tobias-tobin: November 2007

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Booting from WinPE WIM

Booting from WinPE WIM stored locally

Interesting read (and page for that matter).

His main page:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/socal/default.aspx

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Remote support

Sometimes it is easier to try and fix something over the phone rather than drive out to the clients house. The problem may be a quick fix, or the travelling may be too much to justify the time and gas. I've been looking for an easy to use, free method of providing remote desktop support. Currently I am checking out the SharedView Beta 2 from Microsoft.

The install requires administrative permissions. Close Messenger and any Office apps before installing.

The environment I tested in is not NAT. But I do have a admin configured firewall on this system and I did not have to make any exceptions.

Sharing can be by open application, or the entire destop.

It is worth checking out. It does require Windows Live ID /Passport account.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Microsoft command line reference

Microsoft command line reference

This is a good thorough reference on command line options.

Friday, November 16, 2007

Monitoring IPSEC traffic

We were testing something where we enabled IPSEC for port 445 on both server and client, but when browsing shares we were not seeing the secured connection in IP Security Policy Monitor. The reason was NetBIOS. SMB connections were being made on 139 instead of 445. After disabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP, then the secured connections showed up on port 445.

To disable SMB use of Netbios port 139 (Forces use of port 445):
On the Start menu, point to Settings, and then click Network and Dial-up Connections
Right-click Internet facing connection, and then click Properties.
Select Internet Protocol TCP/IP and select Properties
Click Advanced and select the WINS tab
Tick Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP and click Ok

Friday, November 09, 2007

2Wire WEP key

This comes up often enough to mention. Often 2Wire modems have built-in wireless routers. These use WEP and the key is recorded on the bottom of the modem. Look for the key in between the [ ] characters.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

HP's Vista systems and problems with their bundled crapware

It appears that some of the bundled crapware on HP Vista systems can cause a problem for some systems. In particular, individuals may get a pop-up blank window saying 'navigation cancelled' and having the time and date in the title bar.

The above error comes from a scheduled task for 'Internet Services offer'.

To stop this from happening go to Start>Control Panel>(here you may need to select to show classic view)>Administrative Tools>Task Scheduler. If you highlight Task Scheduler Library on the left, in the upper right you should see some tasks (possibly these):

ExtendedServicePlan
HP Health Check
ServicePlan

Right click the tasks and chose disable.

I believe one of the tasks listed above triggers the problem (two of the three are scheduled to run every 30 minutes).

Something else I found mentions it being related to one (or both) of these processes (.exes)

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\SDP\RemEngine.exe

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\SDP\hpsdpapp.exe

I'm fairly sure if you disable the three processes (or which ever one's you have) listed above, that window will stop popping up. But I am not positive (I only had the system I was working on for a while). I'm pretty sure I had the system up for well over a half hour after disabling the scheduled tasks mentioned above, and I did not get the pop-up window.

If you do get the pop-up window, and want to get it off the screen (since it does not have the option to close it), click the window once and then hit ALT and F4. Alt + F4 close the active window.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Learning about wireless

Here's another good read on wireless signals

stumbler.net (under Fri 4 Feb 2005)

Wireless signal strength and noise levels

I've been messing with moving my wireless AP around. I came across this website (Boost Your Signal ) talking about wireless, signals, and antennas.

Last night I was using the Dell Wireless WLAN Card Utility and notice the signal from my AP is weaker than a neighbors. Tonight I moved the AP upstairs and more central in the house. The signal is stronger (stronger than the neighbor's) but I am noticing something I've not noticed before. The 'speed' reported by Vista is low, and when I am downloading it goes incredibly low. To 1Mbps. I've got a N card in the laptop I am using and the router support N. So why so low. I also notice while downloading the reported noise level greatly increases. Right now the signal is around -54dBm and the noise is -88dBm. I started a file download and the signal stays about the same, but the noise goes to -75dBm. The 'speed' went from 39Mbps to 1 or 2Mbps.

