IE Lab Survival Course Part I : Remote Desktop Part II : IE Lab Survival Part III : Understanding Your Machine

IE Lab Survival Course

Part I : Remote DesktopPart II : IE Lab Survival

Part III : Understanding Your Machine

Remote Desktop Allow you to control your computer in home /

hall from another location Comes from Windows XP Professional Windows XP Home users can try VNC Generally, remote desktop performs much

better than VNC

Setting up Remote Desktop Four steps

Enable remote desktop in Windows Set a password Configure firewall to allow it (if you have one) Setup a dynamic DNS service

Enable Remote Desktop My Computer -> Properties (Window-Break) Remote -> Allow users to connect remotely to

this computer If you are not administrator, you need to add

your user at “Select Remote Users…”

Set password For security reasons, Windows only allow you to re

mote login into users with passwords If you don’t want to enter password when turning

on your machine physically, the tool Tweak UI can help

http://www.google.com/search?q=Tweak+UI&btnI (by the way, this is “I’m feeling lucky”)

Go to Logon -> Autologon and set a default user

Configuring firewall If you have a firewall installed, you must

configure it to allow remote desktop connections

Windows XP SP2 or above has built-in Windows Firewall

Enable incoming connections to TCP port 3389

Some basic networking concepts IP TCP / UDP Ports

IP Computers are identified by IP addresses

Control Panel -> Network Connections -> double-click a connection -> Support

Alternatively, you can run “ipconfig” in cmd.exe 192.168.x.x, 169.254.x.x and 10.x.x.x are “fake” IP’s

Think of your mailing address

TCP / UDP Messages sent to your computer usually come in t

wo different “protocols” – TCP and UDP Web browsing (HTTP) : TCP Email (SMTP) : TCP Remote Desktop : TCP Warcraft 3 : UDP

Think of postal mail and packages

Port Your computer received a message, but which pro

gram is it for? Programs are identified by “port”, a number bet

ween 1-65535 Web servers : TCP port 80 Email : TCP port 25 Remote Desktop : TCP port 3389 Warcraft 3 : UDP port 6112

Think of the name written on envelopes

Now have a try Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> Communicatio

ns -> Remote Desktop Connection Alternatively, use Start -> Run (Window-R) -> “mstsc”

Find your IP address and connect to it Do not use localhost / 127.0.0.1 to test

Couple of useful options Display -> Full screen Local Resources -> Local Devices -> Disk Drives Enabling “Disk Drives” also allows you to copy and past

e files between local and remote machines!

Dynamic DNS service For some ISP’s (and Resnet), your IP address cha

nges every time Can we have a fixed “name” like yahoo.com ? This is called DNS – Domain Name Service

Go to cmd.exe and run “ping yahoo.com”C:\temp>ping yahoo.comPinging yahoo.com [216.109.112.135] with 32 bytes of data:Reply from 216.109.112.135: bytes=32 time=360ms TTL=49

Even if the IP address changes, the domain name will redirect you to the right machine

Dynamic DNS service Two free services

DynDNS No-IP

Demonstration…




Machines in IE network WinXP machines

IEUGPxx 1008PCxx Weird names such as A5, C

2, D6…

Solaris machines Operating system is Unix iesun2 ~ iesun11 iesun3 should be the faste

st

Machine Speed

iesun2 3x296 Mhz

iesun3 1336 Mhz

iesun4 400 Mhz

iesun5 502 Mhz

iesun6 550 Mhz

iesun7 400 Mhz

iesun8 333 Mhz

iesun9 400 Mhz

iesun10 333 Mhz

iesun11 550 Mhz

Command: psrinfo -v

Machines in IE network Servers

samba-srv, samba-srv2 – U: ielabnt0 – M: iepclan – X: printsrv – print server gateway – SSH gateway gateway2 – SFTP gateway personal – web server …

Windows XP tips Where to put your working data?

