Ok I am just going to post the link to my forum post over at my.is

http://my.is/forums/f93/second-time-around-411930/

It is what i am doing with my IS300, nothing special, just stockish

Want to change your Windows 7 Logon Screen? First thing you want to do is find a really cool/fun/neat image, I like this one. After you find one you want, go Start (in this case Windows Logo in the lower left hand corner) and type regedit

Once you are there find the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background

You will have to add the DWORD Value OEMBackground with a value of 1
Be careful not to have any extra spaces if you are cut and pasting OEMBackground to the value name or it wont work

After that, go to start and type C:\Windows\System32\oobe\ and add the folder Info, then inside of Info add the folder Backgrounds

Once you have the backgrounds folder you want to  copy your image there with the name of backgroundDefault and make sure it is a jpg file
Also note, that if the image size is over 256K it wont display

If you did it right, when you lock your workstation (winkey+L) you will see the image

Also there are some other values you can play with, in the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI folder you can add the DWORD value of ButtonSet with a value of 1 or 2
1 = Darker Text Shadows and button colors
2 = No Shadows and no transparent buttons

Sometimes it is easy to actually come up with content, other times not so much. This is one that it took a bit of finding but it was something I got stuck on.

How do you get the Active Directory Schema information without remote desktop/console access. Now there are other ways to do this, but i was looking for a simple console scripted method. NTDSUTIL has the power to do this via a simple script

First an example

C:\Documents and Settings\smcgroarty>ntdsutil
ntdsutil:

Notice that the command prompt, it will continue to change for each section that you are in

ntdsutil: domain management
domain management:
domain management: connection
server connections: connect to server DCSRV1
Binding to DCSRV1…
Connected to DCSRV1using credentials of locally logged in user.
server connections: quit
domain management: select operation target
select operation target: list roles for connected server
Server "DCSRV1" knows about 5 roles
Schema - CN=NTDS Settings,CN=DCSRV2,CN=Servers,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=velcrohurts,DC=com Domain - CN=NTDS Settings,CN=DCSRV2,CN=Servers,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=velcrohurts,DC=com
PDC - CN=NTDS Settings,CN=DCSRV2,CN=Servers,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=velcrohurts,DC=com
RID - CN=NTDS Settings,CN=DCSRV2,CN=Servers,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=velcrohurts,DC=com
Infrastructure - CN=NTDS Settings,CN=DCSRV2,CN=Servers,CN=Sites,CN=Configuration,DC=velcrohurts,DC=com
select operation target:

After you get the values, you need to type quit, for each step.
select operation target: quit
domain management: quit
nntdsutil: quit
C:\Documents and Settings\smcgroarty>

Now to put this in a simple batch file:
ntdsutil domain management connection connect to server DCSRV1 quit select operation target “list roles for connected server” quit quit quit

Thanks the quick and dirty of it, hope someone finds this useful

The kids put me to sleep last night so I didn’t do a post. Lets try this again tonight. I will be posting something when I get home.

Is it Since its just after midnight does this count as the third day still? I am going to say it does count.

Nothing really to talk about tonight, I seem to be in a phone loop with looking for a way to get SSH server on the device. I can do it with Ubuntu, but the point is to get the Android environment loaded and ssh to that so that i can view things like dmesg in full screen. Before I do that I really should choose a different ROM for the phone, the current one I am using is less then spectacular.

Ok now lets write about something useful and handy, like a quick touch on adding SNMP and setting it up in Windows 2008 R2.

In review of this I don't have Windows 2008 R2 at this second so I am going to have to do tomorrow. But after looking for some information on it today I will have to include screen shots, because R2 is different than 2008.

In Closing, Sorry to SlackerPlanet.org because of my code link from the other day.

Second day, second post. This time its for a phone.

I was poking around at the PPCGeeks forums and saw that they have a section for Androidon the HTC Touch Pro 2. Now the thread I started reading explained that it is possible to get an "Almost working” version of Android on the Touch Pro2, but some things didn’t work, such as sound, the camera, mms, and booting off itself. I wasnt really worried about it since i was just going to play with it so I gave it a try. Android 2.1 has come a long way over 1.5 that I tried last. I continued to poke around and saw that there was currently work being done on it with a couple of choices for what type of OS, either the full HTC Hero OS or the full native Android OS like on the Motorola Droid

With trying it I must say that if MMS and the camera worked I would use it full time, it was nice and smooth and almost simple. I was curious to see how to get SSH working on the OS that i now had installed and read that it could be done, but with some mild trickery, so i went to the XDA-Developers forumsand saw this http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=640785
Thats right, they have a port of Ubuntu working on the phone, with SMS and phone support. Now I do not know if this fully works on the CDMA Touch Pro but it is sexy and it is something that has my attention for the moment, so I might post a little bit more about putting it all together once I get it figured out. But I just wanted to share that there is a full linux distro on the mobile phone. Yeah this was a bad write up, so let me practice some more.