Friday, November 02, 2007

Sent to Mail Recipient gone - get it back

After upgrading to Office 2007 from Office 2003 SP2 on XP Pro SP2, I lost the 'mail recipient' option when right click and file and going to 'Send To'.

I was able to restore it by running the command (Start>Run) regsvr32 sendmail.dll. Now when I right click something, like a .jpg, and go to Send To, Mail Recipient is an option.

I got the instructions for this procedure on Ramesh's site

Wireless Issues

Wireless issues - I had a Netgear Rangemax wireless router WPN824 that kept requiring a power cycle to restore network connectivity. Often I would lose my wireless connection - I never knew why. I would have to go unplug it and plug it back in. Eventually the problems got worse. Wired connectivity would drop also. On the last day I used this unit I had to power cycle it probably every 15 minutes. After about 5 times I decided to replace it. I got a Belkin F5D8231-4 IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n (draft) N1 Wireless Router. Setup was quick now that Insight does not require the MAC address registration procedure. I did have an issue. For one, when in semi-close to close proximity to the router I lost data transmission. I had a wireless connection, with 5 bars. I had an IP address, gateway, and dns. I could ping address by name. But I could not connect to anything or send any data. I couldn't even connect to the router's interface (wirelessly). I tried changing channels. That did not help. Finally I changed the frequency setting from 20Mhz to 20-40Mhz auto and now wireless works in close proximity.

Insight claims to have 10Mbps up and 1Mbps down. With the Netgear I averaged 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. I always thought I must have noise or a weak signal on my incoming connection to the cable company. Surprisingly, once I setup the Belkin I started getting 10Mbps down and 1Mbps up. At times when downloading of the net, I will get as high as 1.3MBps.

Recently I have helped two households with Xbox360 live and Halo 3. In one case two friends could join online games and play, but could not host or join with each other. Both were using Linksys WRT54G routers. I made sure that uPnP was enabled, that did not help. I tried setting the Xbox's IP as the DMZ, that did not help. Bungie said that when running Xbox networking test, the NAT should report Open NAT. It did. Then I updated the firmware (these were both brand new devices so not sure why the firmware was old), and that fixed the problem. They could both host and join each other.

The other was again a Netgear WPN824 router with an Xbox 360 connected through wireless. The network test was reporting Strict NAT. This person has been gaming on Xbox live for a while with no problems. With Halo 3 they were frequently losing connections, having lots of lag, and not being able to join games. Because of the previous experience I checked that uPnP was enabled (it was already) and updated the firmware. Once the firmware was updated Xbox reported Open NAT and the individual could get on and play Halo 3. Now they are having a different problem. The Xbox is frequently losing connectivity. We changed the channel from 6 to 11. I have yet to hear back if that helped. These individuals did report a increase in the number of access points showing up for them so it is possible they are getting interference.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

IPSEC

Working on IPSEC configuration. I wanted to set an SMB encryption policy using domain policy but I am getting 'access denied' when I get to the edit properties part of the new policy creation.

Here's why (I am not a domain admin):

To manage Active Directory-based IPSec policies, you must be a member of the
Domain Admins group in Active Directory, or you must have been delegated the
appropriate authority. -Assign or unassign IPSEC policy in Group Policy

This can be done through a local gpo though. But for deployment on multiple systems we will probably need to script this. I will look at Netsh for this:

Managing IPSec from the command line

Apply these steps to your file server and the host computer(s) that you would like to establish an encrypted SMB session.
Note: You need to test this in a development environment before you deploy it to your production environment.
Open the MMC with ‘IP Security Monitor’ and IP Security Policy Management’ (local computer)

Video problems waking from sleep

I have two computers running Vista Ultimate that have exhibited a problem when waking from standby. After logging on, the screen goes black and stays black, or you get a colored screen (bluish green) and diagonal lines moving around. In one case (Nvidia) I got this problem after installing a newer driver. Doing a driver rollback fixed it. In the other case, a laptop with a ATI 1150 card, doing a driver update fixed the problem.