Get Trigger-Happy
In Windows Power Tools: "Pulling the Event Trigger" (December 2004, InstantDoc ID 44431), Mark Minasi discusses how to use eventtriggers.exe to alert you when a certain event has happened on your system. I followed his example, but I couldn't get the event trigger to work. I entered
eventtriggers /create /eid 64002 /tr sysalert /tk "net send \[userid\] Something's deleting system files!" /ru \[userid\] /rp \[password\]
and received this error message:
ERROR: Unable to create event trigger named "sysalert".
I tried a couple of different trigger labels (/tr information and /tr 64002), but neither of them worked. What did I do wrong? Does anyone else have this problem? I use Windows XP with SP1.
On an XP SP2 machine (which can be even pickier about what runs), I typed
eventtriggers /create /eid 64002 /tr sysalert /tk "net send jack123 Something's deleting system files!" /ru markuserid /rp markpassword
as one line, and I received the message
SUCCESS: The Event Trigger "sysalert" has been created.
So, I'm wondering whether you've turned off a necessary service and that could be causing the problem. I'd love feedback from other readers who are experiencing problems or
have a suggestion for Ray.
Building Linux Skills
Dustin Puryear's "A Linux Primer for Windows Administrators" (November 2004, InstantDoc ID 44104) is wonderful. I don't use Linux at work, but I've always wanted to learn Linux. Last year, I installed Red Hat 8.0 and played around with it a little bit. Dustin's article has answered some of the questions I had. Can you suggest a way to see or access Windows file shares from a Linux workstation?
To share files between Linux and Windows, you need to learn how to use and deploy Samba. You can find out more about Samba at http://www.samba.org, or refer to my article "Learning Samba for File Sharing" (April 2001, InstantDoc ID 20053).
Death of the Floppy
In Top 10: "PC Computing Trends" (September 2004, InstantDoc ID 43570), number 10 states that the floppy disk is dead. Well, I'm all for that, but is Microsoft?
Recently, I bought a new motherboard for my home PC with a Serial ATA (SATA) controller on it. Windows XP didn't recognize the controller, so I had to hit F6 during the installation process to load the third-party driver. The Help message I received instructed me to "Please insert the driver disk into A: and press Enter." I didn't have the option to change where XP should look for the driver. It's kind of hard for companies to stop shipping servers with floppy drives until Microsoft stops hard-coding their existence into its OS!
Career Chicken-and-Egg Problem
I read Dianne Russell's column, Your Career: "Conquering Challenges, Reaping Rewards" (December 2004, InstantDoc ID 44429), and a question that I've always wanted answered came to mind: Why is it that when you try to land a job in IT, you often need some type of certification, but the recommended approach for getting a certification is to gain some experience first in the area you want to study? For example, one certification program I looked into stated that I had to have 1 year experience before signing up. I had a heck of a time getting positions as well as education because of this sit- uation. Do other IT pros find themselves caught in the same way? An article that addresses this question might be a good idea.
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