Going to try something different here, I notice that I am not paying a lot of attention to my site lately, and there isn’t a good reason not to. So for the next 30 days, until July 8th, I am going to attempt to do a post a day. I am also going to try weekends as well. The reason for this is I have a lot of things that I want to share, and I have been meaning to share from basic tech knowledge and into cars. This will also be an exercise in brushing up on my writing skills, I seem to be lacking a little bit there.

For the first post lets do a scripts to remove all the scheduled tasks on servers. We want to list all the scheduled tasks on a server, ok not a problem if you have one server you can login and view them, or you can list them remotely with

schtasks /query /s ServerName

TaskName                             Next Run Time            Status        
============================================================
FileScript1                                        23:59:00, 1/5/2010       Running        
MyTasksForStuff2                          07:00:00, 1/6/2010       Running       

Now, you want to check the tasks on 15 servers, this gets more cumbersome and a little time consuming. So lets say you have this neat little shell script that helps you loop items so that you can one script multiple times

@echo off

if x==%1x goto MyServers1

if x==%2x goto MyServers2

for /f %%a in (%1) do call %2 %%a

goto end

:MyServers1

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo Run.bat syntax:

echo ---------------

echo.

echo Example:  run.bat list.txt program.cmd

echo.

echo 'list.txt' should contain a list of computers/IPs 

echo (one to each line) to each execute 'program.cmd'

echo.

echo The names of files are not important as long as they 

echo are specified after the run command.

echo.

echo.

echo.

echo.

:end

Save this as run.bat

Next we want to take our 1 line from above and put it into its own bat file with 1 change.

echo “Server Name: %1” 
schtasks /query /s %1

Save that as “ViewTasks.bat”

Next we need to setup a text file that contains all the servers we want to view the scheduled task on.

Server1

Server2

Server3

Now put it all together and you will see your results

run.bat list.txt ViewTakss.bat

"Server Name:" Server1
TaskName                             Next Run Time            Status        
============================================================
FileScript1                                        23:59:00, 1/5/2010       Running        
MyTasksForStuff2                          07:00:00, 1/6/2010       Running       

ServerName: Server2
TaskName                             Next Run Time            Status        
============================================================
FileScript1                                        23:59:00, 1/5/2010       Running        
MyTasksForStuff2                          07:00:00, 1/6/2010       Running       

And you can see your tasks running. Now lets say you want to delete them. Again test with the schtasks command

schtasks /delete  /s ServerName /TN * /f

This will remove the tasks with only a complete as the last line.

So if you save this as “DeleteTasks.bat”

schtasks /delete  /s %1 /TN * /f

You can now run it as a script on all your servers with

run.bat list.txt DeleteTasks.bat

And it will remove all the scheduled tasks from your servers that you have in your list.txt

So lately I have been caught up in personal life as well as started a new job. It has been fun but I haven’t been online very much. Lets see if I can get back into a normal swing of things, but this post is about something else. This post is about a new car that I have.

**** EDIT *****

I totally forgot to mention this, The Shop is

Hall Ass “The Shop”
http://www.hallasstheshop.com
23102 Mariposa Ave
Torrance, CA 90502
ph: 310-325-2921

They are a great shop for custom work, custom builds and general repairs. It is seriously been the only place i have taken my cars.

1 of 32,969

1964 Lincoln Continental
That is how many of these were made, and I happen to get one in January. It was in ok shape.

Yeah, everything is there, mostly, there are a few smaller items missing here and there but it has had a lot put into it, just needs a little more done. I am not taking a whole lot of time to do the work on it, I am only taking about 1 day a month, 12 hours or until the shop kicks me out. At this point I have spent 2 full days working on it, and a couple of random hours here and there when I could.

The first steps were to inventory her and see what she has. I have about 95or so photos of what was there. It turns out most of the chrome is there, along with most of the parts, they were all in the cab. I also found the VIN plate, that I was able to decode.

This tells me the VIN number, but some other random details as well.

• The body code – Lincoln Continental 4 door Sedan
• The factory color – Beige (eww!!)
• The factory interior color – Beige (at least it matched)
• The date of production – May 24th 1964
• Original Shipped to area – Oakland CA

It also tells a couple of other peices of information.

