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July 31, 2006

New tool: whoamIP

A customer of mine asked how he could determine, from /etc/profile at login time, the IP address of remotely-connected telnet users: He wanted to be able to figure out the general area they were logging in from - the office? one of several warehouses? etc. - to determine things like default printers for their business application.

This is not as easy as it sounds. There's no direct network call to make, because the shell itself is not connected to the network (it's insulated by a pseudo-tty), and the indirect methods are not widely portable. This information is usually found in the utmpx structure, but is not always readily available (the who command on SCO UnixWare doesn't seem to expose this information).

So I wrote a program, whoamIP, to make a best effort at retrieving this information, and so far it works properly on SCO UnixWare, SCO Open Server, and on Linux.

Feedback (especially on portability issues) is welcomed.

Posted by steve at 08:10 PM

July 29, 2006

New Tech Tip: Converting Win32 Kernel-mode Print Drivers to User Mode

I've been doing print drivers on and off for a long time - back from the NT 3.51 days - but recently had to do my first conversion of a driver from kernel mode to user mode.

Most of the actual graphical parts of the driver are more or less unchanged, but the housekeeping and support functions differ enough to make this a challenge the first time. A few of the really trivial changes were not obvious, and I burned days and days trying to track them down.

Microsoft's documentation on this is really thin, and I looked all over the internet without success for some comprehensive guidance, so I decided to write a Tech Tip on the subject.

I started taking notes almost immediately, keeping track of big or little issues as I found them, and ended up with something that covers the major points pretty well. It doesn't replace understanding how print drivers work, of course, but for somebody thrown into the deep end of the pool with a "Convert this driver" directive, it should save a lot of time.

Unixwiz.net Tech Tip: Converting Win32 Kernel-mode Print Drivers to User Mode

Posted by steve at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

July 11, 2006

New Tech Tip: Slipstreamed Driver Installation of SBS 2003

After getting really stuck installing Windows SBS2003 on a machine with a RAID controller not supported by the setup discs, I decided to figure out how to burn my own install CD with the required driver files. I figured I was going to have to muck with config files and build it "by hand", but I ended up finding some software which completely took care of the process - it was wonderful.

So I wrote up the whole process in another one of my Tech Tips in the hopes that it will encourage others to make a go of it. It's an easy process - try it!

Unixwiz.net Tech Tip: Slipstreamed Driver Installation of SBS 2003

Posted by steve at 03:31 PM | Comments (2)