- Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

team viewer
by David Mehler 28 Mar '11

28 Mar '11

Hello, Team viewer was mentioned on another list as a remote control method. My information on it however was inaccurate and I was wondering if anyone has used it to take control of another's computer remote in basically, with a screen reader on their local machine? Thanks. Dave.

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Blind Sys Admins website is taking shape.
by Darragh OHeiligh 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

Greetings, I just wanted to briefly let you know before I run out the door to go home that the www.blindsysadmins.com website is really starting to take shape. There are three documents relating to system administration tasks. There's an accessible applications page there that's a working progress. You can write your own documents when you log in. They are unpublished until their reviewed and I'll shortly ask one or two people to come on board as reviewers. If your interested in that let me know. The forum is there as well and it's ready to be used. We have thirteen users. Not all of these are administrators so I really need more administrators to register. As I say, the entire thing is a work in progress. Some parts such as painstakingly creating categories and writing the accessible applications page take time but I'm fitting it in between everything else. The next step will be to tidy up the main page and make it much more appealing and interesting. Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh(a)oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie

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Blind Sys Admins website is taking shape.
by Darragh OHeiligh 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

Greetings, I just wanted to briefly let you know before I run out the door to go home that the www.blindsysadmins.com website is really starting to take shape. There are three documents relating to system administration tasks. There's an accessible applications page there that's a working progress. You can write your own documents when you log in. They are unpublished until their reviewed and I'll shortly ask one or two people to come on board as reviewers. If your interested in that let me know. The forum is there as well and it's ready to be used. We have thirteen users. Not all of these are administrators so I really need more administrators to register. As I say, the entire thing is a work in progress. Some parts such as painstakingly creating categories and writing the accessible applications page take time but I'm fitting it in between everything else. The next step will be to tidy up the main page and make it much more appealing and interesting. Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh(a)oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie

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best antimalware
by David Mehler 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

Hello, I've got a machine that has best antimalware on it. That is a fake security tool, it's actually a trojan and virus a lot of nasty things. I'm wondering i've googled and have seen a lot of sites with removal instructions, but nothing from reputable AV companies AVG, avast, etc. I'm wondering does anyone have a utility or instructions that will kill this? I'd prefer a free standalone utility. Thanks. Dave.

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Launch Jaws when a Braille display is connected.
by Darragh OHeiligh 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Good afternoon, I have been thinking about how to optomize my productivity and accessibility while in server rooms. what I would like to have available is the following: I Plug in the Focus 40 when I'm at a server and Jaws would automatically launch and show that I'm at the control alt delete screen. I could press a specific command on the display to simulate control alt and delete and I could then log in. This would be fantastic as I'd be able to do away with the need to try to use the network KVM's on each rack and I wouldn't have to cary both a Braille display and a keyboard with me. The focus supports input and output so it would be fine for troubleshooting. Of course, I'd rather have a synthesizer speaking to me but that's not a great idea as I'm still never sure what server the KVM is going to be on. Any ideas? I've heard of scripts that can monitor for certain kernel message ID's that can then start an application however after looking at a few examples it doesn't seem like this will be much of a viable solution as it would need to be constantly running. Of course Jaws doesn't natively support this kind of thing. Interestingly, BrlTTY has had this functionality for years. Thanks Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh(a)oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie

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Launch Jaws when a Braille display is connected.
by Darragh OHeiligh 21 Mar '11

21 Mar '11

Good afternoon, I have been thinking about how to optomize my productivity and accessibility while in server rooms. what I would like to have available is the following: I Plug in the Focus 40 when I'm at a server and Jaws would automatically launch and show that I'm at the control alt delete screen. I could press a specific command on the display to simulate control alt and delete and I could then log in. This would be fantastic as I'd be able to do away with the need to try to use the network KVM's on each rack and I wouldn't have to cary both a Braille display and a keyboard with me. The focus supports input and output so it would be fine for troubleshooting. Of course, I'd rather have a synthesizer speaking to me but that's not a great idea as I'm still never sure what server the KVM is going to be on. Any ideas? I've heard of scripts that can monitor for certain kernel message ID's that can then start an application however after looking at a few examples it doesn't seem like this will be much of a viable solution as it would need to be constantly running. Of course Jaws doesn't natively support this kind of thing. Interestingly, BrlTTY has had this functionality for years. Thanks Regards Darragh Ó Héiligh Fujitsu Offices of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Fredrick Building, South Fredrick Street, Dublin2 Telephone: +353 (1) 618 3559 Email: darragh.oheiligh(a)oireachtas.ie Internet: http://www.oireachtas.ie

