Linux saves the day: why every good toolkit should have Linux

By David M Williams
Monday, 09 March 2009 06:45

Opinion and Analysis

No matter if you're exclusively a Windows shop, every good IT technician needs Linux in their toolkit. A bootable Linux CD has saved my bacon more than once.

I'll start with something simple, but yet undoubtedly an issue that is faced by somebody, somewhere every day.

It's the problem of the forgotten administrator password. You have a Windows box but can't log in. Nobody remembers the password. Or, you can log in as a regular user but can't make changes - because nobody remembers the administrator password.

For this, Daniel Petri's page is the ultimate resource.

He begins with three options: make the user remember - but that's not likely to happen; recover from an emergency recovery disk (ERD) - but that doesn't apply to all versions of Windows or the ERD probably doesn't exist or is out of date; and lastly boot from an alternate operating system which has tools to manipulate the appropriate files to reset the forgotten password.

On his site you can find a link to an excellent bootable CD which performs the latter. It's a Linux CD and it works a treat. I've used it on Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 machines.

Now, you might argue that technically wasn't using Linux, per se and possibly similar tools exist for Windows. That may be true. So, here's something that I faced last Friday.

My company spans a large number of offices and some of these are on-site at industrial customer locations. I visited one on Friday, a storeman needed a new printer and computer.

I didn't actually know there was a computer or printer at this location and when I arrived I was surprised to see an ancient Packard-Bell Windows '98 machine sitting there.

Not surprisingly it was caked in dust and grease and grime. Given the simple use it was put to (typing and printing purchase orders) maybe it would have functioned for another decade in a cleaner environment.

Setting up a new machine was a cinch. The difficulty came in backing up the storeman's data. An entire 32Mb worth!

I plugged in a USB key. Turns out this was Windows '98 first edition - and general widespread USB support only came in Windows '98 Second Edition.

I also noted I couldn't compress the files either, there was no "Send to / compressed folder" option.

What would you do? Think about it, then turn over.