Desktop, My Documents, etc are stored in your “profile”, which is cleared when you login/logout

Don’t put important files there as they are lost if your machine hangs / reboots

U: is no good for large files Network drive = slow The drive is reliable, but the connection isn’t Many people have lost data when saving files to U:

C:\temp is quite good Fast, stable, not wiped out at reboot Remember - it is cleared every 6:00 / 6:30 am

Windows XP tips U: is actually a share folder on samba-srv

A share folder has two parts – name/IP of the server, and name of the share

You connect to it as a network drive My computer -> Tools -> Map Network Drive Server : samba-srv Share : <your username> Or in cmd.exe

net use u: \\samba-srv\<username> To disconnect

My computer -> Tools -> Disconnect Network Drive net use u: /delete

Windows XP tips You can connect to someone else’s U: ! You have to do it in cmd.exe

net use v: \\samba-srv\<username> /user:<username> It will prompt for a password

Handy when working on group projects

Solaris tips Do you even know they exist? Most common use is FTP to U:

Use SSH File Transfer Client or some FTP software to connect to gateway2.ie.cuhk.edu.hk

But you can also connect to a unix shell with PuTTY (recommended) SSH Shell Client

Inside CU (or with CU VPN) : iesun??.ie.cuhk.edu.hk Outside CU : gateway.ie.cuhk.edu.hk, then run

ssh iesun??

Solaris tips Usage

Do Unix programming Write PHP/Perl/Python programs Setup website Check U: quota

iesun3 ~> quota -vDisk quotas for tng6 (uid 22989):Filesystem usage quota limit timeleft files quota limit/data/grad 330260 500000 500500 5176 8000 8100

Website setup You can setup your website there

Example: http://personal.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~tng6/ Steps

Create public_html folder in U: or by SSH-ing to gateway2 Upload files into public_html folder For folders, set “others” permission to read+execute (7

05) For files, set “others” permission to read (604) Usually the default setting is ok

Website setup Directory listing is by default disabled To enable, create a file named “.htaccess” (yes,

beginning with a dot) under public_html with the following:Options Indexes

More advanced configurations:DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html index.cgi index.phpOptions Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinksIndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=* FoldersFirst IgnoreCase SuppressDescription

RewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^wiki/?(.*)$ /~tng6/w/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

IE VPN You should be familiar with CU VPN In fact, there is an IE VPN as well

Server: rlabvpn.cuhk.edu.hk Username: <IE username> Password: <Windows/Unix password, I forgot>

Allow you to access FYP lab machines and U: net use u: \\samba-srv.iepclan.ie.cuhk.edu.hk\<username

> /user:<username>

We used to be able to access M:, but it seems no longer working

IE VPN Principle of VPN?

Actually, every network card (instead of computer) has an IP address

VPN is like creating a virtual network card with a long long LAN cable connecting your machine and the VPN server

IE VPN When connecting to samba-srv…

samba-srv.iepclan.ie.cuhk.edu.hk is a domain name Windows resolves it by DNS and get 192.168.100.251 Windows consider the three network interfaces (cards)

203.218.123.234 137.189.210.251 192.168.58.51

192.168.58.51 “matches best” with 192.168.100.251, so it connects through IE VPN

Not entirely accurate, but the idea is like that




Why? Help eliminate repetitive tasks

Computers are supposed to simplify stuff, but without proper understanding it just make your life harder

Know how to utilize existing tools in creative ways

DOS commands? Registry editing?

Make your computer run more efficiently No need to upgrade so often, wonderful $$ savings!

Fix common problems by yourself

Important concepts in Windows Filesystem

Don’t worry, not talking about NTFS today Registry Processes Services

Filesystem Foundation of your machine

Everything you run, everything you see (or don’t) exists somewhere in the filesystem

Knowing which files are which can be very helpful Essential if you want to learn DOS commands

Tips Set fixed pagefile size Proper partitioning and defragmentation Set very small browser cache

Registry A place for programs and Windows itself to store se

ttings and run time information HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT : filetype information HKEY_CURRENT_USER (HKCU) : your own config HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM) : machine-wide config HKEY_USER contains the configuration for all users, one o

f the subkeys is mapped to HKCU HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG contains run time information,

e.g. hardware information, running services; don’t modify

Tips Show filename extensions in explorer Keep an eye on Software\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Processes You can think of processes as “running

programs” Bring up task manager and look at them one

by one If you are familiar enough with your own machine,

you can identify suspicious programs easily Google is your friend

Tips Keep the task manager icon in system tray Watch the columns CPU usage, Virtual Memory size,

Read and Write bytes

Services Services are essential components that keep your

machine operational DNS Networking File and printer sharing Windows update And many others

Not readily visible from task manager But there are also a lot of useless services that was

te CPU time and memory You can get rid of them from services.msc Warning : be very, very careful!

Useful tools Msconfig

Control what programs are run on startup Tweak UI

Change many “hidden” settings Process Explorer

Get detailed information on running processes Treesize Professional

Nice overview of your disk usage

Thank you! Any questions?