The Network Administrator

A few days ago I upgrading a Windows Vista computer to Windows 7 Home premium. The upgrade gave me no issues, anything I ran into i knew of by run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor http://apps.thenetworkadministrator.net/Windows7UpgradeAdvisorSetup.exe

However, after the upgrade my Dell AIO 926 printer would not work. I tried applying the new Windows 7 drivers from support.dell.com, tried using Windows Vista drivers, even tried running the printer  installer using Vista SP2  compatibility mode. Below are the steps i used to solve the problem, hope I can save someone else some time.

1. Disconnect the printer usb cable

 2. From control panel, programs, uninstall programs, locate the Dell AIO printer software and uninstall it, if promted to reboot please do so.

3. Run this utility to uninstall the old printer drivers, http://apps.thenetworkadministrator.net/R166248.zip

3. Visit http://support.dell.com and download the windows 7 drivers, during the software install the setup will prompt you when to connect the printer usb cable.

Download and burn the NT offline password reset  iso from http://apps.thenetworkadministrator.net/Windows_Password_Reset.zip

As an alternative to more costly software monitoring  solutions this is free, Nagios provides the means to monitor windows and linux servers and other equipment such as

• Monitoring Windows machines
• Monitoring Linux/Unix machines
• Monitoring Netware servers
• Monitoring routers/switches
• Monitoring network printers
• Monitoring publicly available services (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.)

To keeps things simple I chose to install Nagios on Open SuSE 11.2 http://software.opensuse.org/112/en. Just go through a typical install, make sure that you install apache2 or httpd (Fedora) and C/C++ development libraries. Also I like to change the default run level from 5 to 3 so that you can put the memory toward the server and not toward the GUI interface. I would also recommend enabling SSH to manager the server.  For the most part you will be modifying conf files and managing the server from http://nagios_server_IP/nagios. Once you have your monitoring server operating system built in my case I chose OpenSuSE, follow these simple steps….

As a quick note, step 1, I had an issue with these commands…..
/usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd nagios

/usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd wwwrun

so, instead I used….

/usr/sbin/usermod  -G nagcmd nagios
/usr/sbin/usermod  -G nagcmd wwwrun

 Also one more note, after two installs the status map has not worked. I am running OpenSuSE, to fix this problem I did the following.

Make sure these packages are installed.

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-opensuse.html

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-fedora.html

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-ubuntu.html

Debian/ubuntu

apt-get install

libgd

libgd-devel

libpng

libpng-devel

libjpeg

libjpeg-devel

zlib

zlib-devel

Fedora /centos/RHEL/opensuse

Use  yum install Or yast2 -i

gd

gd-devel

png

png-devel

jpeg

jpeg-devel

zlib

zlib-devel

While in the Nagios directory run the following commands. IF YOU ARE RUNNING RUNNING THESE COMMANDS ON AN EXISTING INSTALL YOU WILL LOSE DATA, SO PLEASE MAKE A COPY OF YOU CONFIG FILES.

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx – Windows live mesh, allows you to sync files and remote desktop to any computer running live mesh client.

http://www.leafnetworks.net/ – Enable network and device sharing between an individual’s home office and work PCs

http://www.cacti.net/ – Data collection, storage and graphing tool that lets you poll data from multiple sources and create visual representations of information across complex networks

http://www.kismetwireless.net/ – Kismet is an 802.11 Layer 2 wireless network detector, sniffer and intrusion detection system. It works with any wireless card that supports raw monitoring mode

http://www.kiwisyslog.com/ – Kiwi Syslog Daemon is a freeware Syslog Daemon for Windows that receives messages from network devices and displays them in real time

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ – MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a tool that graphs router and other network device traffic by monitoring SNMP and creating visual images of the traffic passing through each interface.

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/netflow_configurator.aspx – If you are unfamiliar with the command-line options for configuring NetFlow set up NetFlow on supported Cisco devices.

http://nmap.org/ – uses raw IP packets to determine which hosts are available on the network, which services those hosts are offering, what operating system they are running and what types of packet filters and firewalls are in use

http://www.pingplotter.com/–traceroute application that allows you to trace the route between them and a target and collect performance metrics about that route.

http://www.plixer.com/products/netflow-sflow/free-netflow-scrutinizer.php – NetFlow and sFlow analyzer that accepts unlimited flows from routers, switches and network interfaces

http://www.uvnc.com/ – remotely control the screen of another computer from a workstation via the Internet or a network connection.

http://www.wireshark.org/ – examine protocol data from a live network or from a capture file on disk

http://www.ziptie.org/overview – network inventory and configuration management

http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/ 

http://iptrack.sourceforge.net/ – IP address management (IPAM) software and tracking tool

Microsoft IT Environment Health Scanner is a  diagnostic tool that identifies common Active Directory and network related problems.

It performs more than 100 separate checks in these categories: Network Connectivity, Active Directory Subnet Configuration, Active Directory Replication, File Replication and SYSVOL Administration, DNS Verification, Network Adapter Configuration, Domain Controller Health, Network Time Protocol Configuration, Exchange Server Configuration, Network Configuration, and Event Log Entries.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=dd7a00df-1a5b-4fb6-a8a6-657a7968bd11

Available from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials
the program is designed to stop common threats such as viruses, spyware, rootkits and Trojans. It runs on Windows XP, Vista and 7, in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

Also check out..http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

Sometimes its faster and easier to just use the windows system restore and go back to sometime before the malware was installed.

http://clonezilla.org/

What is Clonezilla ?

You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS, no matter it’s 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
• Based on Partimage, ntfsclone, partclone, and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

Which Clonezilla Shall I Use ?

• Clonezilla Live: Clonezilla live allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run clonezilla (Unicast only)
• Clonezilla SE: Clonezilla SE is included in DRBL, therefore a DRBL server must first be set up in order to use Clonezilla to do massively clone (unicast, broadcast and multicast are supported)

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/enterprise/products/mdop/dart.aspx

http://www.spiceworks.com/product/

Follow my article on installing Windows pe 2.0.

Download snapshot.exe from http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm, once you have the winpe.wim image mounted copy the snapshot.exe file into programs under the mount folder. With snapshot.exe not only can you back and restore images to the server you can bare metal restore a server provided that the hardware is correct.