RouterTech firmware for Telkom Mega 105WR

Quite some time ago I wrote two posts on the Telkom Mega 105WR router, which you can read here and here. After the second post, I ended up purchasing a Netgear router, which has worked like a charm since the day it arrived. The Mega ended up being put back in its box and packed away for a year and a half.

This past week, I retrieved the Mega from its shelf to attempt something interesting: flash an alternate firmware onto the device. Telkom/2C Telecoms never released another firmware for the device, and since the router was no longer under any warranty, it made sense to experiment on it.

I can’t remember how I originally heard about the RouterTech 3rd party firmware, but I thought I’d give it a shot this week. I downloaded the Router Upgrade Check program and confirmed that the Mega could be flashed with the new firmware. The Mega’s internals are identical to a wide range of routers that were built on Texas Instruments’ AR7 platform.

After registering on the RouterTech site, I downloaded the firmware and followed the instructions. The flash itself took about 7-8 minutes, though it’s a bit tough to tell when the process is done as the router changes from a 10.0.0.x IP to 192.168.1.1 after the flash. The best way to check if it’s done is to see if your network card has gotten a new 192.168.1.x IP address.

Once logged in, the firmware felt pretty familiar. It’s similar in layout to the Mega’s original firmware, but there appears to be a lot more features. The web GUI is a bit bright with its orange colour scheme, but apart from that it works as expected. After the flash, the LED lights on the router were not working properly, but if you change the setting to the BeWan 700 LED configuration, the LED lights work correctly.

I plugged the router into the ADSL line and created a connection. That also worked without issue. WiFi also works with no problems so far.

The only way I could truly test the device to see if the RouterTech firmware has fixed the problems I had with the Mega would be to let it run for a week or two continuously to test stability. Either way, it’s nice to know that I have a spare router now, in case something goes wrong.

My thanks go out to everyone who made the firmware possible. It’s always nice to be able to resurrect a seemingly dead piece of equipment and make it useful again.

Boot disks

Sooner or later in the life of a network administrator, a time will come when you need to fix a broken computer. Hardware faults aside, the more common problems are malware infested Windows systems or Windows that won’t boot. Sometimes you need to run diagnostics on the computer but can’t do it inside Windows for various reasons. Enter the boot disk.

The boot disk has come a long way from the humble floppy you could make with Windows 95/98. Now with a USB flash drive, you can do anything from scan a computer to cloning it or preparing to deploy Windows. I’ve been playing with boot disks lately, and I’ve found a couple of tools I really like so far.

1) Windows 7 Recovery Disk

You can make this boot disk inside Windows 7 by going to Control Panel, Backup and Restore. Click the link on the left to make a system repair disk. Insert a blank CD and follow the steps. This disk is perfect for basic to moderate troubleshooting, and lets you restore your computer from a backup which is very handy. As far as I know, this is available in all editions of Windows 7.

2) Ultimate Boot CD

Freely downloadable from www.ultimatebootcd.com, this is a tool that is part DOS based, part Linux based. I like the inclusion of Parted Magic, a small and lightweight Linux distro that can do many useful tasks. Resizing partitions, running hardware diagnostics, resetting forgotten Windows user passwords and more, it is a Swiss Army Knife in any technicians toolkit. The disk can also be transferred to a USB stick, as well as further customised with additional tools.

There are other boots disks I’ve played with as well, including the ESET System Rescue CD and the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (a project inspired by the above project). The ESET System Rescue CD basically boots up into a Windows PE environment and launches a copy of NOD32 anti-virus, which can be used to scan the local computer for infections from outside Windows. This is sometimes the only way to get rid of certain nasties that bury themselves deeply into Windows.

I suggest keeping a few boot cd’s/USB drives around, as you never know when you’ll need the disk to rescue or repair a computer. These tools are a vital part of any admin’s toolkit, as essential as a set of screwdrivers.

