I'm in IT at my workplace but I can't change any Group Policy settings.
I want my PC to run this script every time it boots up, effectively overwriting the IE homepage which is set by our group policy. Normally it is directed to my company's homepage which takes too long to load, plus it's not useful for me.
REG ADD "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main" /V "Start Page" /D "http://www.google.com.au" /F
This needs to run at every boot as the GP will overwrite that registry key. What is the best way to implement this each time the PC boots?
If there is an alternative script/command, I'll use that.
Related
I am trying to create some local user accounts in Windows 10 on my home PC. I can go through the wizard ok, but when I try to login to the accounts I get a message similar to 'user profile service failed the logon'.
The whole story is this:
I want to add a SSD drive to my system (Dell Tower, I do not remember the model). So following some advice, it was suggested to move my user files to another drive so the SSD drive would only have the OS and programs on it. Plus this would keep my SSD required size smaller.
So I started to move my user files using the "Location" tab for the "My Documents" and similar folders to my other drive. This all appeared to work okay.
I then selected my wife's folders but I could not since I was not logged under her account, fine. I logged out of my account and attempted to log into her account (we both have administrator rights). That is when I received the 'user profile failed' message.
I have third account on the system, another admin account, and it too failed. Windows seems to be accepting the passwords, just failing further into the login process.
I logged back into my account and my desktop is completely different, there are only 3 icons there now instead of the ~20 I had before, so something with the 'move' failed? I'm not sure. I moved the files back to the default location and that did not help. I googled the 'user profile service failed' message and it seems this happens often enough that there are fairly detailed instructions about how to fix it.
The one fix was to examine the registry (this was from support.mircosoft.com) HLM\Software\Microsoft\windows nt\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and 'simply' remove the '.bak' suffix from entries that match the accounts that are broke. Set some other values to 0. In my case the values were not present in the values list.
I did this and it did not help. I did reboots at various times throughout this process, but those did not help either....
So I tried to create a new account(s), but no matter how I created the account I could never log into the account. Right now, I have only one account that I can log into.
I have not tried the "net user" command as I have just found some information about here at work. I did have to use that program to reset my account's password recently. I have used the same password at home for years, so I do not know how it changed. Luckily, my wife's account still worked at that time and it was an administrator account. So maybe that was some indication that the 'user subsystem' was failing in someway.
This PC is seldom connected to the Internet, only for Windows updates or downloading a program, like "Open Office", Paint.Net type of things. We mainly use an older XP machine for computer work and a tablet for surfing the 'net. The computer is 'new' to us and we have not migrated our files to it. In fact the PC is seldom used at all and powered off for months at a time. I am pretty much the only person that even uses the system, my wife went through a "Dummy's for Windows 10" book and decided it was too different to really bother with learning a whole new thing.
I will try 'net user' tonight to add another account and see if that helps.
Thanks for any hints or suggestions.
I'm not 100% sure what's happened, but it looks like the accounts are probably corrupted. You can do it, but Windows much prefers to have the user profiles on the same drive as the installation itself. Moving them entirely may be the cause of the issue.
(For future reference, If you want to copy user accounts across to a new SSD, it's always best to start here: C:\Users\xxxxx). xxx being your userID. If you would like to use it as your primary C:Drive for Windows - I would advise just a clean install.
You could try a couple of things at this point. (Make sure you're connected to the internet if you can)
First, try just making sure your connected to the internet and run all the updates you can. The profile service may just be corrupted and Win10 especially might just need an internet connection to sort it automatically.
Try booting into recovery mode, and run a system restore back a few days. The files may not return but it might fix the profile issues.
If you can still login to your wifes profile, use this tool (after backing up your files) to clear out all the old profiles.
Net user will likely just enable the hidden admin account, and would not be all that useful if your wife's account is already and administrator.
In the answer to this post Corey Henderson explains how you can use the at and stuff commands in screen to send commands to all windows of a screen session at once. I would like to know how I can stuff the input buffers to some windows at the same time. In other words, I would like to use a filter to specify which windows should receive the input and which should not.
