Bonjour? Au Revoir.

Lets say you’re using Autoruns one day and the following conditions arise:

• You notice that the Bonjour service has somehow made its way onto your system (usually courtesy of iTunes or Adobe Creative Suite).
• You find yourself incensed that some dodgy and largely unnecessary Apple networking software has installed itself without asking.
• You discover that the Bonjour service in inexplicably absent from Add/Remove Programs, thus further infuriating you over the stealth nature of the install.

Under these conditions, DON’T do what I did and simply delete the references to mDNSResponder.exe and mdnsNSP.dll using Autoruns. All that will get you is a machine that, after its next reboot, can no longer resolve DNS addresses correctly, leading to a short sharp visit to System Restore. Instead, here’s how to remove Bonjour without tanking your network connectivity:

1. Run the following via Start -> Run:"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove
2. Go to the C:\Program Files\Bonjour folder (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Bonjour if you have ended up with a 32-bit version of Bonjour on a 64-bit OS)
3. Rename the mdnsNSP.dll to something else (it doesn’t matter what, my preference is for mdnsNSP.turd)
4. Reboot
5. Delete the aforementioned Bonjour folder from Program Files.

Et voila.

The Angry Technician’s Guide to Managing Windows 7, you Idiots

I am tired of hearing people say they don’t want to deploy Windows 7  because they can’t manage it properly on their Windows 2003 domain.

This is utter rubbish.

I heard this all before with Vista, and it wasn’t true then either. Here’s a summary some of the idiocy I’ve seen:

• “You have to have Windows Server 2008 R2 to join Windows 7 to the domain” – UTTERLY WRONG.
• “We can’t use any of the new Group Policy settings because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – PLAIN WRONG.
• “We’d have to upgrade our domain schema to support the new Group Policy settings” – UNTRUE.

and along with them, the slightly different but equally ill-informed:

• “We can’t use Group Policy Preferences because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – ALSO WRONG.

OK, listen in, morons. I will now explain how you (yes YOU), can manage Windows 7 using Group Policy and Group Policy Preferences with only Windows Server 2003 servers on your domain. This is a technical article, so try to keep up.