Saturday, March 30, 2013

Disable Thums.db

Just found a way to disable the annoying thumbs.db from being created:

http://www.technoleros.com/turn-off-caching-of-windows-7-thumbnails-in-hidden-thumbs-db-files/

Well done Microsoft, it is very well hidden in gpedit.msc

"To start the Local Group Policy Editor, click the Windows 7 start icon and type gpedit.msc in the search text box and hit Enter.  The Editor will open to the top-level Local Computer Policy, so you will have to expand the User Configuration item in the left-side pane of the Editor window.  Drill down through Administrative Templates, then Windows Components, and click on the Windows Explorer item.  Near the top of the list in the right-hand pane of the Editor window you will find the setting “Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files”  "

While you are there, you may want to disable Windows from showing recent search terms too.

Friday, March 29, 2013

forfiles

Recently, I have come across a "find" like command in Windows called "forfiles".  Similar to the find command in Linux, you can use this command to locate files and execute a command on them.  Full details can be found at:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753551(v=ws.10).aspx

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Getting Linux to resolve NetBIOS names

Like many others, my network consists of a mixture of Linux and Windows machines.  By default, it seems Linux doesn't not seem to resolve NetBIOS names.  After a quick Google search, this seems can be "fixed" by adding wins to the line begins with hosts: in the nsswitch.conf file found in /etc/

cd /etc/nsswitch.conf
sudo pico nsswitch.conf
locate the line that starts with host:
append the word wins to its end, e.g.

hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 wins

save the changes, and now you should be able to ping computers on your network with their NetBIOS names.

(ref: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-networking-3/ping-netbios-names-from-linux-samba-271336/)

edited: can use NetBIOS name with mount command too.  This is much easier to remember than using IPs of machines.

edited 2018-02-04: You may need to install winbind to get this to work.  Here is the command.

sudo apt install winbind libnss-winbind

service winbind restart