It would be great if I could filter on the window number instead of the user name or the window name because bash likes to change the window name sometimes and it is inconvenient to modify the .bashrc on multiple machines. Also, sometimes I don't have control over which user I am running the command as.
So far I have only been able to run a command on either the currently active window or all windows at once.
The only way I have found to do windows filtering when using the atcommand is by using windows names.
By default screen's windows names are set after the actual command name of the program created in the window, for me this is usually bash. But windows names can be changed to whatever you prefer with Ctrl+A. If your windows' names change dynamically, check you don't have Dynamic Titles enabled.
So in practice that means you can give related windows a common prefix and then use at "prefix#" stuff "command" to execute the command only on those windows whose names matches the filter.
Imagine we have the following windows opened in our screen session:
0$ front1 - 1$ front2 - 2$ back1 - 3$ back2 - 4$ back3 - 5$ db1 - 6$ db2
The next command would send the service ntpd stop command to windows starting by the string back, that is back1, back2, back3:
at "back#" stuff "service ntpd stop^M"
I have approx 22 vb.net windows form based projects that are run by different users throughout my company. I publish them using one-click to a network server, then install on each user computer using the set-up file on that server. That way, when I publish an update, it is automatically pushed to each user when they open their programs.
I'd like to consolidate all of this into 1 program. So for example, the Accounting dept, IT Dept, and Customer Service Dept would all have the same icon/program to open, and they choose which program specific to them to open from that main menu. The goal is to remove all 22 programs from user computers and only have 1 installed that runs each individually (somehow).
My dilemma is program updates. When I update a program for the Accounting Dept, IT doesn't need that update. But since it would be only 1 installation and 1 publish, every user on the network would receive updates not relevant to them. So how do I create one main program "hub" for all users that only receives updates to the programs that they need?
You can launch the click once programmatically
Dim url = "\\Software\Production\ClickOnceApp\ClickOnceApp.application"
Process.Start("rundll32.exe", "dfshim.dll,ShOpenVerbApplication " & url)
Just point to the url on your server, where it's installed from. This will launch the app the same way windows does, so it would check for updates when it's run as if it's run from the start menu.
Then you could maintain a list of 22 applications' names and locations in the 23rd app's settings, xml, sql, etc., and add user groups, permissions, etc.
It could be a winforms app which provides buttons according to the configuration above for launching all these apps. Yes, I think this is actually a pretty neat idea.
There are some registry keys that are owned by System, and I can't edit them unless I run as System. I want to be able to edit these keys from my VB application. Any tutorials I've found suggest using PSTools, the now deprecated At command, or schtasks. PSTools seems great, but its license seems to restrictive (about redistributing). At and schtasks are too messy, and require scheduling delays.
This is related to my previous question. I want to take what I discovered, and implement it via VB.
Modify audit policy (group policy)
I also found this, but am getting error 1314. I realized despite running VS2010 "requireAdministrator", and even Running my EXE as Administrator, it still says my username in Task Manager (running as me, not Administrator). I logged in as Administrator, and got Error 5 instead. Even after ensuring I had the rights set, as suggested by this post (CreateProcessAsUser error 1314), it still gave me Error 5.
Using a vb.net application running as SYSTEM, how do I start a detached process for each logged on user?
I changed the example to "TokenAccessLevels.Read and Duplicate" rather than MaximumAllowed.
If Not DuplicateTokenEx(hToken.DangerousGetHandle,
TokenAccessLevels.Read & TokenAccessLevels.Duplicate,
Nothing,
SECURITY_IMPERSONATION_LEVEL.SecurityImpersonation,
TOKEN_TYPE.TokenPrimary,
phNewToken) Then
I get Error 5 from CreateProcessAsUser. This is while running VS2010 as Administrator.
http://forum.sysinternals.com/tip-run-process-in-system-account-scexe_topic16714.html
This post was the best I could do. Basically, install a service, run it, then delete it. According to the OP, this is his explanation.
So how does it work?
