Koozie Notes

Windows SteadyState: XP Lockdown

While listening to Security Now, episode # 129 [Transcript], Steve and Leo provided an excellent and thorough review of Microsoft's SteadyState Software, a tool for locking down a computer running Windows XP.

Windows® SteadyState™ is now available. (Windows SteadyState was formerly known as Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.) Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them. Windows SteadyState is easier to download, set up, use, and maintain than Shared Computer Toolkit.

Steve sums this up with the following.

So the beauty of this, instead of putting, like, a write lock on your hard drive - which Windows won't tolerate because it's constantly updating the registry, and there's all kinds of things going on with Windows, as we know, our hard drive light is flickering there even when we're not doing anything. So instead of write-locking the hard drive, it basically sequesters any writes. And when the administrator logs off, the administrator being a special user to Windows SteadyState, it will prompt you, saying do you want me to retain these changes or flush them? A normal user, a non-administrative user, does not have access to that. There's no choice that they're able to make.

So if you want to lock down your windows computers, Windows SteadyState might be a good solution.  To better understand the pros and cons of SteadyState, I would highly recommend listening to episode #129 or reading the transcipt from Steve Gibson's web site, grc.com.

-Chris

Mac Printing Issues on 10.5.2

This evening I was banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why I couldn't print to my HP LJ1200 printer over TCP/IP from my new Powerbook with OSX, version 10.5.2.   I finally stumbled on to this thread from Apple Support, and found the missing ingredient:  Add "LP" for the queue name.

Now, when one sets up a new printer under Leopard, you begin with system preference and printer& fax.  After clicking on the "+" sign to add a new printer, I elected LPD for protocol box.  Next, I enter in the IP address for my HP printer.  After that, you come to the third item, queue name.  For some reason, Apple has the statement "Leave blank for default queue." right under this box.  When I left it blank, my print jobs kept stalling.  I tried different drivers, differnt options, but nothing worked. 

Finally, I deleted all my printers and started over.  This time I entered "LP" as the queue and guess what? I'm printing.  By the way, this solution worked with the generic postscript printer and the HP LJ 1200 drivers as well.

-Chris