The VIN number also tells me it was a 1964 year model with a MEL 430 engine. Lets start here

Yeah, that is it, the MEL430 boat anchor. Damn I dont like that blue. But its covered in a few years of dust and stuff,but that is the basic motor,rebuilt but never started. Same as the transmission. No fluids in either, no batter, the wires all need to be connected and but they are all there.

But that was the first day, just inventorying parts and getting it ready to roll, not start, but roll as in push this bitch.

The Second Day

The second day I went the shop had pushed the car into the front area because it was now a Current Project instead of a Former Project, so in the sunlight I could get a good over view of things.

Looks like some things are missing. But it is mostly there. So we started by finding out what was needed to make the car a Running Vehicle, yes I do have the carb and it was there but that wasnt my primary, First things first, lets assemble some stuff.

Radiator and A/C Condenser first.

And yes, that is a factory speaker.

I dont have pictures of these parts because they were just simple “lets run to AutoZone and grab them”

• Coil Pack – Delco basic for Ford motors – Gives spark to the engine
• Thermostat – Was in the box of random parts but the gasket wasn’t
• Carburetor Gasket – Had to get so that the carb would mount
• Hose Clamps – those were not with the car, but new hoses were
• Car Cover – the car is outside now

With that list of stuff, Andy and I (mostly Andy) mount the carb, the coolant system together, and while we were thinking of starting the motor, Andy saw an issue.

The power steering pump goes there, I have the power steering pump BUT I do not have any of the mounting hardware or gaskets or supporting pieces to mount it. So that means no firing up of the motor at that point. “You can put the oil in, and watch it drain out from the there”  so no firing it up until i get the gaskets and mounting hardware.

I ordered the stuff for it from Old Lincoln Parts worry about finding the parts on their web site, it isnt the greatest web site, but Call them, they know their stuff. He was able to tell me every step of what i needed to do when i said “MEL 430 Power steering mounting hardware”.

But because the scope of the work is that great we were able to do other things while waiting for the parts. So while talking about what else to work on, the hood was mounted

I got a nice high flow Holley Carb for the car. Holley StreetAvenger 870CFMand its nothing to sneeze at. I had to get a adapter plate to mount it properly because the linkage was not clearing a vacuum outlet. But once I got it on there, I had to double check for clearance issues, and still need to check it correctly. But damn it looks kind of sexy sitting there

And then after getting that all said and done, we called it the end of day 2

The list of things for next time I go will be:

• Clean Prep Paint
  • Power Steering pump after test mounting
  • Harmonic Balancer
  • Upper Radiator Support
  • Pullies (i really dont like this blue)
  • Water reservoir (the beat up looking can on top)
• Found oil pressure sensor location 
• verify all wires are connected to correct locations
• Mount the doors (? maybe)
• Verify cost of disk brake parts
• Find some damn wheels for disk brakes to work

Also, I would like to let everyone know that El Angsto is going to be moving forward with his photography and he has already scheduled the first "Staged” pictures of the car, those pictures will be done after it is running so that we can drive it to a location

Ok it has been a while since my last update, and I dont think it is because I am running out of stuff to talk about. Today lets just do a simple grep trick. Lets grep some stuff out of a maillog 

grep -i rejected /var/log/maillog

 that should give you about 2000 or so returns. But what if you are looking only for rejected messages from yahoo.com? Lets string some grep commands together shall we. 

 grep -r rejected /var/log/maillog | grep -r yahoo.com 

Now we are starting to narrow it down a little bit, we see only messages from yahoo.com, lets see if your email address is actually being rejected now 

grep -r rejected /var/log/maillog | grep -r yahoo.com | grep - r irocksbigtime  

Now you  you should see just your mesages 

 19:24:25 vsmtpin3 postfix/smtpd[28336]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[192.168.1.101]: 504 5.5.2 <GNTDJLCVL>: Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname; from=<irocksbigtime@yahoo.com> to=<XXX@XXXXXX-XXXXXXX.XXO> proto=ESMTP helo=<GNTDJLCVL>

Ok, planning some updates to the site. Getting ride of the twitter feed cause its really messing with my search engine information … weird things that should not be linked to this site. Also I am going to add a blog roll, the site has the hooks for it already, just a matter of linking to a few other sites to share the love.

Also been going more and more to IRC. not a random IRC place but a very specific one, making new friends and I can sometimes be found in #slackstuff channel on irc.liquidbabble.com. There are some really cool and interesting people in that channel. And they are willing to help out with all sorts of linux questions. For a better idea visit slackstuff.com