USB boot in VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a great piece of free virtualization software. I’ve been using it for years to tinker with various operating systems and software products. Lately I’ve been playing with boot disks. This isn’t a problem if you intend to use an ISO file or a physical disk in VBox, but if you want to use an USB flash drive to test things out, you can’t do so. Or, I should rather say that you can’t easily do so.

In order to get VBox to boot off an USB flash drive, you will need to do the following:

1. Open up a command prompt. Under Windows Vista/7, right click on it and run it as an Administrator.
2. Type in Diskpart. Once Diskpart has loaded, type in list disk. Your flash drive should appear near the bottom of the list. Make a note of which Disk number it is. Exit Diskpart.
3. Back in the command prompt, change to the C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox folder.
4. Type in the following code: VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename path\to\usb.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1
5. Change the number at the end of PhysicalDrive 1 to match that of step 2.
6. Right click your VBox shortcut and run it as an Administrator if you are on Windows Vista/7. Create or modify a virtual machine to use the VMDK file created above. The file is located in the root of your user profile. Make sure that the file is set for IDE Primary Master.

You should now be able to start your virtual machine using the USB flash drive as the boot device. Very useful if you need to test out recovery software etc…

Hopefully one day VirtualBox will be able to boot from USB without needing to go through these hoops.

Be careful when cleaning out Windows 7 profiles

If you run Windows 7 in a domain environment, the computer is eventually going to get cluttered up with user profiles under the C:\Users folder, depending of course on whether you have roaming profiles etc…

A week ago my colleague and I decided that we needed to clean out this directory on our Windows 7 staff boxes for a number of reasons, including the fact that a drive mapped via Group Policy Preferences was not showing up. We duly proceeded to do so, not unduly concerned. I have personally done this step a number of times in the past on Windows XP and have never had any issues. After clean up, people who logged back into Windows XP simply got a fresh and clean profile.

After the directories had been removed, we let some staff log in, only to find out that we had created a bigger problem than we had hoped to cure. After the log on procedure was done, Windows 7 moaned that the user was being logged on with a temporary profile. We were flabbergasted and worried about this, as this was a major step backwards.

After a bit of research on the net, I discovered that Vista and 7 store information about the profiles in the Registry. More specifically, the location of the files comprising the profile. Deleting the profile folder is only a partial delete and is probably considered a “hack job” method of cleaning up.

The location of the information in the Registry is as follows: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList. Below this key, you will see a list of numbers starting with S. The S and the rest of the string is the value of the unique Security Identifier (SID) for each account on your computer. You need to delete each S number for each profile folder you deleted under C:\Users. If you have a handful of computers it is easy enough to do by hand, but in a large environment I can only imagine what a nightmare it can become.

Once that is done, the next time the user logs in, they won’t get moaned at by Windows that they are using a temporary profile. I have seen that at first login, most of the users drive mappings, printers and so on will be missing. A simple log off and back on solves that particular problem.

An interesting situation that almost gave me a minor heart attack, and definitely not something I will be doing in the future again any time soon.

Tip to remove incorrect tags in Windows Live Photo Gallery

If you use Windows Live Photo Gallery like I do to manage your photos, the ability to add tags to photos is a very useful feature. Even better, in Windows Vista and 7, those tags get indexed by the system, so searching for photos becomes even easier. For example, if you tagged “mom” in a photo and search for “mom”, the tagged photos will come up, irrespective of what their actual file name is. However, there is one small problem with this, a human problem: spelling mistakes!

Sometimes you can tag a photo correctly but with incorrect spelling, with the result that the incorrect tag is now in the list of predefined possible tags for other photos. These appear in the drop down menu when adding tags, and there is no way to remove them from this list, at least not in the application itself. However, there is a way to correct this using the Registry Editor. Do as follows, but make sure you are comfortable working in the Registry first.