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Interesting way of installing an nt6x os
by Ben Mustill-Rose 14 Mar '11

14 Mar '11

Hey all, I've been playing around with a new way of installing nt 6x operating systems (Vista, 2008 and 7) and I thought I'd post about it in the hope that someone might find it useful. Essentially, this is a script that excepts the path to a windows setup wim file along with a destination drive letter where you want the os installed. It then copies the setup files to the destination and once that drive is booted, the install starts streight away. I originally came across this method when I was reviving a netbook that required a 1.8 hard drive which I was not willing to purchase. The script allows you to install to a usb drive, so in this situation, after a bit of fiddling around in the bios, I was able to boot w7 from a usb drive and the netbook now functions as a local PHP server. The main advantage from an accessibility point of view that I've found is that you no longer have to worry about setting the boot order in the bios. I know that not everyone on here enjoys taking things apart as much as I doo, but, if you had a laptop for example which just wasn't booting from cd, you could remove the harddrive, run this script, reinstall the drive and the install would start streight away. Unattended installs seem to work fine; I've just tested this out on a machine that required a vista reinstall and the setup got to the stage where I could press windows u without it prompting me. I've put the script on dropbox; I don't claim any ownership to this - I found it a few months ago on one of the boot cd forums but I can't find the post again and the author isn't listed in the readme. Instructions: Download the zip at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5152598/installer.zip and extract it. Connect the destination hard drive to your working machine and take a note of its letter. Run the script; the first screen is an intro so press enter. You'll now see a dialog which lets you brows to an install.wim file. This will usually be located at x:\sources\install.wim, x being your optical drive. Note that if you have the wim file stored locally, the script will sometimes fail if the path is too long. Using the subst command to create a virtual drive seems to solve this issue. E.g. at a command prompt, type subst x: c:\longPath\sources\install.wim where x is the letter you want your virtual drive to have. Once you've given it the wim file, your presented with a list of the different versions of windows that the wim contains. Enter the number of the edition that you want and hit enter. The next few screens deel with drive letters. In every case, give the script the letter of the destination drive, regardless of what it tells you. When you are asked if x: is a usb hard drive, only say yes if you are planning to boot the os from usb - if you have the drive connected via a usb adaptor but you intend to connect it directly to the motherboard in another machine, say no. The script will format the destination drive if its not empty and will then begin the process, which seems to take between 10 to 15 minutes with a 7200RPM source drive and a 5400RPM destination. You get a press any key prompt once it's done, at which point you can remove the drive and install it into it's original machine. It's not exactly a game changer, but as I said, hopefully someone will find it useful. Cheers, Ben.

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blocking pornographic web sites, family environment
by David Mehler 10 Mar '11

10 Mar '11

Hello, I've got a Windows xp machine that I've received and it needs cleaning. That however is not the point of this email. It got this way because of visits to porn and other adware carrying sites. I'm needing to block this stuff at the pc level. The place it's going the user's do not have the technical know how to go beyound the machine, install another browser, etc. so block it there probably with IE or Firefox and it's gone. I can not purchase new hardware or software for this project and must therefor rely on open source/free tools and techniques. Some solutions i've tried in the past though this first one is no longer proving effective, has been to drop a hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc which contains sites and pointers to localhost. The idea is the redirects won't work. Enabling the popup blocker at maximum as well as the phishing filter is standard in my setups. On a home router once I deployed a squid proxy with a squidguard antispam redirector, this was marginally effective. I've also deployed the opensource dansguardian content filter, this slowed things down noticeably. I'm wanting to deploy some of these packages on the local machine itself. If anyone has any suggestions on this issue please let me know. Thanks. Dave.

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vmware and video resolution on emulated card
by David Mehler 06 Mar '11

06 Mar '11

Hello, I'm running vmware workstation. I've got an xp vm that when I alter it's video settings I can get it up to something insane like 1900 by 1024 at 32 bit color. On my host machine I can only pull 1280 by 768. I'm not sure how this is possible given that vmware only emulates the video card it doesn't add another one. Did I miss something here? Thanks. Dave.

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Connecting to a running vm across the network
by David Mehler 04 Mar '11

04 Mar '11

Hello, I've got a vm running on a machine under vmware workstation. In this case it's a Vista vm. I'm wondering if it's possible to connect to this vm from across the network, without installing the full workstation on another machine? Thanks. Dave.

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