So, you are running SCCM 2003 to deploy your Operating Systems, Software, and patches, etc. Even though you set a Maintenance Window (MW) on a Collection that you are Advertising a Task Sequence (TS) to and the computer fails to re-clone within that MW, you find that when you try to reboot the machine it immediately attempts to re-clone, then there is a nice little dirty workaround.

The reason behind the system re-cloning outside of the MW is something to do with PXE, which at boot the system doesn't know about the MW and hence cannot follow the rules set up. You could set it so that it doesn't boot to PXE, and do it from Windows, but obviously this is not possible on a bare-bones machine with no OS installed.

The dirty workaround

Simply stop the WDSServer service. It's that simple. It won't effect software pushes, only clone pushes.

"But wait," I hear you say, "What about when I want to schedule clone pushes?"

Simples. Create a basic script that you run via Task Scheduler each night prior to your clone pushes that start the service, and another script to stop it when you no longer wish clones to be pushed.

Remember to remove the un-cloned systems from the collection after the scheduled re-clone of course, otherwise when you start up the service for they clones will "possibly" get pushed and ruin a users day.

Keep a copy of the start service script on your Desktop in case you get a clone push request during the day, so you can ensure you can push a clone when requested.

Stop
net stop WDSServer

Start
net start WDSServer

This was another help-myself-and-maybe-help-someone-else-blog-post-of-the-day

Hopefully this will be a new regular posting from myself which will cover all the interesting/funny stuff I have found of late. It could be that this becomes a weekly occurrance, but probably more like monthly. Either way, be sure to keep checking for new posts, others may be posting as well.

Dotcom & Banks

There has been news of late of a New Zealand politician, in fact the front-runner for mayor-ship of one of their cities embroiled in some kind of donation scandal involving Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload, you watch the story from 3News.
Dotcom has produced a song about the donation issue, which can be seen below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CvRSZxqk_I

Kopimist Wedding

The first ever Kopimist wedding took place over the last week or so. If you haven't heard of Kopimism, it's an officially recognised religion in Sweden which enshrines Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V as holy symbols. Congratulations to the happy couple, and the religions first ever wedding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRMPcFexWlk

DK drinking & chatting

Apparently, something was happening the video posted below, I can't really make head nor tail of it, but it sounds very much like a lot of voice chats I have with my friends too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVOhpM679f8

RIP MCA :'(

To end the post on a low note, it should be mentioned that MCA of The Beastie Boys died earlier in the week, it's a very sad event, he was only 47. Democracy Now! did a short tribute to him (below). As did Rockstar Games (includes classic Mr. Magic world premiere of "Hold It Now, Hit It").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTHoQT4s2JU

This blog entry is purely for my own information, it is not intended to teach anyone anything, as this is really simple stuff (even though it took me a while to get the short form version working). If it does help anyone else, well that would be an unexpected bonus (it really is so simple as to be ridiculous though).

Aim: To either delete, move, copy or rename a number of files of the same name held in a number of different folders all of which are held in a single folder.

Long Form
$loc = "C:\Users\testuser\testfolders"
$fldrs = Get-ChildItem $loc | Select-Object Name
foreach ($f in $fldrs)
{
$fName = $f.Name;
Copy-Item $loc/$fName/text.txt $loc/$fName/copiedText.txt;
}

Shorter Form
$loc = "C:\Users\testuser\testfolders"
$fldrs = gci $loc | Select-Object Name | foreach { $_.Name }
foreach ($f in $fldrs)
{
Copy-Item $loc/$f/text.txt $loc/$f/copiedText.txt;
}

Copy-Item shown above, remaining commands:

Rename-Item
Delete-Item
Move-Item

As rename and move are essentially the same, can forget one or the other.

NOTE: This is not a useful program, it's really only a test to see how to extract the folder name and utilise it in another command (in the above case, Copy-Item). It does not perform any error checking, there is no verification or anything similar.

So after a couple of days struggling to get my payment to Steam to work (it seems that because my IP is in Italy and my payment details are in the UK, payment is refused), eventually Steam Support got back to me, giving me a link to a working page after unlocking my localisation settings on my account (or whatever), I finally managed to make a payment on two new games.

Those games were the new Telltale Games production Walking Dead Episode 1, and The Legend of Grimrock.

Sprinting Dead

Firstly, my thoughts on Walking Dead; whilst it is a very well made game, the graphics are very comic-book like, the story gripping, and the gore quite intense, one or two problems remain.

1. The puzzles are just not hard enough.
2. The game had only 3 hours gameplay, which for around a tenner a pop is way too pricey.

