Perimeterless Network

SMB/CIFS Download Manager

2009-01-28 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

With this article we’re going back to the origins of the “Perimeterless Network“. If you (like us) are living the idea of the “Perimeterless Network” you sure can access your SMB / CIFS shares from anywhere in the world. Fo security reasons connections are protected with IPSec, right?

Now, for testing purposes I had to download a large DVD image from a remote file server and since I am accessing the Internet by WLAN and IPSec slows down the connection, too, I thought of using a download manager. The best choice would be a handy command line tool like wget. I did remember a tool called smbget I had used before which actually is part of the Samba Suite. But the only Windows binary I could find was at http://paully.com/smbget/ and on that page it says:

“For me it was very useful to transfer big files with size about 1 gigabyte over the our intranet through Samba from Germany to Belarus and from Belarus to Germany. If remote file is not available the application will try to download it until the job is done ”

OK, Belarus is not really what I’d call a democratic country so I was a little anxious about downloading a pre-compiled binary from such a source. Furthermore, I don’t know if Windows binaries are always larger than BeOS, BSD, and Linux ones but in this case the difference was huge. Anyway, if the source is not available anymore I am hosting the Windows Zip here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RC1 Inline Search

2009-01-28 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

Some might remember my post quite some time ago about what is still missing in Internet Explorer. Major criticism was the antiquated search box. What can I say, finally someone chastened the IE developpers and they integrated an inline search that will fit most needs. Good job!

It took me a while to remember this new feature since I still had the IE Inline Search plug-in activated. But once I deactivated it I got enlightened.

So, who still needs Firefox and for what reason? Only speaking for Windows systems, of course. And leave me alone with Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.

Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on IBM Thinkpad R30: Screen Resolution Problem (1024x768)

2008-12-21 by Administrator, tagged as linux

I just got my old IBM Thinkpad R30 back and I thought installing Ubuntu on it could be useful. So I downloaded the Desktop Edition Live-Install-CD thing and booted into the live system.
Disappointedly I discovered that the latest Ubuntu seems to have problems configuring the right resolution. The system would only let me choose 800×600 as a maximum but the display is capable of 1024×768. So I started searching the web and found descriptions of a bug. Still, all this seemed a little overdosed to me and searching around a little more I found another thread where a guy describes the problem of Xorg detecting the right display refresh rates.
So I figured out that I wouldn’t need all this xorg.conf stuff except the refresh rates and changed my original xorg.conf to look like this:

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"
	HorizSync	28-49
	VertRefresh	43-72
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	"Default Screen"
	Monitor		"Configured Monitor"
	Device		"Configured Video Device"
EndSection

The only lines I added are bold. And after I restarted X with [CTRL][ALT][DEL] I got the wanted resolution. Btw it is a Trident graphics chip but /var/log/Xorg.0.log showed that it is detected just fine.

T-SQL Simple Timestamp With Leading Zeros

2008-12-04 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, programming

I just had to create a simple string in MS T-SQL that would look like the following:

200812041613
or
yyyymmddhhmm

I solved it this way but I have no idea if this is a good solution (comments welcome):

DECLARE @timestamp AS varchar(12)
-- Create Timestamp with leading zeros
-- Year
SET @timestamp = CONVERT( varchar(4), DATEPART(year, GETDATE() ) )
-- Month
IF DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) < 10
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT( varchar, DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) )
ELSE
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( month, GETDATE() ) )
-- Day
IF DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) < 10
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) )
ELSE
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( day, GETDATE() ) )
-- Hour
IF DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) < 10
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) )
ELSE
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( hour, GETDATE() ) )
-- Minute
IF DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) < 10
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + '0' + CONVERT(varchar, DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) )
ELSE
	SET @timestamp = @timestamp + CONVERT(varchar(2), DATEPART( minute, GETDATE() ) )
-- Done creating timestamp
print N'' + @timestamp

The Bitlocker Odyssey or How I Killed Five Hours of my Time

2008-09-03 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

(…and yours if you are going to read this )

My Windows Vista System had some strange side effects and so I decided to do a reinstall. After having postponed this action many times I finally started yesterday.

First I thought it would be nice to have SP1 slipstreamed into the installation sources but it seems as if Microsoft does not support this anymore. I think they provide slipstreamed sources themselves. Still, there exits two ways to do so: the manual and the vLite way. vLite is the Vista version of nLite. Both are tools to create custom Windows Installation Sources.

Since VLite ist pretty much straight forward I decided to go that way. Still, the process takes around two hours!!! So get a can of tea (I suggest a FTGFOP Darjeeling)…

Once, this process finished I needed a tool to burn the ISO image. I like InfraRecorder which is the first decent GUI to the open source cdrtools I’ve seen.

I did the first try with maximum speed and a second one with the lowest possible speed and both burning processes finished successfully. Still, when launching the installation process I always got the error that it “Cannot find the file D:\Sources\Install.wim. Error code 0×8007000” after I entered the license key. Well, I remember we had burn issues with Vista ISOs and the solution usually was to use a different burn software and to burn at single or double speed but I got pissed and so I continued using the RTM image w/o SP1 I had. Two hours later I had a fresh Vista installation and SP1 was applied manually. And guess what? Of course I didn’t do a backup of the slipstreamed ISO I created and so I couldn’t use it inside a virtual machine to at least test if the slipstreaming process was a success.