• Click on Start, and type in Regedit in the search bar (Windows Vista and 7), or Start, Run, Regedit (Windows XP)
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Library\PreviewPane\LabelAssignment\MRU
• Delete the offending tag from the various registry keys
• Since this is based on the Current User Hive in the Registry, deleting tags here won’t affect other the tags of other users on the same computer.

This won’t remove the tag from tagged photos, but will remove the tag from the predefined options so that you don’t use it again in the future. You can remove the incorrect tag from the photos and apply new correct tags to them.

This tip also works with the standard Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista, but the main key is Windows Photo Gallery instead (not 100% sure, been a long time since I looked. Still, you should see it pretty quickly)

Installing Windows Vista – Server 2008 R2 off of a flash drive

During the course of last week, I had the task of installing Windows Server 2008 onto a server. Normally it’s easy enough to use the DVD and off you go, but this tale has a twist in it: the “DVD” drive in the server was actually a plain old CD-ROM drive, nothing more. While at first I thought it was simply struggling to read the Server DVD, later tests showed that it wouldn’t read any DVD at all, but would read CD’s fine. Go figure.

Investigating other methods to install Server revealed that I could use a USB flash drive to install the software, provided the server supports booting off of USB based devices. Luckily it did, and though it didn’t actually work for me, the bootable flash drive I made worked in another computer just fine. Your mileage may vary with this trick, but it should work on the majority of computers for installing Windows Vista and up. I would suggest using a speedy USB stick as well, as it is to your benefit. I suggest doing these steps on a Vista or above machine, as Diskpart on Windows XP didn’t pick up my flash drive.

1. Open a command prompt. Type diskpart and hit enter. UAC may prompt you to elevate your rights, do so. A new command window should appear.
2. Type list disk to find your flash drive. It will appear as a number.
3. Type select disk <your flash drive from step 2>
4. Type clean to wipe the flash drive. Optional step, but worth it.
5. Type create partition primary to create the partition.
6. Type select partition 1 to select the partition.
7. Type active to make it active.
8. Type format fs=fat32 so that it is formatted as FAT32.
9. Type assign.
10. Type exit to exit diskpart.

The last step to be done is to copy the actual install files onto the flash drive.

Type xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ into your command prompt, where D:\ is the DVD drive with the setup files, and E:\ your flash drive. D:\ can be substituted for a folder if you have the install files somewhere else.

With flash drives being so cheap, it’s easy enough to have one for each OS you want to install this way. Another sign that optical drives are on the decline I guess.

Testing Exchange Server connectivity

If you are fairly new to administering Exchange Servers, you’ll often wonder if you have configured all the connectivity options correctly. One way of checking this is to test things from both inside and outside your organisation, but sometimes you don’t have the necessary hard/software to do these tests. Enter a great solution provided by Microsoft: the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer

  Exchange Remote Connectivity tester

This tool will let you test things such as ActiveSync, Outlook Anywhere and so forth. All you need to do is use a valid user account, and point the tester to your server(s), and wait while it attempts to connect. If it isn’t successful, it shows a log of all the steps it took, along with the point where it failed. This makes it an excellent tool for troubleshooting.

Credit for this goes to a post on the EduGeek.net forums, where I discovered this little gem. I don’t know if this works with Exchange 2003, but it definitely works with Exchange 2007 and 2010.

Handy Windows 7 logon tip

Today I discovered a nice tip which is very handy. If you have a laptop issued by your work, it is possibly joined to the domain, so you can use it when you are in the office. Usually there is also a local account set up, so that you can use the laptop elsewhere, in case you can’t use cached credentials. In Windows XP, it was dead simple to select if you were logging onto the domain or local computer, you just had to change a drop down box. In Vista and 7, that logon screen no longer exists.

I always understood that in order to log on to a local account, you had to type localpc\username, which could be quite cumbersome, as well as tough for non technical people. I discovered that if you put the username as .\username, it would log you on to that local account instead of onto the domain.

Handy little time saver! It’s not perfect, but it works well.