So, I did enjoy the game, but it was over so quickly as to depress me, I could tell that it was about to finish after about 2.5 hours in too, and I was right. So, whilst I do definitely want to play the remaining 5 episodes, I won't be paying the price they are asking for each episode, I would rather wait until they are all released and Steam puts them on offer like they did with the Sam & Max series.

Dungeon Crawling

After completing Walking Dead, I moved my attention to The Legend of Grimrock, which unlike the aforementioned game, didn't end after playing it for 3 hours. In fact I'm stuck at a particularly tricksy part of the game involving a few rotating teleporters that keep pushing me back to the start of the puzzle. I must admit, this game is far more puzzling than The Walking Dead could ever dream to be.

In TLoG you basically get to pick four characters from 3 different classes (Fighter, Mage, a thiefy type - can't remember the actual title right now), and they are all chained together and thrown into a lovely big dungeon. It's basically an RPG dungeon crawler of ye olde worlde type that I used to play back in the days of yore. And I must admit its bloody great. Google the bloody name if you want to know/see more.

So my single-player game recommendation of the month is The Legend of Grimrock, go out and buy it today (or stay in and buy it - it's on Steam after all).

We miss Muffin!

As you may or may not be aware, DK decided to not re-subscribe to SWTOR a few days or maybe a week back, and myself, Jose, and 4K were left in a guild (FT) that we could not control (as DK was the Guildmaster).

Rather than bother waiting a few weeks and opening a ticket to transfer control of FT to one of us, we decided that it would be far simpler to just create another guild. It's only 5000 credits, so why the hell not?

So that is what we have done. The guild is called, somewhat predictably, "Sensibilium" and we are a loose, relaxed, 21+ only, social, casual, PVP guild. We generally do stuff between 7pm - 11pm (GMT - or BST - which it is now) every week night.

We are also present most of the day, 11am - 11pm during weekends, but not everyone is constantly present. We have one US-based member who generally plays around our times and later.

The three mains of the guild are (Server: Bondar Crystal, Faction: Imperial):

Hellane (Guildmaster) - that's me.
Xantarah (Officer) - that's 4K.
Ranec (Officer) - that's Jose.

We also have alts, mine are:

Glork, Endriana, and Dora.

Other members may list their alts in the comments section.

We are also present, unguilded, on a European server, which I can't remember the name of right now. It's our Republic server. We've only recently joined this server, mainly because of the huge population. We currently have two groups of toons, The No-Pants Party, where it is not allowed to wear pants while grouped, and The Other Group, where there are no restrictions.

Not sure how these groups will work out yet, as we played together on the same starter planets in each grouping, but we'll work it out once both groups have their Advanced classes.

As you may or may not be aware, I am working on a MVC version of this website, and there are going to be a few changes to how this website functions overall. Initially, everything that exists right now should still exist after the first release of the new code, with additional features being considered for site members after that.

But one of the major changes that will occur during the first release will be our use of the Disqus commenting platform, which will not only allow us to stop wasting time re-inventing the comment system wheel, but will also allow registered Disqus users to post comments without the need to register for an account here. Obviously, guest posts will also be possible, but there will be better features available for all commenters.

I was thinking last night that we may have to lose all our existing comments when we made the switch, but after a quick scan of the Disqus documentation this morning, I found that I can simply import all existing comments through the creation of what's called a WordPress XML file. It's a simple process to write a script to automate this, so I'll do that closer to the time of switch over.

For my own information (and yours if you're interested), here is a blog post describing the document format required for import at Disqus.

Hang on, need a ciggie first actually...

Okay. So a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and spend a lot of money on this new fangled MMORPG from Star Wars called The Old Republic. I had been thinking about it for a while, watching DK's videos with growing interest, and then of course JoseSparrow went and bought it too. It was already decided in my mind that I would buy the game, but I was working on the assumption that it probably wouldn't run very well on my Lenovo ThinkPad E420s, and would instead wait until I returned to the UK and my lovely shiny home-built awesome gaming rig. Not that I would be playing on my awesome rig for long, as I am already planning on replacing it with an even more awesome home-built gaming rig with additional monitors. But July/August is a long way away, and Jose going 'pew pew' all the time in Skype simply didn't help.

I could wait no longer. I took the plunge (checking the recommended and minimum specifications against my laptop specifications first of course). Can I say I regretted it? Absolutely not. It's been the best waste of a ton of money I've had the pleasure of spending my life in for a good long time.

