Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Restrict Domain Computers From Ripping CD’s on WMP!

Often times in a group policy environment it can be a pain to keep your users in check.  They might try to treat their workstation as a personal computer by bringing in music cds and ‘ripping’ them onto their local storage.  This can create a huge nightmare for any IT staff trying to control a local storage quota and can even degrade performance of the local workstation.  Luckily theres a solution; by forcing the user to use the ‘corporate’ skin for windows media player, the rip option is no longer available.  Try these steps to enforce a clean media player environment for your users.

First open the group policy you want to modify and navigate to the follow setting:

Navigate to the following setting.

Select enable and input the skin you would like to enforce.

Ping Returning Beep + Symbols?

Corrupt Winsock

So if you’ve ever gotten a terrible spyware infection you might have bumped into this little bug.  When you try to ping something the system returns a beep from the system speaker and shows the host as “oy” (or any other symbol).  Heres a quick fix:

Open a command prompt window (Start > Run > cmd <enter>)

Next type the following string:

netsh winsock reset

Restart and your finished.

Enjoy =)

Mime Types (Apache vs Office 2K7)

Just a quick boring post about an issue I had with our Apache server at work and the new office 2007 documents….

You may not bump into these issues if you didn’t setup your web server from the ground up but if you do, here’s a quick fix…

We’ll the description:
When you open a link to a newer office document, for example, PowerPoint 2007 (pptx) apache may assume the document is a zip format and direct your browser to open the file with the application associated with zip files.  To fix this simply update the associations in the mime.types file located @ /etc/mime.types (sudo gedit /etc/mime.types)

application/msword                                doc dot  docx
application/ms-excel                              xls xlb xlt xlsx
application/ms-powerpoint                 ppt pps pptx

Added items in red.

After you save the file, restart Apache and your golden…  (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart)