iPhone India: Vodafone will Launch iPhone on 21st of August 2008 Priced around Rs.24,000

As the launch date comes closer we made a few calls to know if the launch is on time i.e. 22nd of August and found something you will certainly be interested in.

Vodafone is taking an aggressive approach to the launch and they want to be the 1st to launch iPhone in India. So, if Aritel is launching iPhone on 22nd of August, iPhone will be available at Vodafone stores on 21st of Aug.

The company also wants to claim the cheapest iPhone in the country. So, iPhones coming out of Vodafone will be cheaper than its competitors, namely Airtel. Price for non-vodafone users will be around 35k's and for existing users who have preregistered with Vodafone, it will cost them around Rs.24k.

The bottom line is and I quote "No matter what we will be cheaper than our competitors."

That's not all, we have more!!

Initially iPhone will come only with 2G service and not 3G. 3G services on Vodafone will start from October onwards. 2G services will include GPS and Maps for 8 Indian cities including metro cities. Hyderabad is one of the 8 cities on GPS maps.

Vodafone will start calling the users who pre-registered for iPhone two days before the launch to discuss the details in terms of iPhone price and its features and once the user confirms the purchase, iPhone will be delivered at the day of launch. So, Ideally we should start receiving calls from tomorrow onwards. i.e 19th of August.



In addition to this information, Apple sent a mass e-mail to its registered users confirming the 22nd Aug as the launching date in India.

Click here to see what Apple India has in store for us. http://www.apple.co.in/iphone/buy/

DHCP PROCESS Summary

Why do we need to know the DHCP lease Process? Because you are sitting in MCSE class, or you will try to go another job and someone in the interview, just like me will ask you the process. Perhaps you are doing troubleshooting why client is not getting IP address from DHCP server and you forgot to see the ports 67 and 68 was blocked. In any case knowing your stuff is going to make you smart and stronger. I recommend keep memorizing below simple process just in case if you ever been any of the situations I have speculated.

In TCP/IP little world a device cannot communicate to any other device unless it has an IP address. Now think about, XP client who has not have any IP address yet, able to locate the DHCP server and ask for an IP address. IN logic world you should say, hey wait a second how come client even can talk to DHCP server, client does not have any IP Address yet. ???????. If you wonder about the answer keep reading.

• At the time of the lease request, the client doesn't know what its IP address is, nor does it know the IP address of the server. To work around this, below how client is able to talk to a DHCP server
• Client uses 0.0.0.0 as its address and assumes 255.255.255.255 for the server's address.
• DHCP discover message on UDP port 68 and destination port 67.
• The discover message contains the hardware MAC address and NetBIOS name of the client.
• Once the first discover message is sent, the client waits 1 second for an offer. If no DHCP server responds within that time, the client repeats its request four more times at 2-, 4-, 8-, and 16 second intervals, if the client still doesn't get a response, it will revert to Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) and Continue to broadcast discover messages every 5 minutes until it gets an answer. With APIPA, (169.254.X.Y) The Windows client will automatically pick what it thinks is an unused address.

DHCP lease is 4 way Process as listed below.

• DHCP – discovery (The discover message contains the hardware MAC address and NetBIOS name of the client.)
• DHCP - Lease offer
• DHCP - lease request
• DHCP- Lease acknowledgment

To keep memorize the process use simple map below

• DD ( DHCP Discovery)
• LO (Lease Offer)
• LR (Lease Request)
• LA (Lease Acknowledgment)

Notepad as a Diary

Do you want to keep a diary in your PC or Laptop...

You can do this very easily. Do the Following:

• Open Notepad
• Type : .LOG
• Save it with any name say 'Personal_Diary'
• Open Personal_Diary.txt again

Now, you will be surprised to see today's date and time. Your diary is ready now !!

Block USB Devices in XP

All students in our college received our laptops few weeks back, and the biggest problem we face that everybody seems to take everybody's data. As nobody is well versed of using laptops, and they are a bit careless about their data security. Pen drives becoming a handy tool to get data is the biggest problem we all face today. Not only in our college, it is part of everybody's life that. To this what can be done is that the USB can be blocked and then stopping the use of USB drives. Here is a simple registry hack to do so, try it with care.

1. Go to Start –> Run, type Regedit.
2. Go to Hkey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlset\Services\USBStor
3. In the right pane, look for value Start and have value as 0000000(3)
4. Double click on that and change that value to 4.

You might be required to restart the PC, and then you are done with it, USB is now blocked.
In case if you want to get the USB unblocked, just change the value again to 3.

How to disable ShutDown Event Tracker on a windows 2003 system?

By default Windows 2003 server systems comes with shutdown event tracker enabled. This provides a way for us to consistently track why users restart or shutdown the computers. This information is very much useful for the IT administrators to track the reasons for shutdown the important systems. But it is annoying if we use that system as development platform like i am using. I use windows 2003 system as my development environment because sharepoint services supports in windows 2003. My primary work is with sharepoint services.

Usually everyday i shutdown the system while going home from work and sometimes i may restart in work hours also, I feel so annoying to see the shutdown event tracker screen to enter the reasons for shutdown, so i decided to disable that feature in my system. Here is the way to do that.

1. Open Group Policy, then load the group policy you want to apply the change to. If your computer is not a part of domain you can set this feature locally by running GPEDIT.MSC from the Run command.

For example, if you want the setting to affect the entire domain, edit the Default Domain GPO, or another GPO on the domain level.

2. Expand Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System.

3.Double-click Display Shutdown Event Tracker.

4.Select Disabled.

5. Click OK to close all dialog boxes.



If you want the change to take place right now, refresh the GPO by running the "gpupdate /force" command in a Command Prompt window or from the Run command