Jorgensen.org.uk

Recently we had to "break into" one of our windows boxes, and ended up using the "Offline NT Password & Registry" Editor from http://www.pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/.  It appears to be an excellent tool - but there was no information on how to get that to PXE boot.  This blog entry should help with PXE booting it.

You will need:

• A DHCP Server
• A TFTP Server 
• The CD image
• The PC on which you want to change the passwords

Most DHCP servers will work. For ISC DHCPd the configuration needs to be amended to include:

next-server 10.1.111.8; # IP address of TFTP server 

Even Windows DHCP server can be used here.

The TFTP server (which can be the same server as the DHCP server), serves out a directory tree - in our case "/srv/tftp" in which the CD contents needs to be available. This can be done by simply mounting it. We put the CD image in /srv/tftp/cd110511.iso and mounted it on /srv/tftp/cd110511 using an fstab entry: 

/srv/tftp/cd110511.iso /srv/tftp/cd110511 auto loop 0 0

And the corresponding pxe boot menu entry looks like this:

label win-pwreset
menu label Windows Password Reset
   menu passwd soopersekrit
   kernel cd110511/vmlinuz
   initrd cd110511/initrd.cgz,cd110511/scsi.cgz

And voila!

As I recently got an iPhone4 for work, I've been trying to make the best use of it - it already handles the instant messaging (mostly Skype), Nagios alerts (an XMPP client) and obviously email. And sometimes phone calls, microphone allowing. But I was still missing (at least) one thing that I had working on other phones: tethering.

As it turns out, others have had similar desires and come up with solutions. By now, the things needed for this is available in Debian Squeeze - the "test" release of Debian (which happens to be rock-stable), so installing the required bits is as easy as installing anything else:

apt-get install ipheth-utils 

and switch on "Internet Tethering" on the iPhone. Then plug the phone into the USB port. The combination of linux kernel, ipheth kernel module (which is now in the mainline kernel, so no need to install ipheth-dkms), Network Manager and DHCP takes care of the rest :-)

Allegedly it is also possible to do over bluetooth, but I have not tried that yet. The phone tends to drain its battery within 36 hours, so the cable needs to be at hand anyway.

Note: Since this will send your PC's network traffic through the iPhone, additional data charges may apply. Buyer beware. Don't blame me.