Network Administration News

It may be useful at times to prevent a particular computer from appearing in such 'My Network Places' or similar groups. Note that it can only be kind of convenience, a privacy option,not a security measure.

Windows Firewall is by default a GUI-driven application; yet in many a situation, especially in cases when unattended changes should be made, or any other kind of automation is expected, command-line solutions could do well.

The default settings of most Windows versions is rather relaxed: most actions are allowed to users by default. However, in case users should be rather restricted in their choice of actions, several special actions should be performed. It is especially important in multi-user environment such as schools and computer classes in high schools. SysAdm Blog offers one of the technique to restrict users from arbitrarily running any executable in Disallowing .EXE’s in a WindowsXP/2003 Environment

Finding the manufacturer of a device may be painful and routine work. The variety of peripherals and the fact that but few OS do support drivers for all the devices in regular way, makes it a hard work to identify a device and find its exact characteristics - this is the knowledge required to make it function as expected. In Bored Sysadmin's Blog we can find an example of the mentioned technique: How to identify ANY mysterious “PCI Device”

A simple problem may have rather a complex solution, and vice versa. Most complex situations are when cross-tool compatibility is required in the environment when tools can't be either configured according to the task, or there are other restrictions preventing from applying the necessary configuration. An example of such a situation is described on SysAdmin Adventures, in Forcing browsers to “open with..” or “save” attachments.

Handling different timezones may be a nuisance; every sysadmin has at least once been confused with transforming dates and times, dealing with servers running in different timezones. However, there are several online services that can save a lot of efforts spent on taking into account time differences. Everything Sysadmin, Three useful TimeAndDate.com URLs, offers several good pieces of advice on it.