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I’ve broken down the installation of Dasylab into the following steps, all of which should exist in the non-existent Troubleshooting section of the Dasylab manual.

1. Install the software accepting all defaults on Windows 2000 SP3.
2. Reboot after the installation and enter the BIOS. Make sure the parallel port is in normal mode and not bi-directional or ECP.
3. Create a text file in C:\WINNT named STI_DRV.INI. Put the following lines in it:

[STIDRV]
MIT=548
UseECP=0

4. Enter the Control Panel > System > Device Manager. Inspect the parallel port’s Port Settings tab and select “Use any interrupt”.
5. Restart the machine.
6. Start the Dasylab software with the data shuttle attached to the parallel port.
7. Clicki on Experment > Select Driver and click on the Data Shuttle driver and OK.
8. Restart the software and begin the experiment.

Dudes and dudettes, XnView is the rockin-est freeware image converter and manipulator for the Windows platform (and all your favorite unices sans MacOSX). Its like Graphic Converter on the Mac, except free. It does resizing, cropping and batch jobs too. Someone threw some SciTex (.ch) files my way today and requested that they be able to convert them themselves. XnView ate them up and spit them out, and required all of two minutes to explain to the user how to do it themselves. Rock!

Nuno Pereira asked the question; Andrew Bartlett answered with the response I didn’t want to hear. Kerberos authentication has yet to be implemented in Samba, alpha-code or otherwise. I so wanted to authenticate my users in a lab environment to a central Samba fileserver. Time to test out that bleeding-edge AD support.

For UNIX users, Mac OS X often needs to be shaped and molded, and yes, sometimes beaten into submission.

Recently I needed to associate .fig files with the application xfig and I came to the task ready to throw some punches. Fortunately there are many innovative tinkerers in the nexus between Mac and UNIX, and associating files with X11 apps turned out to be cake. First, grab a copy of DropScript…
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Fastpush is how I plan to push VNC server software onto my clients. I’ve attempted a test case and have a few notes from my trial run below. This completes one-half of my remote administration solution for Windows; if I can somehow fashion a similar script for OpenSSH for Windows, I’ll be all set.

1. Download the Fastpush zip file and extract it.
2. Download vncenc.exe from the downloads section.
3. Generate a password for VNC by running “vncenc.exe desired_password > machine.ini” from a DOS command line.
4. Move the file machine.ini to the “common” directory within the extracted Fastpush directory.
5. Edit the vnc.cmd file and change the variables to your liking.
6. Run “vnc desired_host /user username password” to begin the install on the desired host machine.
7. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If you have two licensees and an identical product between them, why should you ever be forced to do a reinstall just to associate it with a new owner? This tool looks like one that would get you around just such a situation. It allows you to change the Windows Product Key and ownership information on multiple Windows machines over a network.

Technically I’m on vacation until Thursday, but I’ve been a bit of a work-a-holic lately. Its really hard to force yourself to take a needed respite when you are required to be so engrossed most of your waking hours. Just this weekend I was at a friend’s barbeque and couldn’t stop tinkering with her laptop; I had to be made aware of what I was doing so I could consciously fight it. Its kind of like getting that adrenaline rush after running to the top of a hill and then running out of incline to use it on.

This latest find makes me very happy though. Its relatively simple, but then again, my tech knowledge is spotty and sometimes the easy things slip through the cracks. I’m sick of managing user’s passwords locally, so I figured its time to take advantage of the University’s Kerberos server. The configuration settings are very simple for Red Hat Linux, especially if you use the authconfig command. I’ll write up some instructions for Mac later on as that requires some text file editing. Works like a charm for authentication, and I can say goodbye to most of my locally stored passwords AND passwords sent over the network without running a kerb server of my own.

I have two security-related questions before endorsing this wholesale though. Namely, if an account doesn’t exist locally is that enough of an access control mechanism to disallow users I don’t want logging into a kerb’ed system, and will kerb systems accept the password that root uses on the kerberos server itself. Hopefully I’ll have the answers once I get around to the Mac writeup.

[addendum]

In the event that that screencapture image gets lost in the shuffle, the settings are:

REALM: PRINCETON.EDU
KDC: kerberos.princeton.edu
Admin Server: kprime.princeton.edu