A History of Star Wars Games Played

I have previously had the pleasure of spending a lot of time (many years ago now) in Star Wars Galaxies which I really enjoyed playing until Jedi were introduced at the behest of whining little bitch children. The game not only broke the Star Wars storyline (a big no-no in my book), but also totally unbalanced the game. Suddenly everyone was a Jedi of some form. To get ahead in the game, you really had to be a Jedi. It sucked badly. Also, the addition of the spaceships made a mess of the game play and population on the planets. This ended up making the towns and cities mostly empty which were already mostly empty thanks to the introduction of player towns many moons earlier. But the spaceships gave even more places for players to be, and hence away from the towns and cities. Whilst the crafting and other parts of the game were very good, it ended up dying a deserved death.

Then came the single player Old Republic series, which were a real breath of fresh air, if not a little on the short side. Also, it was annoying that once you had gone through the entire games and built up your awesome character and companions, the game ended with no opportunity for open world game-play. This made the entire experience somewhat flat, and made you feel that leveling your characters and companions was a pointless waste of time. Kind of like Pazaak when you had beaten everyone in the game and had all the cards there was.

So when SWTOR comes along, what else could I do? I had to buy this game, there was no doubt about it. It shall be done. And currently I am very pleased. It has the feel of the old Old Republic games with an open-world after levelling your character and companions. It's class system is relatively well-balanced, with only a few tweaks probably required to balance it out (I guess it's up to the devs to work out how those balancing changes should be implemented). I just hope they don't cave in to players whining when their over-powered class gets reduced in power a little. But then they have to be sure to not completely "nerf" the class(es) in question. It's still up in the air as to whether that can ever happen, not sure I know of any MMO that is perfectly balanced.

Anyway, I'm thoroughly enjoying my Bounty Hunter, it's nice to finally have a character that can actually stand a chance against a Jedi. Because if there is one constant in this world, it's my hatred for those damnable Jedi.

...this is the end of my blog post, can't be arsed typing anymore, even if it ends abruptly.

OblongOrange is currently playing on the US Server Bondar Crystal for the Imperials as a Bounty Hunter Powertech going by the name of Hellane Lededje. If you are playing too, send me a whisper and mention sensibilium for potential entry into our guild as provided by the superbly talented DK

I've been working hard on the site redevelopment, and I just wanted to inform everyone how far I've got in the process.

The MVC for the Blog display pages, including share links and comments form (but not comment submission), user login and logout, the about, gumbo, and downloads areas are pretty much completed.

The site design is crawling along behind as I don't want to do much of that until the complete functionality of the site is ready. But it's looking a lot cleaner so far at least.

Breadcrumb navigation is generally up and running, although I still have to work on the Writings section so that will mean some further updates are required to it. The same is true for the next / previous links (working as expected in the blog area).

The code has been cleaned and performance improvements have been introduced. Still a long way to go, but I am doing it, honestly! Things are being made easier through my use of Eclipse and running everything locally in my Linux installation on my laptop. Although programming with an annoying touch-pad constantly moving the cursor around and randomly highlighting stuff is something I wouldn't recommend to anyone. But for me, needs must.

Okay, time I went back to coding.

Exciting times ahead folks! I'm working on a brand new design for Sensibilium, and not only that, I'm working on moving the underlying code into the 21st century, by utilising the power of MVC (Model, View, Controller). This is how Ruby works, keeping the database interaction away from code processing of said database data, and again separated from the page you see when you load it.

I will also be attempting to get some AJAX with jQuery up and running, but haven't really gone there yet, need to get everything else moved across to the new way of doing things first.

Obviously, considering the size and complexity of the software powering this site, this will likely take a very long time, so your patience is highly appreciated.

I already have an idea of what to do with the CSS and XHTML, and it just a case of re-programming all the underlying code, and hence make it a whole lot easier to update in the future. Of course, this code will be transferred into further development that will include my eCommerce software which is still not ready after all these years. It's not far off though, just need to get the time to spend on it.

Sensibilium as ever comes first though, can't really practice on a commercial website.

PS: The blog search facility is broken, likely has been for a very long time, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Just a little how-to for myself really, so if the original article website goes down I have a copy available in perpetuity.

can be done with Ubuntu Lucid and beyond. It creates a new group “wireshark”, configures dumpcap with setcap, and requires the user to manually add themselves to the “wireshark” group (then log out and log back in to activate it).


$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure wireshark-common
$ sudo adduser username wireshark
$ exit


Original article can be found here, plus instructions for earlier Ubuntii:
Steve Kargs' Wireshark on Ubuntu not as root