Anyway, during installation I left around 1.5 MB of unallocated space on my hard drive because I knew BitLocker would need this as an unencrypted boot partition. But it seemed as if I didn’t leave enough space because when I startet the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool it said it would shrink my system partition. Since I didn’t want that I directly canceled the process and checked what was wrong. This turned out to be the worst thing I could have done because it left me with an unallocated hard drive space that wasn’t enough for the BitLocker boot partition and a system partition that Vista could not shrink anymore.

Exaleading around a little bit I tried the following:

Disabled paging and delete pagefile.sys
Disabled hibernation and deleted hiberfil.sys
Used JKDefrag (supposed to be able to move the NTFS MFT file)

All the above didn’t work. If you want to try yourself maybe this link is of help.

So what else could I do. Use something like Partition Magic, of course. I used the open source live CD gparted before but this time I tried Parted Magic.

And I tell you it rocks, perfect hardware discovery and after two hours I had a NTFS partition resized with gparted.

Automatically Create IIS Application Pools

2008-08-28 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, programming

Here is the script for the AppPools

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.
FOR /F "eol=# delims=; tokens=1,2*" %%f in (apppools.txt) DO (
  ECHO Creating AppPool "%%f" with user identity "%%g"
  CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS CREATE "w3svc/AppPools/%%f" IIsApplicationPool
  CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/WamUserName" "%%g"
  CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/WamUserPass" "%%h"
  CSCRIPT %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Inetpub\AdminScripts\ADSUTIL.VBS SET "w3svc/AppPools/%%f/AppPoolIdentityType" 3
  ECHO.
)
pause

And the correspondign text file:

#
# ";"-delimited file to create application pools
# Beware of strange characters in password,
# though ; should work 
# Structure is
#
# AppPool Name	;	User	;	Password
tmpAppPool;tmpUser;tmpPass

Automatically Create IIS Websites

2008-08-21 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, programming

I had to create quite a lot websites on a Microsoft IIS webserver and of course there is a nice scripting solution to it. Here is how I did it:

Batch code:

@ECHO OFF
SET webRoot=D:\websites
ECHO.
ECHO Creating directories
ECHO and websites
ECHO.
FOR /F "eol=# delims=; tokens=1,2*" %%f in (websites.txt) DO (
	ECHO Creating Dir %webRoot%\%%f\%%g and website %%g in appPool %%h
	MD "%webRoot%\%%f\%%g"
	iisweb /create "%webRoot%\%%f\%%g" "%%g" /i 192.168.228.30 /d %%g.perimeterless.org /ap %%h
	ECHO.
)
pause

and here is the text file that goes with it:

#
# ";"-delimited file to create directory structure,
# websites and application pools
#
# Structure is
#
# Subdirectory	;	Sitename	;	AppPool
testing;test1;DefaultAppPool
testing;test2;DefaultAppPool
testing;test3;DefaultAppPool

Congratulations to the Internet Explorer 8 Developer Team

2008-05-25 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

In the early beta phase of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 I posted some improvement thoughts to the official developer newsgroup and never got any response or feedback.

One thing I find pretty important is the option to close only the current tab if you click on the global close ‘X’ in the top most right corner if you have more than one tab open. In IE7 it would only ask you if you really want to close all tabs. If you accidentally clicked on the global close icon but only wanted to close the current tab you had to say ‘No’ and then close the actual tab.

But hey, guess what it looks like in IE8 beta (Konqueror style, woohooo) :

Update:

Wow, we’re really getting somewhere here. Playing around with IE8 beta a little more I discovered that the search box in the upper right corner has a sort auf auto correct mechanism. For example you type ‘target audiecne‘ instead of ‘target audience‘ in the box with Google as your search provider and then Google offers you to correct your search with a link above all the results of your original search query.

If you would like to use the corrected search query in the search box you had to copy’n'paste in the pre IE8 era but now IE8 is doing it for you. I already love this browser.

Virtual PC 2007 VHD: Resize NTFS Windows System Partition

2008-05-05 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft, software

As you may have recognized reading my last post I sometimes use my blog as a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). This post is filed under the same category.

Virtual PC 2007 is a free virtualization product from Microsoft. You can download many M$ Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files from here

Go to http://vmtoolkit.com and download the VHD Resizer (btw they also have a tool to convert VMware VMDK images to VHD files)
Run the tool and open the VHD file you want to resize (make sure its not currently used by a running VM)
Specify a new VHD file as destination with a type (fixed/dynamic) and a size and click on the button “Resize” (this may take a while so go and get a drink)
Add the new resized harddisk image to your virtual machine as second/third HD and boot into it with the original small VHD as system disk.
VERY IMPORTANT: Use “Computer Management” -> “Disk Management” to
assign a drive letter to the second/third HD
(otherwise dispart will not work)
Now open a CMD console and type diskpart to get into the interactive mode of the partition utlitiy. The tool is part of Windows XP / 2003 and later and may be downloaded for Win 2000
type list volume to display the list of available volumes in your system
type select [volume ID] (where [volume ID] either is the drive letter or the number given by the list volume command
type extend
Shutdown the system
Use the extended HD as your primary VHD file in your virtual machine configuration and remove the original (small) VHD file from your setup
Boot the virtual machine and download lots of movies in HD quality to fill up the new space

Direct access to Windows "Network Connections"

2008-05-01 by Administrator, tagged as microsoft

On my own account (just a personal reminder):

Press
[Win] (+ [R])
then type
ncpa.cpl

« Previous

About

Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)