The majority of cds that come into my office get ripped to an iso,
stored on the file server, and put into a an ugly cd storage box,
hopefully not to be touched again. Unfortunately, not all of my cds can
be put away, I had nearly 20 cds that I still needed use to for
installation and troubleshooting.
With the Ultimate Boot CD, I
reduced the number of cds on my desk to 6 (that includes 4 OS install
discs). Before customizing it is
simply a collection of free bootable disk images with a menu system to
select between them (note, I recommend that ALL people who work with
computers have this cd). After my additions, it eliminates nearly all of
the cds I used to have to keep around by putting them all on one.
I created the ISO of Disk Director with LC ISO Creator. The
Altiris Deployment Solution created those ISOs. The bios flashers were
made from the boot floppy creators provided by Dell and saved using a Virtual floppy
Drive. After making my changes, I created a new iso with Nero and tested the changes under VMWare.
Note on Making Your Custom Disc Bootable: To make the disc
bootable has different settings under different burning packages. Under
Nero, you need to change a few things in the boot tab of the disc
properties; The image file is in "UBCDdir\boot\loader.bin\". Under the
expert settings; kind of emulation should be set to "no emulation", Load
segment of sectors is "07C0", and number of loaded sectors is 4.
I have been looking for a way to easily (and cheaply) acquire
statistics on users of my lab. I want to know things like; How many
unique users use the lab get each day/week/month/semester? How often does
the average student stay logged in? Do all of our users login in a given
month/semester?
A bit of searching by a coworker found that events were logged to the
primary domain controller's security log with event id 680 whenever
someone attempts to login. He was further able to work out from an export
of the log answers to some of the questions we sought answers to.
My coworker was on vacation last week, and he tasked me with exporting
the logs on Monday; I forgot. So this morning (when I was reminded a week
late (user error put it on the wrong date) by my Palm of the task), I sought a way to make
a scheduled task of it. With the program ELDump, I was able to
construct a command line to perform the export. It was then trivial to
wrap it in a batch file and set it up as a scheduled task.
The batch file: SET TODAY=%DATE%
SET YEAR=%TODAY:~-4%
SET DAY=%TODAY:~-7,-5%
SET MONTH=%TODAY:~-10,-8%
That batch file spits out a csv file that tells the who (what user),
where (from what machine), and when that we care about for each login.
With some appropriate crunching, my coworker can now tell us when the lab
is most used, how many unique people use the lab in a span of time,
what the average number of users per day we see, and answers to other
similar questions. While none of the results were a real surprise to us,
it is nice to know that we can now provide actual numbers to the powers
above and grant submissions.
