Linksys WAG160N

Since my DSL went active I've been using the Linksys WAG160N, with mixed opinions. After running OpenWRT and DD-WRT on my other routers over the last few years I may've been somewhat spoilt, however I'm finding the web GUI for the WAG160N absolutely crap. I'm also finding the stability of the thing to be somewhat sketchy. I've tried all the various firmware revisions and it's made no difference. Would I buy it again? Right now I honestly don't know. I was going to see what I could do to patch OpenWRT to get it running, however since I use this router for work and personal, and I can't really justify spending the same again on a play box this makes doing so somewhat hard to convince myself to do.

Fixing redirected My Docs ACLs, using Powershell

For many of our customers we redirect a user's My Documents to a directory of the same name, on a Windows share. For example, the user 'JMcCockFaceTheIII' * may have their My Docs redirected to "\\FILESERVER\Home\JMcCockFaceTheIII\My Documents", which are stored in a local path of D:\Data\Users\JMcCockFaceTheIII, on FILESERVER. Obviously you can switch \\FILESERVER\Home for a DFS share, etc.

In some instances you might have a significant number and for whatever reason the permissions may have been altered, and the Group Policy defaults don't quite suit your requirements.

In days of old we'd sort this with a batch script and it would be ok, but might take a while to run. Powershell has changed things though. The script we've popped together (below) runs lightning quick in comparison, and we thought someone else might also find it useful.

Just save it in a ps1 file, and invoke it from powershell, providing your directory path that you want to "fix".

To use our example from above, you'd call the script on FILESERVER, from Powershell:

PS C:\Users\Karl> C:\path\to\scripts\fix-perms.ps1 "D:\Data\Users"

The script would then go over each directory and try and add that user to the ACL with Modify rights - i.e. the JMcCockFaceTheIII user to the D:\Data\Users\JMcCockFaceTheIII directory.

In our scenario we required ourselves, a specific group, SYSTEM and each user to have access only - So we pushed the common permissions from the parent, and then ran the script to add the individual users.

# Fix-Perms
# Iterates over all child directories, and adds the user, with the same name as the directory, to the ACL with modify rights
# Usage:
# Fix-Perms "C:\Path\To\Directory"
# Or, for the current directory
# Fix-Perms "."

# our parameters, throw a warning if we get none
param (
[string] $dirpath = $(throw "Please specify the full path to the directory!")
)

# get list of all child directories, in the current directory
$directories = dir $dirpath | where {$_.PsIsContainer}

# iterate over the directories
foreach ($dir in $directories)
{
# echo out what the full directory is that we're working on now
write-host Working on $dir.fullname using $dir.name

# setup the inheritance and propagation as we want it
$inheritance = [system.security.accesscontrol.InheritanceFlags]"ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit"
$propagation = [system.security.accesscontrol.PropagationFlags]"None"

# get the existing ACLs for the directory
$acl = get-acl $dir.fullname

# add our user (with the same name as the directory) to have modify perms
$aclrule = new-object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule($dir.name, "Modify", $inheritance, $propagation, "Allow")

# check if given user is Valid, this will barf if not
$sid = $aclrule.IdentityReference.Translate([System.Security.Principal.securityidentifier])

# add the ACL to the ACL rules
$acl.AddAccessRule($aclrule)

# set the acls
set-acl -aclobject $acl -path $dir.fullname
}

There's no warranty on this, so use and test at your own risk - I can tell you it works in our scenario, however.

* Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. I should also probably point out this was also published on $company blog, but with a few obvious alterations.

Moving sucks giant donkey cock

Having never actually moved, in memorable life, I clearly had no idea what I was letting myself in for. About 15 days ago I started the process of moving into my new house with a few guys I know from school. Bugger me sideways it's ridiculously hard work, and ridiculously shit. We were only moving from Bath to Bristol, and that was bad enough. I dread to think what its like moving from one side of a country to another, let alone to another country altogether.

I had wanted to write a massive Clarkson-esque rant, but quite frankly I can't be arsed. Moving is fun. The act of moving sucks giant donkey cock.

Not exactly elegant, but pretty much how I feel about the whole thing!

On the off chance there was an important non-work related email, PM, or whatever I apologise if I've not yet responded. Unfortunately between all the mailing lists, and even with 99.8% accurate spam filtering, I have rather a lot of stuff in my inbox to sort. If was really important, it might be quicker just to mail again.

The embodiment of metal...

..is a 62 year old monk, who sings in a metal band (link includes some footage). Now for the part just for the non-believers in the power of metal; Brother Cesare does it solely "to convert people to life, to understand life, to grab hold of life, to savour it and enjoy it. Full stop". How awesome is that?

Throttling baby penguins with packet shaping

Bandwidth throttling, or packet shaping, is becoming a more common feature that many ISPs give you, the consumer, for free. This is killing the planet. Bear with me and you'll see sense.

During UK working hours, and peak times in the evening many will see traffic being shaped (and these periods are being increased). Effectively this means that the only period where any legal and unhindered downloading can occur is between the hours of midnight and 9am. At the company I work for, we all work from home - which means pulling down ISOs and other media from companies like Microsoft, etc. during the day - which we can't do any more without the line being throttled. During the day this kills us as our VoIP phone system can get stuttery, connections to servers becomes unreliable or you get poor responsiveness.

This now increasingly means that I'm keeping PCs on during the night to get the stuff I need. For our small company multiply this by 3. Now take into account illegal downloads and the population of the UK. Now multiply this across the world.

I'd be willing to bet that the environmental impact of upgrading the infrastructure to the home would be less than that caused by the number of computers eating electricity.

So, ISPs - Stop killing the little baby penguins.