moonlit

That might be a little generous.

Excuse my cynicism but why would you mention the former and underline the latter if your intent was purely educational in a positive manner?

Ok, first off... what? Secondly, did you pay no attention to any of the million threads where I've explained how school hacking is a bad idea? No? Thirdly, We're not your sysadmins, wait and see, you might get a surprise punishment... I dunno, lines, detentions, banned from the computers, suspended... hey, maybe even expelled! Enjoy.

Besides, what if it happened to be malware, you just pick the shit from the ass hairs and leave it? No, you pressure wash and walk away clean.

That's such a noobie thing to say. Almost every OS problem regardless of platform can be fixed without a reinstall. Talk about using a sledge hammer when a screwdriver will do. Sledgehammer is quicker. If you're trying to get stuff done and you have a Windows problem, do you spend 3 days digging for an answer that might not even be there or do you spend 15 minutes imaging the drive so you can get back to what you were doing?

That's actually fairly easy, just wire each button to a contact/encoder on a game controller or standalone keypad keyboard.

QFE. As has been said, you can't access the internet (and by that I mean browse it) with a spoofed IP address because the packets would get dumped for having bogus info and being impossible to route.

If you want what you're asking for bad enough then I can guarentee that you could find out how to do it within minutes by asking Google. We don't assist people when they ask us questions like this because we're cynical (realistic?) and realise that a large portion of the users on this forum would happily take the advice we give then run around "pwning" innocent bystanders.

not even close... but it runs and that's where linux is for , it just works :D On the contrary, unless you know its quirks and how to get around already, Linux can be a major, and I mean MAJOR, pain in the ass. Compiling drivers, manually editing .confs without a GUI, error messages worthy of BSoD-level user friendliness... If you want easy, I'd stick to OSX or Windows.

User friendly generally means less secure and more bloated. This is far from ideal in a server environment, you need security and speed. If you can't work it out without a pretty GUI and you can't compile stuff yourself, I wouldn't advise putting up a public server.

Ubuntu is a good choice if you haven't a clue where to start. However, it's not nearly "the deep end" if you wanna get stuck in. Of course, it is still Linux based, no-one can dispute that, so it still does everything it should, it's just a bit more bubble-wrapped than... almost every other distro ever. On the plus side, you can generally install drivers easier due to Canonical (the guys who distribute Ubuntu) allowing closed source drivers to be installed with a couple of button presses. It's not, however, a good choice if your machine is lacking in power (and specifically RAM), it'll curl up and die on any machine with a lower spec than it thinks it needs at any given time.

Sounds like you should've read the small print to me.

QFE. Also on low spec machines too, though that's already been said. If you really *must* have a GUI, I'd definitely skip Gnome and KDE in favour of something a little lighter, xfce for example, or perhaps fluxbox.

The easiest, cleanest way to install Windows 95 without any drives is to hook the drive up to another machine (via a 2.5"-3.5" IDE adapter or 2.5" IDE-USB adapter), install MSDOS, copy the Windows installation files from the CD to the drive (preferably in a folder) then put the drive back in the laptop. It should now boot MSDOS. cd to Windows' install files directory, run setup from there, and install as normal. You can also remove the DOS folder when you're done too.

Am I missing somethng? Did I get something wrong? He said he used Vista as the host OS, right? No, you're quite right, I am using Vista as the host, Sparda's our regular Ubuntu fanboy. ;)

It would indeed be possible. No small job, mind you, but possible. You'd have trouble getting the kind of traffic the internet copes with without the support of the infrastructure currently in place but it's definitely something that could be done. You could even simulate a miniature version of the internet using a decently powerful computer and a pile of VMs. I'm no expert on the topic, but the services that are run aren't really anything special (compared to a service that you might run on a LAN, for instance), you just have to make sure that all the computers on the network can access the services and that you have enough power and bandwidth to cope with the loads it'd be under.

Demonoid has been dead for months.

As far as I know the ISO is limited to 6MB or so, though I may be wrong, I've never tried larger ISOs myself. Note though that you can install Linux (Slax is a nice choice) on a regular non-U3 USB stick pretty easily, the only disadvantage is that it won't work on older machines that can't boot from USB natively.

Technically you could do that with full screen SSH/VNC sessions, that'd be quite nice too I reckon.

I use a lot of VMs and I began to realise it was a little inconvenient having windows and tabs all over the place to access them. I though about switching to Linux, using compiz-fusion and getting the 3D cube thing going but I wanted to stay with Windows, I had all my stuff set up how I liked it... I remembered that there had been attempts at doing the whole 3D cube on Windows before, so a little googling gave me YODM (Yet anOther Desktop Manager, it was bought by a company and rebranded but if you look hard enough you can still find the freeware 1.4 version). So, downloaded it, installed it, threw up a couple of virtual machines in VMWare, full screened them on each of the cube faces. The outcome I think is awesome, see below: http://arch.kimag.es/share/14759199.jpg [image Removed] http://arch.kimag.es/share/24290556.jpg http://arch.kimag.es/share/41867636.jpg Video (excuse the hosting). Vista as the host OS, VMWare 6 running OSX 10.4.9, Windows XP SP3, Ubuntu 7.10 full screened (1600x1200x32@85) with 512MB each on an Intel E2180 @2x2GHz, 2GB DDR2 @800MHz, 8600GT w/256MB. Usable speeds on each VM and the host OS, the box is pretty much idle when the cube, the VMs and Vista w/Aero are all sitting doing not much so it doesn't really cost much in the way of performance unless the VMs are actively processing rather than idling/showing basic screensavers/etc. Overall I think the experiment was a success and I'd recommend the same to anyone who uses a lot of different virtual machines/OSs at once. YODM 1.4 Freeware available here: http://rapidshare.com/files/26524705/yodm3D.zip.html

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fight.png[/img] http://www.virtualroadside.com/blog/index....-mbr-love-note/ (Caution: If you're not confident with assembly or reinstalling an operating system, do not attempt this.)

Also check for malware, because adware/spyware/viruses can screw with optical drives under Windows. You might want to try updating the drive's firmware too.

I don't know if it applies on real Macs but I know OSX86 is capable of booting from USB, and since people have booted OSX from USB devices on AppleTVs I would imagine so, since it's basically a mini-Mac Mini running Tiger.

Yeah, I suppose it's going to compete directly against this too.

Actually you just explained how I feel right there. Not in the way you intended, mind you. See, you're right, back in the day there were no people to turn to, kids had to learn for themselves and that's something that not enough of them (or us, I still include myself as a beginner) actually do. I've explained it elsewhere on this forum too, if you rely on pre-packed download click-n-pwn tools then you never learn anything, you just piss people off with your little awesome USB key. No idea how it works, what it does or how it does it, just... your cool little USB stick. Now, if you had to be the first guy to figure that out, you'd learn stuff. Granted, that could sound like I don't want anyone to ask questions or anyone else to give answers, far from it. We just got sick of kids rolling in here picking up the tools and running off to try them without a second thought for what they're actually doing. That and the less than useful/ethical (yeah, I know)/legal additions to the packages available.