How Long do you Try Repairing Before Reformatting?
As a small-time computer consultant I've dealt with dozens of customers who bring me computers loaded with viruses and spyware. I'm of the school of thought that a reformat is never neccessary, that--given enough work--any infestation can be overcome. But there is a point of diminishing returns, and I'd like to know where others think that point lies.
I've arbitrarily decided that at my current rates it's no longer worth my customer's hard-earned money to try and root out an infestation beyond two hours of labor. After that I suggest a reformat. Where do you draw the line?
Enabling Network Discovery on Vista Without Windows Server 2008
This problem has been making my life a living hell since we deployed Windows Vista to a handful of workstations several months ago. According to Microsoft, "Network discovery is a network setting that affects whether your computer can see (find) other computers and devices on the network and whether other computers on the network can see your computer." What this means to a network administrator is that, even with correct firewall rules in place, communication between your Vista workstations and 2000/2003/XP workstations and servers will basically cease to function. Apparently Windows Server 2008 has a GPO policy that resolves this, but the fact that it hasn't been released to the public yet tends to keep up from upgrading. In the meantime you can solve this problem by applying a couple of registry entries to your workstations.
[Update]: For those of you fortunate enough to be using Server 2008, check out this page over at the MSDN Blogs about turning on Network Discovery via Server 2008 Group Policy.
How To Inject Text-Mode Drivers into a Lite-Touch Windows XP Installation
I'm sure someone else has run into this problem: while using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (formerly known as Business Deployment Desktop) to deploy Windows XP, everything seems to be working just fine until Windows PE finishes it's portion of the setup wherein it copies the Windows XP setup files to your hard drive; then when the XP text-mode setup begins, it fails to recognize the drive. This most commonly occurs on systems with SATA drives or a RAID configuration. The solution is to load the text-mode drivers for the device as you would during an individual install of the operating system. You might be thrown off by the fact that the text-mode setup started by the Deployment Toolkit never prompts for additional drivers. How do you get around this? Integrate the drivers directly into your operating system source using a tool called nLite.
Troubleshooting PostgreSQL Connection Problems
I've been using PostgreSQL for years as the back-end database for my company's intranet, and though I haven't had to reinstall it once in the past five years on the production server, I inevitably need to reinstall it on my development workstation at least once or twice a year. Of course when the time comes for a reinstall, the steps I've taken to make it work have been completely forgotten. Performing a basic install of PostgreSQL which communicates only over the loopback interface (127.0.0.1) is simple, and so I won't explain that here. Because the platform's configuration is spread across several files, network configuration can get a bit confusing. This article will explain how to open up PostgreSQL to communicate with other computers on your network.
Adding Drivers to a BDD LiteTouch Image
Since Vista's release Microsoft has provided a variety of tools for deploying their operating systems. One such tool is Business Deployment Desktop which Microsoft describes as "the best-practice set of comprehensive guidance and tools from Microsoft to optimally deploy Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system." Though BDD certainly makes OS and application deployment to a variety of hardware platforms simpler than ghosting, eventually you'll run into a problem: some critical hardware may not be natively supported by WinPE, the preinstallation environment used to load the OS onto a new system. This article will explain how to inject LAN drivers into WinPE, allowing you to deploy installations to a larger variety of hardware.
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