Re: Big Brother Is Watching?

The corporate LAN that I've been known to haunt is fairly typical of most that use the SMS delivery method.

Windows 9x

If your a windows 9x/Me user then your probably pretty close to being stuffed, as SMS (AFAIK) does most of it's evil through a domain logon script.
If somebody knows how to kill this in the registry without taking out the rest of the profile stuff, you get my open mouthed awe.

If you can't make the upgrade to NT and you've got a little free reign with the cabling, I'd investigate getting on old unused machine,setting up something like E-smith and running your own (sub)domain throught it.

Windows NT

This one is a little easier as you can just set yourself up for local logon instead of domain logon. This way you loose out on a little trust but don't need to deal with logon scripts.
The only pain comes around if (or when) your corporate domain user password expires. Then you'll need brief access to a Win 9x box to login and change it. It's not perfect but my dept' has found it the better of two evils.

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Re: Re: Big Brother Is Watching?
by JohnB (Scribe) on Jan 13, 2001 at 02:11 UTC

Without SMS my Perl programs keep running for days until I stop the programs. With SMS there are problems with my Perl programs and other applications such as Outlook, Word and Access. Outlook would often lock up while writting an email and when I look in the task manger and find "CLISVC95.EXE or CLICORE not responding". Other people had had these same lockup problems on other applications.

After logging on the corporate network I stop these programs from running. There is one Perl program that was started over a week ago and it is still running without problems on a computer without SMS. I am going to write a Perl program to delete these files.

Here is a way to disable SMS on a Windows 95/98 which I tested on one computer. Check the first line of your Autoexec.bat file for SMS and delete this line. Rename your autoexec.bat to something else like auto.bat. Edit this file a put the word SET in front of your path and you may have to edit other statements in the file. Delete any file with autoexec in the name. There is a hidden file called autoexec.sms that also needs to be deleted. Create two directories called AUTOEXEC.BAT and AUTOEXEC.SMS. Reboot your computer and log in, there will be a couple of error messages but the login script kept loading. Run the file batch file you created. Program editors, Outlook, Word, and Excel on this 233 MHz Pentium II with 64 Meg Ram now runs much faster than the 550 MHz Pentium III computers with 256 Meg Ram.

I am going to write a Perl program to kill SMS a few minutes after login to keep Jeremy and the other system administrators happy. This should allow time for SMS to to do it updates and then prevent it from crashing my programs as well as Outlook, Word and Exel.

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