Microsoft Volume Activation Management Tool

Recently, our school started getting some new computers. It was decided that we should put Windows 7 on these computers, as it made sense to use the new and improved OS on the nice hardware. Using XP would be a waste really, and as we are looking towards the future, we don’t want to be stuck on old technology.

We got Windows 7 under a special agreement Microsoft has with our country’s government. We were given a MAK key to use to activate all our Windows 7 copies. The key works without a problem, but it is a bit of a pain to have to give the client computers a default gateway address first. We don’t hand out that as a safety measure on our network, so doing it on the client computers could become quite tedious. At the end of this year, we will be getting a hardware refresh in our main computer lab, and we are planning to run Windows 7 in both that lab and our second lab. Activating them manually would eat up loads of time.

Enter the Volume Activation Management Tool.

This tool is part of the Windows 7 Automated Installation Kit, a vital piece of software if you want to manage Windows Vista and 7 computers on a network. It is a free download from Microsoft, but be warned, it weighs in at over 1GB in size.

After installing, the tool can be found in your Start Menu, in a sub folder called VAMT 1.2 under Microsoft Windows AIK.

Main window of VAMT 1.2

I discovered this tool by accident, as I was searching for a way of activating a Windows 7 computer without letting it connect directly to the internet. Although you can get a product key installed during Sysprep, the need for activation is always there. It is probably my only gripe about Vista and 7 compared to XP, though I fully understand why Microsoft had to take such drastic action with its volume license keys.

In a nutshell, you enter your volume key into this tool, it checks and authorises it with Microsoft and tells you how many activations you have left on that key. A blessing since these keys are no longer infinite.

Once your Vista/7 computers are joined to the domain, you can search for them, or you can specify a computer by name/IP address

Once the computer(s) have been added, you can see their licensing status in the main window. You can also create groups when adding computers, so that you have a more organised grouping.

Once you have your computers, you can activate them remotely. Basically, your management computer installs the product key onto the targets, gets an authorisation code from Microsoft and applies it to that computer. This is exactly the same thing that happens when you do it manually, but this process is more manageable, and lets you activate more computers at once.

To get this to work, your target computers need to have the WMI port open on their firewalls, so that the tool can do its job. It is a pretty straightforward tool, and the help file is well written.

I am glad I found this tool, it will now become part of my ever growing tool kit. I will be digging into the rest of the AIK soon, there are other tools in there I need to learn as well.

Interesting WSUS problem

WSUS is a real life saver on a Windows network of any size, it more than pays off its huge initial download size when it serves computers on the network and saves internet bandwidth. However, like any other software, it can be temperamental and have tough to troubleshoot problems.

I recently came across a problem during the migration at my work. We set up the client XP SP3 workstation, ran sysprep and then cloned the box. However, after the deployment, only 1 or 2 computers were appearing in the WSUS console when there should have been 38.

Puzzled by this, and by the fact that computers were still getting updates despite not showing up in the console, I decided to investigate. After a lot of internet searching, I narrowed down the seeming culprit to a setting in the registry.

It turns out that for whatever reason, sysprep is not removing these entries in the registry, so the computers after cloning will receive updates but won’t report to the console. It may have been some change Microsoft made with SP3, or it may be the updated Automatic Update client, no one really knows.

The solution is to delete the SusClientId and SusClientValidationId entries in the following registry key before running sysprep and cloning the computers : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate

Clone the computer and after sysprep is run, the computer should now report to the WSUS console. Alternatively, you can restart the Automatic Updates service, as well as run wuauclt /resetauthorization /detectnow. If you don’t delete the entries in the above mentioned registry key, they are all identical and WSUS will only pick up the first computer that starts up with those entries.

I haven’t yet figured out if this problem exists in Windows Vista and 7, as I have never had the chance to clone those systems or use the sysprep tool for them.

I hope this will help someone out there avoid the head scratching we went though with this.