Microsoft Download Manager
Well, I only have to bring up a painful subject and Microsoft reacts right away...
Grab the Microsoft Download Manager
UPDATE:The download page seems to be missing now but the direct linki to the software still seems to work. MSDownloadManager.msi
What Internet Explorer is Still Missing, Part #2
Some time ago in the early IE7 days I wrote an article about the definetely required functionality the Microsoft browser was still missing. IE8 then added some of the missing features.
Today, in the pre-IE9 days some things have changed but others have not. After all these years there still is no download manager integrated into Internet Explorer. The feature to resume an interrupted download is so normal these days that this fact could be the big laugh of the day.
Anyway, there is something from MS that uses the BITS feature from Windows. Sadly, it is OEM only but I am sure you will find someone with an account to grab the download. Check this link:
http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-bits-ie-plug-in.aspx
and get the download here:
http://oem.microsoft.com/downloads/bitsfiles.exe
You'll then get a decent context menu entry and a nice little GUI telling you about the download status. OK, I guess I can now omit my Windows wget port. Btw, this has been tested on a 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise box invoked from the 32- and the 64-bit iexplore.exe. The bits_ie.exe is a 32-bit executable.
Create Certificates in a Windows Environment
A quick reminder for a certreq.inf file
[NewRequest] Subject = "CN=name" KeyLength = 2048 Exportable = TRUE MachineKeySet = TRUE [RequestAttributes] CertificateTemplate = "Template Name"
Type
certreq.exe -new
and supply the above file in the open file dialog. Then, specify a file to save the request in. Take the request (base-64 – cut’n'paste will do) to a CA and submit it. Take the response certificate back to the machine (base-64 again) and type
certreq.exe -acceppt "response.cer"
You will the find a certificate in the machine store (MachineKeySet = TRUE). Of course, template and usage must match
UPDATE: Just found an article that relates to this one.
Cool commandline moves
FOR /L %f IN (1,1,254) DO ping -w 500 -n 1 192.168.1.%f | findstr /I reply >> %TEMP%\ping_results.txt
SMB/CIFS Download Manager
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
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.
T-SQL Simple Timestamp With Leading Zeros
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
(…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
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
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
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 ;-)