PutrNrd

When installing Windows 7, the administrator account is disabled by default.  This is a problem if you are using VMware to install the operating system because the default user account when installing a virtual machine with Windows is “Administrator.”  If you choose this rather than a different account, after the install you will be unable to log in for the first time to Windows.

The solution is to boot in Safe Mode (pressing F8 at boot up) as Administrator then re-enable the account.Hat tip to the HowtoGeek for the solution.

Here’s a video screenshot I took of the process.

NOTE: The administrator account is disabled for security reasons, it is advised that you disable it again after you create a normal account for the system or simply create a new user when booted into Safe Mode instead of enabling the administrator.  For anything that needs administrative rights with the administrator account disabled, right click the application and say “run as administrator”.

File menus still available in Windows Vista/7.  You can change the folder options to get the file menus back in Windows Explorer under Vista/7 but today I accidently found out you can also simply press the ALT key to display the menus, yay!

Still no way to turn them on in Office 2007 that I can find though, bother.

If you use virtual machines on a daily basis like I do, hopefully you have come to build a library of ISO image on your system to be used by virtual machines instead of physical CDs for OS installations and such.  It’s so much easier to simply click on the CD I want rather than trying to find it in my cluttered office.  The problem comes when I need to install some software on my host computer (think MS Office).  Luckily there are nifty little tools to tell your OS to use that saved ISO file rather than looking for the physical CD.  If you are using Windows the one I use is Virtual CloneDrive.

If you’re using Mac OSX of course, the ability to do this is already part of the operating system, you just have to double click the ISO file and it will mount to your file system.  In Linux just use your mount command to do the same thing. 

Extending my last discussion of NTFS support for Linux, attaching NTFS to Mac OSX machines can be a headache as well!  While Mac OSX does include support to read from NTFS volumes, no such luck on writing to them.

Like most Linux apps, ntfs-3g can also be ported to Mac OSX.  And lucky for us there’s already a pre-built installer too for Mac OSX (yea!).  You can find it here (http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/).

WARNING!  When I installed this there was an NTFS formatted flash drive in my Mac Pro which got hosed (technical term) after the install.  The contents of the disk were not even viewable on Windows systems (booooo!).  Time to run some forensics on it to see if I can recover any of the data.

That being said, ntfs-3g worked just as advertised (apart from losing my flash data).  It overrides the Mac OSX NTFS support mechanism for its own.  The app places a new item to your System Preferences from which you can change settings, disable it in favor of the native NTFS support (read only), or uninstall it.

Why not simply format my disks in a FAT format you say?  Minimum file size of course, we can only go to 4 gig with FAT.  My needs for more stem from the use of large files created by virtual machines.

Brian Pence, Architect Evangelist from Microsoft, gave a presentation at school this week and inspired me to start a blog.  As I work through preparing to demonstrating technologies for students in my classes, it often requires lots of digging/configuring on my part to get things to work properly.  It involves testing different technologies, integrating them together, etc.  So this blog will spell out the things I come across as I prep for class or simply while poke at new technologies.  Hopefully it will save some pain of other IT professionals/students/teachers who are trying to solve the same problems as myself.

On the left there is a link where you can find pdf files of the slides I use when teaching that might be of use to some folks.

Likely technologies covered in the blog:

Microsoft Windows – Server 2008, Vista, Windows 7, IIS, PowerShell, Server Core, Active Directory, GPO, Exchange, Remote Desktop

Linux – CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, bash, Samba, OpenLDAP, Apache

Macintosh OS X

Virtualization –  VMware (Workstation, Server, ESX, ESXi, Fusion), HyperV, VirtualPC, VirtualBox, Parallels

Security/Forensics – Helix, Coroner’s Toolkit, Autopsy, Foremost, NAP/NAC, ISAData Center Operations – EMC