IE Hompage reset (Part 2)
Originally I had entered this information in the original post, but I felt that it needed it's own post (the video limitations of the plugin's that I'm using to display video also prompted this second post 
).
Anyway, Remo commented (in an email) about using the Group Policy Editor (gpedit) to change your group policy restrictions to change your homepage (yes you can do that and a ton of other things that you can play with), this is another viable route to the homepage lockdown problem, but he also asked for a post on using regedit to unlock or change your homepage. I thought that maybe I would find the key that actually holds the homepage information and just edit that, but I found a different way that I think I like better (seems like it has less potential for system-wide destruction). So here are the steps.
- Crack open regedit from the command line
- when this opens navigate/drill-down to
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\Control Panel". Note that this will only exist if your current
admin has locked down your computer... if you can't find this route
(meaning this tree does not exist) then DO NOT CONTINUE! - If you did find the path, then now is the time to make a backup of
your registry file. To do this click on File->export->(make sure
your selected branch is at the bottom, or click "All" for the entire
registry) Save. - Now that you're safely backed up, lets double-click on "HomePage"
(it's the blue REG_DWORD value in the right pane). In the pop-up change
the value from 1 to 0, and viola! crack open IE and go to change your
homepage the "normal" way and it will no longer be locked. - rejoice in your geekery...(not a required step, but it is recommended
)
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A little Homepage reset in IE
Sounds easy enough right? Well what happens when your box has been locked down and when you look at your internet options in IE (or in control panel) you discover that the homepage box has been grayed-out and there's nothing you can do to reset it? Simple, use another route. One of the things that m$ almost got right was the ability to get anywhere you wanted to by at least 2 different ways. In this case the SysAdmins may have blocked your normal route with a group or user policy, but they didn't block the other route.
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If you just watched the video (sorry about the small compression) you've see that there is another way to set your homepage in IE7, the little drop down menu by your homepage button. simply navigate to the page you want as your homepage and then click the drop down and select "Add or Change Home Page". From there a new dialog window will appear and then click on the radio button next to "Use this webpage as your only home page" (the first time you do this I think you have three options so pick the one closest to this option). From there just click the "Yes" button and then you're set!
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VirtualBox – and a linux experiment
So a few weeks (or months) ago I read a post on a site that said how to run windows in a linux environment similar to how parallels works on OS X. I went to the website and found that there was a windows binary available for download and that you can make a Virtual Machine out of just about anything. So I made one of ubuntu 7.10 (making sure to disable the "network" portion before the install so as not to get stuck in an infinite loop when installing the distro). Everything went smoothly and soon enough I was booted fully into a very fast running virtual linux installation. That's when I opened firefox and found out that we have a firewall that hates us. So now that you've done the same thing and want to figure out how to make things work, lets start by setting up the system proxy settings.
- In Gnome (ubuntu 7.10 default interface) click on 'System' -> 'Preferences' -> 'Network Proxy'.
- Click on the "Manual proxy configuration" radio button.
- For 'HTTP proxy:' enter "proxy3.wherewework.com"
- For Port use 3128.
- Click on the "Details" button
- Check "Use authentication"
- Enter DOMAIN/username
- Enter your password
- Click the "Close" button
- Click the "Close" button again
- Crack open fireyfox and make sure that the proxy pop up window has "domain\username" then your password
- Enjoy the surf
It is fairly important to note which way the slashes are going in each step of the process. If it still doesn't work, your NAT settings may need to be tweaked... I did end up cloning my hosts MAC address, but I'm not certain that will make it work.
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