Yesterday I upgraded my Desktop and Laptop PC’s to Windows XP Pro. I wanted to have them join my domain here at home so I wouldn’t have to type my username and password in all the time.

First one I did was my Desktop. I ran a fresh install after the upgrade failed very badly. (Video card wouldn’t recognize) So with a fresh install of XP Pro I joined it to the Domain which is served by my Ubuntu Linux server. Joining it was no problem. This is how I did it

Start -> Right Click on My Computer -> Properties

Then under “Computer Name” tab, click on “Change…”

Where you see “Member Of” click the “Domain:” button then type in your domain. In my case it was “miller”.

Now you need to restart your computer. Now here where I had another problem. All Domain Controllers have a logon.bat script witch is run every time any user logs on to a computer within the network. Now in my home, we have never had Windows XP Pro so this is the steps I had to go through to get it working. On the server there is a Samba server that basically talk on the windows protocol. I followed this tutorial on how to setup the server.

Ok now I’ll get to the good part. In the /etc/samba/smb.conf file there is few lines that read this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

So that worked fine when I was connecting manually to the shares but now that I want permissions and such working I need this logon.bat to work. After going through a few Google Search pages I figured out how to get this to work. All I had to do was add the line “path = /home/netlogon” So when I was done though’s few lines, it looked like this…

# Default logon
logon drive = Z:
logon script = logon.bat
path = /home/netlogon
logon path = \\server1\profile\$U

Ok now I created a logon.bat in the /home/netlogon folder. My logon.bat mounts three shared drives I have created. (The How To Forge link will show you how to make other shared folders.)

net use Y: \\server1\shared
net use X: \\server1\programs
net use W: \\server1\pictures

So now your asking your self “Why didn’t he use Z:?” Will I didn’t because I specified Z: as the mounting point for the users home directory in the smb.conf. So now I can logon and off my computer with ease. My dad and sister can logon my computer and have access to all there files and none of myna.

Next I’m going to talk about upgrading my laptop. Now I ran the upgrade from XP Home to Pro. Every thing went well till I started using certain things. First thing I notices was Windows Updates would not run. It said there was 34 to install, but when I would run them they would all fail. The second thing I noticed was Internet Explore 6 was installed. So again I went to my good friend Google and started searching. A few people have had this problem and the easiest way to fix it was to make a simple batch file. I will go through this step by step.

1. Open up Notepad (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Notepad
2. Copy the following lines into the file

3. regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
   regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
   regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
   regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
   regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
   regsvr32 /s wups.dll
   regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

4. Now save the file as update.bat onto your desktop
5. Close the file then open it from the desktop.

Or Download the Batch file from Here

windows-update-fix.bat

A command prompt window should pop-up then disappear. Now if I run Windows Updates all install will work. Basically XP Pro Upgrade took out all the patches that XP Home had. But XP Pro didn’t know what was already there. So by running “regsvr32” we tolled windows that, Hey these files are here. Windows Updates is now fully functional.

Well hope this helps you in your indevers of Windows and Linux. If you have any questions or comments please post them on the Forums.