As requested via the tip line, a command line app to adjust the volume of a computer.  The general use for this is to copy it over to a computer and run it using psexec or owexec.  Then it is just as easy as doing the command

setvol <volume percent>

For example “setvol 100″ or “setvol “10″.   The program will accept just about anything on the command line, try to convert it to a number and set the volume with it.  Passing nothing will set the volume to 0 and passing strings has unpredictable results but will not error.  Also, this adjusts the Wave volume slider not the master slider so it is more difficult for the layman to fix the problem.

Download setvol here

You may not know this but when you use PSEXEC to start a process on another persons computer the process belongs to you.  This has some interesting side effects as well as a few concerns.  First off the big concern is that since now the user has, in their control, a window of say Internet Explorer with your permissions attached to it, they can now browse to any network share you have access to with that window.  As a domain admin that is kinda scary.  So what we need is a way to run a process remotely as the user that is logged in locally.  I spent a bunch of time a few months back researching this and had built a solution for an application I wrote and then I promptly forgot about it.

However yesterday someone came across this site by searching “psexec run under currently logged in account” which got me thinking about it again, I figured if other people out there are interested I should take the code I have and make it useful for others, so I did.  I went ahead and wrote a PSEXEC like program that I lovingly called OWExec that allows you to start a process on a remote system in the context of one of the users logged in currently.

This program bears some explaining so I went ahead and made it its own page here, follow the link to download and for instructions on use.

Ok I had a briliant idea for a prank today but it was a big enough scale I foolishly thought to ask permission first, which of course means I was told no.  However with some of the leg work done I have decided to post what I have so far here incase there are any enterprising IT employees out there in the world with a Cisco phone system.

So my idea, I thought man that tune on Cadie’s blogspot page is annoying, I should make a ring tone out of it. So I did.  Then I thought, I should put this on a few phones, but wait! I should do one better, I should put it on everyones phone.  Then came the dilema, how to do such a task.  Well it turns out such a thing is no large task at all on a Cisco phone system like we run here at my unnamed work.  Where was I, oh right, well Cisco phone systems use a TFTP server to host all of their ring tones and they store them in a .raw audio format, so making them is easy and adding new ones is easy, for more information on that try here.  The really fun part about that is if you are an administrator and you have access to that TFTP server all you have to do to replace all ringers at your site with an annoying ringer is copy all the .raw files out of that path (to back them up, then make enough copies of cadie.raw and rename them for each real ring tone you currently have.  Then copy all of your fake cadie ringtones over and voila all phones ring with that annoying tune.

One last thing for anyone interested in the cadie song I ripped an MP3 from the youtube video and uploaded it here for you pleasure.

So today, as I assume you know, is April Fools day.  Today is literally the national holiday of Office Warfare.  So in the spirit of this auspicious day I would like to link you to a few of our older articles that can be fun around your office.  I know for one that the PSEXEC article has been used around my workplace several times today.  I also just took a quick break from typing this entry and used boo together with the psexec article to pop boo up on several computers at work.  Here is what you need.  Download PSTools (including PSEXEC) from here then download Boo and put them in the same folder on your computer.  Then run the command

PSEXEC -I -C \\their_computers “BOO.EXE”

That will copy boo.exe to their computer then execute it interactively.

One more thing, the way you get the computer you downloaded it to to run the command.

Go to Start->Run, type in CMD then press <enter>.  Then type “c:” <enter> (assuming you downloaded these apps somewhere to the c drive.  Then type cd “directory” <enter> for each directory in the path.  You could also copy the path from explorer and type “cd ” then right click and paste.

FakeTop also works really well for this type of attack.  And in is a little less abviously an attack which can be fun, to watch them flounder.

This is my first WoW addon specifically designed to annoy people in the grand tradition of OfficeWarfare. Now most of us know someone who plays World of Warcraft, some of us probably play it for that matter. And hopefully most of you reading this have a healthy desire to annoy your friends that play WoW. If you do you have come to the right place. MountHelper an addon written by yours truly is specifically designed to annoy people who play WoW.

All you do is copy the files in the zip (see below) to a persons WoW installation folder under Interface\AddOns. Then when they log in to play WoW they will be greeted by a big fat nothing different. But what they don’t know is that silently in the background MountHelper is rolling the dice and if they loose the toss (~.5%) they will be dismounted with no indication as to why. Now I intentionally made the percent low so that it wont happen often. But I am looking forward to the time when your friend gets dismounted while farming on their epic mount from WAY to high up to survive.

One other thing in the interest of full disclosure because I would never want anyone to say I sneak extra stuff into my code, when your friend is dismounted they will join the OfficeWarfare channel in WoW and announce, “Dismounted by MountHelper” the idea being those of us that know about it can join that channel and chuckle as people get dismounted.

That is all there is to it, enjoy.

MountHelper (ZIP)