At work I've built 7 new workstations for some of the employees.  To install the OS, I have been using Symantec Ghost 2003.  I've jotted down the process of how to clone systems in a one-off manner for my own reference, but thought it might benefit others if I posted the How-To here.

How to Clone a Computer Using Ghost 2003: 

1. Install Ghost 2003 on the master computer.  This is the computer that you want to make a clone of.
2. Create a Ghost Boot Disk if you don’t already have one.  This disk is used to boot the slave PC.
   1. This is done by starting Ghost, going to Ghost Utilities, and selecting the Create Ghost Boot Disk item.  When creating a boot disk, make sure to select the correct network driver.  If you need to add a driver, select the NDIS2 option and then browse to the media that contains the NDIS driver.  This will be the directory where the OEMSETUP file is located.
3. Select the Peer-To-Peer option under Ghost Advanced.  Make sure to choose correct options.  The computer will restart in Ghost DOS mode.  Set the system in Master mode.
4. Take the boot disk and boot the slave PC to the Ghost Boot disk.  Set the system in Slave mode.  Once slave mode starts, it will display the IP address of the box.  Note that IP, then go over to the Master PC and type in the Slave’s IP address there.
5. Now the two machines are connected, go to Disk and select the option to start the clone operation on the Master computer.

I've noted some interesting behaviors with getting the new clone to login to the active directory domain properly once the above process is complete.  This has to do with the system time of the clone being different from the system time of the domain.  The way around this I have found is to:

1. Login to the cloned box using a local computer account.

2. Open a command window and type: net use \\ADcontroller\ipc$ /username:domain\administrator password

3. Then type: net time \\servername /set 

This gets the time of the clone in synch with the domain.

If the machine still won't login to the domain, the solution is to remove the workstation from the domain, setting it back to WORKGROUP mode.  Reboot.  After Reboot, join it to the domain.

Over the past year+, I've noted an incredible increase in form spam through the various web sites that I've authored and continue to manage.  As a result, I've had to go back and add CAPTCHA controls to the forms in some cases.

I'm working on a new .NET project called ArtOverture and needed to dig into a .NET based CAPTCHA control.  Looking around at the source code for dasBlog, I learned about Jeff Atkins CaptchaControl.  It's written in VB.NET for Visual Studio 2003 and ASP.NET 1.1.  However, I found that you can include the compiled DLL just fine as a toolbox control in Visual Studio 2005.  The control works perfectly without any need for recompiling.

Here's the link to Jeff's Code Project writeup on CaptchaControl.  Full source code is available.

 http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/CaptchaControl.asp

I've been toying around with the idea of setting up my own blog for sometime.

After doing a brief Google search on ASP.NET based blog tools, I found David Hayden's note where he recommended DasBlog.  Took me all of 15 minutes to get up and running on my box.  So far so good.