July 2006 - Posts
Over on my alter-ego site AdminPrep I have an interview up there with Ben Smith who is a Senior Strategist
with Microsoft. Good stuff for you Security folks read up on and share with your community.
Take a look here for it.
Just saw this video
on an investigative report dealing with Microsoft hiring college
grads. I would love to see more of this from Microsoft. It
always seems like they are this ultra conservative company from the
outside but there really are some fun things that go on within the
company.
Being a huge Group Policy guy I have always searched for a policy that would allow me to turn on or off Remote Desktop on clients and servers. Well there is no Group Policy that currently does that. I do however have VB script that can be used to enable Remote Desktop on Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003 and then of course pushed out via Remote Desktop.
To use copy the code below and paste into a file with a text file with a .vbs extension. This will work for the local machine. Just replace the perion part that is mentioned in this string to another computer name if you want have it work on one machine - strComputer - "."
Const ENABLE_CONNECTIONS = 1
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_TerminalServiceSetting")
For Each objItem in colItems
errResult = objItem.SetAllowTSConnections(ENABLE_CONNECTIONS)
Next
By the way if you want to turn off Remote Desktop just change the 1 in this line of code
Const ENABLE_CONNECTIONS = 1
to a 0.
I know a lot of you are either looking at new certifications or looking to renew existing ones.
This voucher is good for VUE testing centers only!!!
Voucher # - MSUU4C7E701E
Microsoft ONLY
This voucher can be used as often as needed so feel free to share the
voucher # with any other co-workers or test takers you know.
Register for your exam online at www.pearsonvue.com/ms or call 1-800-837-8734.
I just published another Rewind session entitled "Removing a DC from Active Directory".
This session along with the other I created are free for anyone to
use to help learn how to perform tasks within Windows.
If anyone
else wants to help build a library of free task based online training
let me know. I'm sure there are plenty of folks that would
appreciate it.
I just saw off another MVPs blog that Microsoft is making Virtual PC 2004 free! This is not a demo but instead the full product. Microsoft has said for some time that this component will come with Vista and it looks like this confirms that as well. Take a look for yourself.
Just remember, you still need to have a valid licence to install the OS using this software.
Update: It looks like Microsoft is pulling this down. The reason being that in a corporate environment it would be way to easy for people to hide stuff in this password protected folder. There also is no recovery options. I personnaly like it and if you can't remember the password then don't use it!!!
Microsoft has released Private Folder 1.0 for Windows XP SP2. This free product (that is not supported) allows users to lock a folder with a password to a folder called My Private Folder. Passwords for this folder must be 6 - 16 characters long and can only contain letters and numbers...for some weird reason symbols are not included.
The folder remains unlocked for 5 minutes of idle time before you must enter your password again. That threshold can be configured from 3 minutes of idle time to never (thus you would have to manually lock it).
You can download Private Folder 1.0 directly from Microsoft's website.
I know most of you have done this time and time again but I always forget the steps on how to extend a partition on Windows Server 2003. Now I can always just take a look here to remind me what I need to do. 
- At a command prompt, type diskpart
- Type list volume to display the existing volumes on the computer
- Type Select volume # where volume number is number of the volume that you want to extend.
- Type extend to extend the partition the remaining free space
This method works great if the storage is local or stored on SAN like an HP EVA.
This is hands down the coolest thing I have seen
on the web in a LONG time. GE has an online whiteboard that you
can actually share with people. You have to check this out
yourself!
GE Whiteboard
...is NOT going to be the next name for the
server product currently known as Longhorn. 
However there were
some pretty funny ones they came up with. Check out some of the
names they played around with here.
Dean Wells has a very interesting and in-depth look at this FSMO role. This will actually be an 8 part series that looks into this DC role. Teaching AD for years this was always a mystery to students on what this role really did. For those that love the nitty gritty details this is what you have been looking for all along.
Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Article 4, Article 5, Article 6
I have always been a fan of classic arcade or
console games. Pac-Mac, Donkey Kong and such brings back so many
fond memories.
If you are like me and enjoy playing those types of games then www.classicgaming.cc/classics is for you. Those two titles along with Astroids and Space Invaders are available to play for free within your browser!
Try not to stay up to late or miss out on too much work with this one.
Not to long ago I mentioned that I bought an iMAC for my wife that was going to be used to replace her Dell laptop. I mentioned in that blog that I was not going to install Bootcamp on it...I lied.
After about a month I decided to make things easier for Sami and thus installed Windows XP on my Intel based Mac. The first thing she said to me was "Why the hell did you do that? I was just getting used to" Well honey, perhaps it was because you complained long and hard enough that it was too difficult to understand. :) Regardless, I love the way XP looks on this machine. I can't wait to upgrade once again to Vista once it is supported. Actually before I do that I have to upgrade the memory...if anyone has any good recommendations please let me know in the comments.
Life was good on OS X but to be honest it is much better with XP.
After playing around with Longhorn for quite some time I have grown found of the icons Microsoft has decided to use. Now that i'm back to using my XP machine for the majority of my work I really want to use those icons. If you would like to use those icons on your machine and am a beta tester of Longhorn do a search for imageres.dll and copy that file over to your machine with the other operating system. The file is just under 15MB. Now when you want to change the icon of an application just point to that file and use what ever you like.