The & symbol tells cmd.exe to parse treat the text that follows as if it were a new line in a batch file (It basically is a new line
delimiter which allows multiple commands to be combined into 1 line)
To break it down: Create Service - sc create -- binPath= "cmd /c start
calc" type= own type= interact Start Service net start -- (This could
also be done with: sc start --) Delete Service sc delete --
Variables
Service Name: --
App to run: calc
Variables:
How it works:
cmd /c - allows us to pass in parameters to cmd (Without this initial
part, it will work if you copy & paste in cmd.exe, but not in the Run
Dialog. So this fixes it) sc create binPath= - Since cmd.exe does not
respond to service commands, when the SCM runs the app in binPath (Reg
= ImagePath) then it will terminate it, when not responding in a timely fasion, therefore cmd.exe cannot be used. It has to call
something else which in this case is calc.exe sc create type= This one
took a while to figure out. The inital problem is the Window Station
in which cmd.exe is launched in (which in turn is inherited by
calc.exe (its child process)). Luckily after reading Mark's Windows
Internals e4, I was able to solve it by specifying the service as
being Interactive. (Experimenting, it actually has to be BOTH
interactive(256) and own(16) (256|16 = 272) . Basically what this
allows is for the windows to run in \WinSta0\Default (The current
user's desktop, allowing the window to be displayed.) After some
research from being frustrated that sc would not accept type
=own|interact, I found out that it allows us to specify it again, and instead of overwriting Type (dword) it bitwise-ORs it (Adds it).
Problems Solved! net start - start the service (probably calls
StartService) cmd.exe runs with the command line (CL) of start [File]
in which start probably calls ShellExecute (Its ashame that MS didn't
allow start to specify a SW_* commands (like hide). Although it does
allowing us to min/max windows. cmd.exe opens the app/file, the SCM
terminates cmd.exe for not responding in a timely fashion to its
commands, and the window is now shown to the user. sc delete - Finally
we clean up our path by removing the service
For me, this worked.
cmd /c sc create -- binPath= "cmd /c start app.exe" type= own type= interact & net start -- & sc delete --
Now, I had trouble with getting absolute paths to work. I had to put my .EXE in System32 and SysWOW64, so I didn't have to use an absolute path. According to the site, this is supposed to allow absolute paths to work.
cmd /c sc create -- binPath= "cmd /c start \"\" \"C:\windows\regedit.exe\" " type= own type= interact & net start -- & sc delete --
It never worked for me, as it would hang for some time and never start the app. It should almost instantly complete.
I am extremely new to Ms-Access. I have a central back end access database in server computer. And all the users have the front end user interface installed on their system.
Now, whenever I make any changes to the interface in my local, i need to re-install the updated interface on each of their system. Is their any way that i can do so that i will make the changes only on my local and it will be automatically reflected on all the users' systems.
Thank you.
Ok there are a couple of options that you can do to either fully or paritally automate this process.
Partial Automation
If you don't have a lot of users and you don't want to do a great deal of coding you can write a simple batchfile or vbs file which you set up on the users desktop as an icon. Batch file code would show the following type of information.
#Echo Off
REM Copy your file from server location to local user machine
xcopy "F:\ServerDirectory\databasename.mdb" "C:\ClientDirectory\databasename.mdb" /E /Y /R
Set this up on the users machine as an icon and whenever you want them to update their front end ask them to double click the icon. This will overwrite their client with whatever you place in the location on the server. It is advisable to create all table links to the database back end having UNC paths as well.
I have used this successfully for various applications - I make changes to the front end place in appropriate location on the server and then do a quick e-mail to people just to ask them to double click the bat file icon.
Full Automation
Programmatically set version control up using visual basic so the client checks version number of the client against a server number and if the client is not the latest will download a new version.
This is more involved and full instructions are available here.
Front End Auto Update
When you deploy an MS Access solutions like this, you need to decide whether to share the client MDB file between all users, or distribute copies to each user. It sounds like you have taken the second option. Each choice has merits and disadvantages. If you stay with the current approach, you might look at a scripting option to deploy updated client MDB files between users.