Thomas Nicholson

Image rights: http://xkcd.com/

I am working on creating a series of “how to” videos covering various network security topics for my NicholsonSecurity.com website. One of the requirements I have is I needed to create a bunch of Virtual Machines running various operating systems. I was able to create all the Linux and BSD images just fine. Keeping them skinny is easy to do since you have full control over all the packages. On Windows it’s a little different.

Since I will only be using the Windows installs for demo’s in the videos I’m creating I don’t need a full install. In one of my feeds last week I read about vLite 1.2 going final. Per description on the website ”
vLite is a tool for customizing the Windows Vista installation before actually installing it.”

Image source - http://www.vlite.net/about.html

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I have been a big fan of PuTTY for years.  I am always looking for new PuTTY tips and tricks.  Well I wanted to share one with you that I have been searching for since I started using PuTTY.  It’s called PuTTY Command Sender.  When I was working in a NOC many years ago, I would get adhoc request and need to run a query against multiple servers.  Since it wasn’t a regular request I didn’t want to waste time writing a script.

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My old desktop died a few days ago.  I had known over the last few days it was on it’s way out.  I was getting HDD, CD/DVD, RAM and CPU errors.  I’m pretty sure the motherboard was dieing.  I thought the RAM upgrade and a clean upgrade to Vista would make it better.  All was well for a few days until the errors started.  I even removed the new RAM and rolled it back to the factory XP install.  After the recovery install finished it never booted again.

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I decided to upgrade to Vista Business SP1 about two weeks ago.  My first impressions are that I like it.  Comparing it to XP SP3 I like the enhancements made.  Since when I did my install of Vista Business it started downloading updates so I wasn’t able to experience the full blown hell of Vista pre-SP1.  From the research I did before my upgrade, SP1 fixed a lot of the problems that caused some users to rollback to XP SP3.

I do find it annoying that after a clean boot I login to see 33% of my 2.5 GB of RAM is already being used.  I did get my feelings hurt with Vista rated my system a 1.0 over all.  My graphics score and gaming score wer 1.9 and 1.0 respectivly.  If I had a game for a Windows PC I would be hating life right about now.  I guess the P4 3.06 GHz w/ 2.5 GB RAM and an onboard 256MB video card is a little low end for Vista Business.  Funny part is when I dual boot Ubuntu 8.10 beta Compiz Fusion runs fine.  But Vista won’t let me enable Aero because my onboard Intel video is too old.  Not that I want to give up another 33% of RAM to be able to use Aero but still Compiz Fusion I think is better than Aero and it works fine.

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