Stephen Pillinger - Personal Web Page

I'm currently the Director of Computing Facilities and Senior Computer Officer with the School of Computer Science here at the University of Birmingham. I'm responsible for strategic and operational aspects of the School's computing infrastructure.

Projects

Linux Firewall Builder - XML to iptables Converter

A Perl program that takes firewall rules written in XML and generates an iptables based shell script for Linux based firewalls - can be used on dedicated firewalls or on general servers and clients.

 

Multicast System Control Daemon

A daemon that currently runs of Solaris, Linux and Windows machines that allows RSA signed multicast messages to be sent. Presently it allows groups or specific networks of machines to be quickly shutdown or rebooted by system administrators from a trusted source.

Tips and useful resources

Windows Deployment Service (WDS) - Vista & Windows 7 Unattended Installations

Generating Windows IAS PEAP certificates using openssl

Changing Active Directory passwords via LDAP using PHP

Synchronising Mozilla, Thunderbird, Lightning Calendard with Exchange

Getting OpenSSH and Windows 2003 server working

Resizing NTFS partitions via PXE under Linux

Generate media barcodes dynamically

Steve's Top Tips

• Want GNOME to put applications on a designated workspace or set its geometry at startup?
  Try using devilspie
• Can't get Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) or Windows System Image Manager to create a catalog or get Parameter count mismatch errors?
  Try exporting the image first then creating the catalog from it. More info about WAIK and WDS...
• Run explorer as administrator:
  runas /user:administrator "explorer.exe /separate"
• View the contents of a source rpm:
  rpm2cpio rar-3.8.0-1.rf.src.rpm | cpio -it
• To convert Nero NRG files to ISO - skip the first 300K:
  dd bs=1k if=image.nrg of=image.iso skip=300

Laptop security cables

Do they actually protect your laptop?

My old pages...