Posts from 2009

BackInfo over BGInfo for Your Servers Wallpaper

Richard Green on

I see a lot of posts about BGInfo from SysInternals and using it on your servers to make them easily identifiable.

Although BGInfo can show you a wealth of information, it’s not the most beautiful of wallpapers, and yes I know you can spend a day or two using the GUI tool to customize the way it looks, but it’s just too much effort for something that is supposed to just be telling you what server you are logged on to.

For this reason, I always use BackInfo on any server I touch. BackInfo came out of the Resource Kit Tools for either Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003, I can’t remember which. For this, you get two files: backinfo.exe and backinfo.ini.

For the simplest installation running out of the box, do the following:

  1. Copy the two files to inDir/li>
  2. Open a Command Prompt
  3. Type inDir0ackinfo.exe to launch it for the first time
  4. Type reg add HKLMSOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun /v BackInfo /t REG_SZ /d inDirbackinfo.exe to add BackInnfo to the registry so that it runs for everyone at logon.

A nice idea for someone wanting to enforce this background across a corporate environment would be to create a logon script in a Group Policy Object at the parent OU which holds all your servers. In the logon script, push the two files and the registry setting down to the servers. Then, just as the little cherry on top, to stop people trying to get away from BackInfo, you could assign a User Configuration policy which enforces the background wallpaper as backinfo.bmp, which is the file produced by BackInfo.

If you like to see other information, you want to change the font or anything like that, you can just edit the backinfo.ini file you copied over to do all sorts of things. The file is really well commented which makes it easy to do also.

Still Ugly, but Improving

Richard Green on

So if you’ve been looking over at the Baby-Green Wedding website, you’ll see that nothing much has changed on the design front, and that it’s just content missing now.

Well that’s because I’m pretty much settled and finished on the design over there, but the issue now is bringing that over to the blog and the forum. Unless your reading this over RSS, you’ll see that the blog looks partly like the Wedding site now – The background, font and some elements of the design are getting there, but these theme based content driven sites like the blog and forum are hard to reverse engineer, so give me time.

I guess it’s times like these that it pays to use RSS.

Windows 7 Wallpaper Pack

Richard Green on

One of the RSS feeds I read regularly, Redmond Pie posted this over the weekend: It’s a pack of Windows 7 coloured wallpapers.

Each colour comes in two flavours – With or without the Windows Seven title and there is five colours to choose from.

Just dump them in the %SystemRoot%WebWallpapers directory and your good to go.

Grab the download from my Windows Live SkyDrive account below.

The Change The Blog

Richard Green on

In line with the changes to the design of the blog, I’m going to be making some other changes.

I’ve never used Categories properly. This is because I was using this WordPress installation as a MUI even though it was the standard installation.

As of today there will be a Category called Personal and anything by Nicky, myself relating to family or anyone else family oriented will go in the Family Category.

I will be creating a load of categories over the coming days and weeks to accommodate my posting habits and over time, re-organising my posts into them.

The net result will be a better and more effective experience using WordPress. This, coupled with the recent Permalink structure change on the blog giving it nicer URLs will also help.

Finally, I’m going to be changing the name of the blog.
As the only person to use it is me and as I mostly talk about technology related stuff these days, here’s the new name:

Baby-Green Blog :: The Mostly Technological Ramblings of Richard Green

It is a little bit of a mouthful, however it will better suit the topic of the site and will hopefully help improve the SEO of the blog.

UPDATE: Actually thinking about this, I’m going to stick with the categories, but instead use them for authoring, so whereas my posts are currently split into Richard for personal and Technology for my drivelling posts, everything for me will be under Richard now. This makes more sense based on how effectively I’m tagging my posts.

My Eye’s Hurt – The Blog

Richard Green on

So to anyone trying to look at the blog at the moment, you may be thinking to yourself, oh dear god my eyes hurt.

Well yeah, I’m sorry about that one.

As I said in a previous entry a few days back, I’m in the midst of redesigning everything all spawned from the Baby-Green Wedding mini-site, and due to it’s fair simplicity compared to the forum and the main site, the blog was the next victim.

Over the coming days, I will be chopping and changing between my development theme and layout and the current theme and layout to compare and trial my work in progress theme to make sure it makes the other sites perfectly.

On the bright side, Baby-Green will be better soon.

Domain Problems in Windows 7 RC1

Richard Green on

So it seems there are some problems with Domain Membership in Windows 7.

I formatted, installed and joined a Windows 7 RC1 x86 machine at home to the domain at home over the weekend, and me being me, I have quite a lot of GPO’s that apply.

After joining the clients to the domain, if you enter the username and password to logon, once the logon process begins, an error is shown that explorer.exe cannot start. There is a thread running on the TechNet forums for this issue.

Some of the posts on the TechNet forums seem to suggest the Restricted Groups component is at fault here, when trying to control the Administrators groups members on the client, however I don’t believe this is the issue.

For the client in question, I added a new OU called WindowsSeven and moved the client to this OU after setting the Block Policy Inheritance setting. After doing this the client logged in ok. After this I wanted to get the AV software deployed to the client, so I linked my software deployment GPO’s to the new OU, and at reboot the explorer.exe error returned.

I’ve since moved the client back down to Vista, but I will be building a Windows 7 VM to play with which policies may be causing the issues – Keeping you posted as always.

Update on Windows SideShow in Windows 7 RC

Richard Green on

So as I said earlier today, I emailed the Windows SideShow team for information about what’s going on in Windows 7, and here’s the response I got:

Richard,

Post-beta, we made a change to help reduce clutter in Control Panel and improve the user experience by only showing items that were relevant to the user’s current configuration.  Because Windows SideShow is a hardware dependent feature, we felt it was best to only show it when appropriate hardware was installed on the PC (other Control Panels behave similarly).  If you went to the SideShow control panel in the beta build, you’ll notice there’s really not much you can actually do there without a device installed.

Rest assured, Windows SideShow is still there!  As soon as you connect up a SideShow-compatible device (such as our latest Device Simulator) the control panel will go back to where it belongs.

I was sceptical at first because my device (HTC Touch HD) was paired with the PC running 7, however it was showing no Windows SideShow service available in the Bluetooth properties.

Read more…

Windows 7 Release Candidate

Richard Green on

So I upgraded last night to the RC of Windows 7.

I took longer than the previous builds to upgrade but that’s possibly because I had the files from ISO on the HDD I was upgrading. It wasn’t my fault I needed to change the MinBuild string to let me upgrade from 7068 though.

So first impressions? Not really any difference from the 7068 build with the exception of the changed desktop version printout. SideShow still seems to be missing, and I’ve emailed the SideShow team to ask them about this, so hopefully I get a positive response back like it will be back in the RTM build.

Deploying 64-bit with WDS

Richard Green on

So as you probably guessed by my last couple of blogs, I’ve been hacking around with WDS, and there is something weird I’ve noticed.

I have a VMware ESXi virtual machine which is running on a 64-bit box with the VM configuration set to Vista 64-bit, however when I boot the VM into network boot mode, I only see the 32-bit images? How so?

I checked my WDS server and sure enough I have my 32-bit and 64-bit images all their ready to rock, but nothing.

I did a bit of a search and discovered this one. By default it seems that WDS does not allow the client to determine it’s processor architecture and will always dish out a 32-bit image.

Running the following command however will allow the client to determine the architecture and hence offer up the 64-bit images. I haven’t tested this yet but will do soon enough.

wdsutil /set-server /architecturediscovery:yes