Multi Boot Thumb Drive with YUMI

There are a couple of Linux distros I use regularly for such activities as creating recovery images of developer machines and communications debugging. To avoid software installation on production systems I simply run these distros from a bootable thumb drive created with the help of a very useful tool called YUMI.

YUMI automates the installation of a number of supported distros onto the one thumb drive using a simple GUI. Once the distros are installed I simply create a folder on the thumb drive called "Data" and keep any docs etc that I need in there the same as I would on any other thumb drive.

Hosts File Fixes PCS7 OS Project Download Errors

I was getting error message whenever attempting to download a PCS7 OS Client project. The Client PC had two network interfaces, one on the terminal network and another on an office network. On further investigation I found the following:

• Pinging by PC name from the PCS7 Engineering Server was resolving to the address on the office network, not that of the terminal network. 
• The Engineering Server LHMOSTS file had the client PC with the terminal network address
• ipconfig /flushdns did not fix the problem

After some googling I stumbled on the solution - the hosts file! It seems that lmhosts and hosts are used by different utilites and ping is one of the utilites that uses hosts. 

After adding the correct name and ip address to hosts ping resolved to the desired address and PCS7 downloaded the OS client project without errors. This would indicate that PCS7 also uses hosts or at least the tcp/ip utilies like ping that reference it.

RDP to Windows Server for Non-Administrator Users

Windows Server 2003 by default does not allow Remote Desktop Connections from users that are not part of the Administrators group.

To get around this open a command prompt and enter the following:

C:\> WMIC RDPermissions where "TerminalName='console'" call AddAccount "Remote Desktop Users", 2


Any user added to the Remote Desktop Users group on the server will now be able to start an RDP session.