Synapses blog Aghh , grammer

Thin client hacking

For the past few weeks I have thought about setting up a thin client pc for my kids, over the weekend a fried decided to give me an unused compaq T20. These are tiny devices with no hard drive and a minimal operating system , they are pretty gutless but are designed to access other terminal servers.

Any way the one one I got was still provisioned to another company so i set about re-flashing the firmware back to factory settings. on the HP web site you can get a utility called netxfer which is a bootp/tftp server to deploy the new firmware , unfortunately after trying to set it up on 3 computers all i could get was

"Unable to start the application--the Java Virtual Machine cannot be loaded.

Class not registered"

So I gave up on that idea and set about hacking back some admin rights. This machine came out of a business enviroment so was locked down but not compleatly untouchable. By defualt when it was turned on it booted into a session and automatically started an ica client. all other apps were removed from the start menu , right click disabled , run command killed, browsing in explorer disabled. So what to do ? well my first goal was to get a command shell opened , from there I at least had something to work with.

First I opened the control panel , this was locked down with very few tool available but the address bar was showing so I typed in a url, when the site opened I selected view , source, this open in notepad. Then I deleated all the contents and replaed it with , cmd.exe , then I selected to save this to the desktop as a batch file. At first this failed, only flashing up then closing, so i edited the file wo be cmd.exe pause cmd.exe. Saved , now this work I have command prompt.