCENARIO:
You join your brand new Vista or Win7 machines to a your domain and then try logging in with a roaming user account and get a popup notification error saying that Windows has logged you in with a temporary profile. You look in the event viewer and see the following:

All the permissions are set correctly for the share and folders for the roaming profile and the user can create files in the roaming profile folder, but the stupid “Access Denied” error message is still there.

SOLUTION:
Your roaming profile path MUST have a trailing slash at the end now… Likewise:

What the hell, Microsoft? All along you’re lax (*nix had this enforced all along) and now you change it. At least let us know? Please and thank you…

On a slightly different note, I also suggest that you set the following Group Policies to make your sysadmin life easier:
Computer Config\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\Logon --> Always wait for network at computer startup and logon [Enabled] Computer Config\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles --> Add the Administrators security group to the roaming user profile share [Enabled] Computer Config\Policies\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles --> Wait for remote user profile --> [Enabled]

As usual, cheers.

By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged BIOS, dell, M6400, memory, memtest86+, on, POST, power, precision, RAM, self, testwith 2 Comments

Fix that slow BIOS Power-On-Self-Test! (Dell Laptops)

I installed 16GB of ram into my Precision M6400 the other day and it things ran perfectly fine, until I had to force an ACPI shutdown by holding the power button.

When I turned it back on, the progress bar on the BIOS’s POST (power on self test) screen (big dell logo) got stuck at about 80% and started crawling for about 15 minutes before it moved on with the boot process. In my case, it was to ask for a biometric verification. But since it took so long to start up, I went to go do something else. By the time I got back, the laptop had turned itself off again because no credentials were provided to continue the boot process. So I turned it on again and had to wait out the full 15 minutes.

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By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged answering, delay, google, mobile, not, phone, voice, voicemailwith 2 Comments

Fix Your Google Voice Voicemail

I ran into a problem recently with my Google Voice’s voicemail – it no longer picked up my missed calls! Instead, it redirected to one of my other phone’s voicemail.

Frustrated with this new phenomenon, I went searching for a solution, but again, didn’t find a clear answer. So I tried reducing the voicemail delay on my mobile phone (which forwards calls to GV), hoping it would pick up the call before my other phones.

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By Darwin Mach on News, Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged barryware, cfe, cisco, dd-wrt, e2000, e3000, firmware, linksys, LOM, router, upgradewith 31 Comments

Upgrade Your Linksys Router, Literally!

Cisco-Linksys decided to release new routers for their home routers: the “Valet” series and the “E” series. After doing some research, they’re actually just a re-branding of the older models. The only difference is that the “E” series now have double the amount of NVRAM available. In this article, we’ll be looking at the new E2000 and E3000 routers.

The E2000 is actually the WRT320N with a working reset button and E3000 is the new WRT610N v2. But that doesn’t that mean you have to ditch your current router if you own one of these already, especially just to get the extra 32k of NVRAM. You can actually update the CFE of the older model and transform your WRT320N or WRT610N v2 into the E2000 or E3000 respectively. The CFE is basically the BIOS of the router.

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By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged acrobat, adobe, deploy, install, installer, integrated, msi, msp, patch, professional, slipstream, windowswith 6 Comments

“Slipstream” Adobe Acrobat Pro Updates

Seems like one of those really annoying things out there is deploying an installation of Adobe Acrobat Pro with all (or most) of the updates at once. Of course, this pertains to the Windows version. After doing some intense research and looking through the bits and pieces if suggestions that are out there, I found a much easier way to integrate all the updates into one package.

This one is tricky, you can’t just use the traditional method of running msiexec with the /p parameter and patch over the MSI. What makes it worse is that certain updates can’t be slip streamed or they will prevent future updates from being applied. One can only imagine the headaches that can come out of trying to deploy this without having to install the numerous patches after.

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