TalentlessHack.com

Platform diving

Jared — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:25:34 +0000

Having never used Drupal, I’ve often wondered if I made the right choice with WordPress.

5 questions to ask when deciding whether to use Drupal or WordPress

Altiris tools

hack — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:08:48 +0000

Bulk Delete Resources Tool
Warning: This is a dangerous tool. Essentially it runs a SQL query and deletes the results, GUIDs and all, from the Altiris databse.

Mac OS X Management Run Script Tasks
A collection of command line scripts for the Macs

Remote Altiris Agent Diagnostics 2.0 (RAADv2)
Just what it says on the tin

AILA (Altiris IIS Log Analyzer)
Also hosts a few other utilities including a stress tester for Notification Servers and an NSE Event Queue tool

NSAgent_CommsChecker
A tool for the diagnosis of network or agent communication issues

I’ll add more as I find them.

Why would I close that?

hack — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 16:34:42 +0000

I know a lot of folks use the Add-on Bar as a sort of temporary space for using Add-ons but I like mine open more or less permanently. I’ve accidentally closed the bar on more than one occasion and while it’s easy enough to reinstate it from the View > Toolbars menu, I’d just as soon keep it from happening in the first place.

To remove the little “x” that closes the Add-on bar in Mozilla Firefox:

1. Start, Run.

2. Enter %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and click OK

2. Open your profile directory, usually some salted characters followed by .default

3. Create a chrome subdirectory if it doesn’t already exist

4. Inside the chrome folder, create a textfile and name it userChrome.css

5. Edit the file with a notepad application and enter the following:

#addonbar-closebutton { display: none !important; }

6. Save the file and restart Firefox.

Original Add-on Bar

Modified Add-on Bar

Altiris Enterprise notes

hack — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:27:31 +0000

I’ve been trying to find a list of recommended configuration settings for a large scale Altiris deployment but the sheer volume of manuals has been daunting. This is what I’ve managed to glean from the various sources so far. This post will be a work in progress as I find more suggestions and determine whether or not there’s any real benefit to them.

A single Notification Server can support up to 500 Site Servers.
Package Services Replication requires at least one Site Server with Package Services on the same Site as the Notification Server.
Assign Packages to Sites and all Site Servers at that location will get them automatically.
Constrain Secondary Package Servers if bandwidth if a concern so they only retrieve Packages from unconstrained Site Servers.
Task Services running on a desktop OS can support up to 5,000 clients while a server OS can handle up to 10,000 endpoints.
Can “load balance” Task Services with multiple Task Servers at larger sites.
Increase “Task Update Interval” to greater than 10 minutes to reduce the load.
Schedule server-side Tasks to occur off-hours where possible.
Stagger start times on Collection Update schedules by 10 to 15 minutes to avoid concurrency issues.
Leave Full Collection at 1x/day.
Clone the Default policies and split clients among them for more granular control and staggered deployments.
Agent Configuration request intervals should be increased to between 2 and 6 hours.
Delta and Policy change collection update intervals should be between 1 and 3 hours. A good rule of thumb is twice as frequently as Agent Configuration requests.
Enable Power Management Settings for WOL features to reach machines powered off during Maintenance Windows.
Use bandwidth throttling where appropriate.
Set Communication Startup delay to ~1 hour to avoid “morning rushes”.
Set “All Windows Mobile” to communicate every hour, increasing the likelihood that remotely connected users will get Packages & Policies but not to download Packages if available bandwidth is less than 100K.
Set “All Site Servers” policy to throttle by default.
Define Maintenance Windows…there are none by default.
Set up Maintenance Windows for Inventory Collection and set to Low Priority.
Use “Evenly Distribute Sending Inventory over x hours” on the Run Options tab of Advanced Settings.
Use Policies for recurring inventory tasks – they offer more options for systems that are powered off at the scheduled execution times
Review inventory settings – all Inventory Tasks are enabled by default, which can grow the database entry size for each agent by 10 to 20 MB.
Clone Inventory Policies and distribute the targets to spread the timing and load on the server.
Definitive Software Library should be moved off of th Notification Server.
In Patch Management, can enable the option to disable superseded updates.
There’s a server Task that can be run to cleanup Patch Packages.

Fight the power

hack — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:36:09 +0000

Here’s a good tip for Windows 7 laptop and tablet owners who’d like to find ways to extend the battery life on their devices:

1. Open a command prompt as Admin (right click, Run as Administrator)
2. Run powercfg.exe -energy and press Enter. Wait for the trace to complete.
3. Copy C:\Windows\System32\energy-report.html to your Desktop
4. Open the file for hints on how to extend your battery uptime.

PACMan, of a sort

hack — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:50:57 +0000

If you’ve ever had to write a proxy autoconfiguration file, pacparser is a handy way to test which proxy server it returns (or if it returns one at all).

Make a note of it

hack — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 15:40:17 +0000

Despite Google ending development of their handy Google Notebook service almost two years ago, I still use it regularly. Unfortunately, they also ended development of the Google Notebook Firefox Extension that made using the service with Firefox so easy. I’ve grabbed a copy of the XPI installer and modified the versioning so it can still be installed on the latest versions of Firefox. I haven’t tried this with any of the 4.0 builds yet.

Google Notebook Firefox Extension

Elementary, Watson

hack — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:59:58 +0000

WinFE is an interesting project, a WinPE (Preinstalled Environment) build geared specifically towards computer forensics. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Windows Forensic Environment

They’ve also opened a forum (empty at the moment) on the BootLand forums, a great resource in and of themselves for all kinds of boot disk builds.

Never been one to turn down chocolate

Jared — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 04:00:00 +0000

This is an interesting project, basically a version of the apt-get Linux package manager but made for Windows instead. I think these guys may be on to something clever here:

http://chocolatey.org/

At the moment, it’s a downloadable PowerShell script but I’m sure that won’t be the case upon release.