Category: Microsoft

Windows 7 with 2 NICs

Despite supposedly having no data caps, the other day my provider interrupted my surfing with a message stating that I’d downloaded an “excessive amount” and should contact them to upgrade my plan.  Interestingly, their website also doesn’t show any data caps or, for that matter, any plans for me to upgrade to.

I’m not real worried about it, but at the same time since I work full time remote I really need my intertoobs to work all the time.  Then I remembered that the vacation rental we manage next door to me has internet that rarely gets used.  Time to slap a wireless NIC on the server and push internet traffic through that router!

Doing so was easy.  I had a halfway decent USB wireless laying around.  I slapped it in, joined the next door wireless network, and then ran a route print:

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The highlighted bit is the new NIC.  Above it is the wired NIC connecting the server to my local network.  You want the Metric on the NIC you want internet traffic flowing through to be the lowest.  Luckily mine defaulted to that.  If yours doesn’t do that you can manually set the Metric by navigating to the Advanced properties of the Network Adapters:

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After that I simply removed the Gateway address from the properties of my wired LAN access NIC and voila – all my intertoobs were coming from next door while my LAN still had full access to my server.  In order to double check I logged into my router and disabled internet traffic for the server IP address.

I also installed a groovy little tool called Network Manager so I can watch the traffic:

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Windows Sticky Notes

I admit it – I use Windows Sticky Notes.  I hate how unconfigurable it feels though.  The font is terrible, for instance.  Lucky you can change it with a reghack.

What’s happening here is, because the notes demand to use Segoe Print as the font, you’re changing what font Segoe Print actually is.  Replace the .ttfs with fonts of your choice.

There are also a myriad of shortcuts for modifying existing note text:

Ctrl+B – Bold text
Ctrl+I – Italic text
Ctrl+T – Strikethrough
Ctrl+U – Underlined text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Bulleted (press once) or Numbered (press twice) list
Ctrl+Shift+> – Increased text size
Ctrl+Shift+< – Decreased text size
Ctrl+A – Select all
Ctrl+Shift+A – Toggles all caps
Ctrl+L – Left aligns text
Ctrl+R – Right aligns text
Ctrl+E – Centers text
Ctrl+Shift+L – Small Alpha list (3rd), Capital Alpha list (4th), small roman (5th), Capital roman (6th)
Ctrl+1 – Single-space lines
Ctrl+2 – Double-space lines
Ctrl+5 – Set 1.5-line spacing
Ctrl+= – Subscript
Ctrl+Shift++ – Superscript

TrueCrypt – No longer safe?

Bad news.  A serious flaw in TrueCrypt has been found that potentially allows full system compromise.  The worse news?  There’s no truly trustworthy TC successor for Windows out there in the wilds so far.  Microsoft and Symantec both offer encryption solutions, but surely they’re rife with back doors.  VeraCrypt is a fork of TC, but so far there’s nothing to generate any confidence that it too isn’t compromised.

The good news, I suppose, is that so far it appears that TrueCrypt on Linux doesn’t have this newly found flaw.  Also, it seems this flaw requires the machine to be on and in Windows.  In other words, if your fully disk encrypted machine is powered down, or your drives are removed or are external and the machine isn’t with them, your data remains safe.  Cold comfort, really.

More info on Microsoft’s push to track Windows 7 and 8 users

Surely you’ve already read that Windows 10 includes some pretty disappointing user tracking baked into it.  Microsoft is also pushing this tracking down to its Windows 7 and 8 operating systems.

Aside:  I get the Win 10 thing.  It’s free.  Do what you want with your free operating system.  But quietly inserting anti-privacy shit into operating systems that people have already paid for?  Ludicrous.  Offensive.  Ridiculous.  It’s prompted me to finally get off my ass and move all the machines I can off of Windows and onto Linux, for good.

Anyway, yeah, MS is pushing this stuff into your operating system without really giving you any indication.  The current list of updates that should trouble you are as follows:

You can remove these updates via command line thusly:

In fact, you can save the above to a .bat file and run it.  This takes them off, but unfortunately doesn’t prevent them from presenting themselves for install in the future.  To fix that you’ll have to head to Windows Update, let it scan what you’re missing, and then go through that list hunting for each of these.  When you come across one, right click it and choose to hide it.

This is the list for now… I sincerely doubt this is where it will end, however.  Have you tried Linux lately?

Microsoft slips it to you on Windows 7 and 8

Microsoft is slipping into Windows 7 and 8 the same data mining and privacy violating tracking that has made news for being a part of Windows 10.  I’m in the midst of absorbing it all, but for now further info, including updates to block, can be found here.

Also, instructions on how to opt-out of their CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) which if you’ve installed Office you’ve surely inadvertently joined, can be found here.

This is getting to be a bit much.

Go Away Windows 10

I ran Windows 10 on one of my laptops for awhile.  It looks nice.  It also has major problems, including privacy concerns and the inability to truly stop/delay update delivery and installation.  That laptop is now running Ubuntu Mate again.  And for those of us on pre Windows 10 machines, it’s pushy.  I get daily prods to upgrade on machines that I know good and well will either run dog slow or not at all on 10.  My goal now is to make that nag go away.  Here’s my current method. This seems to work on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.  Your mileage may vary and, as with everything I post, this is all at your own risk.  The screenshots that follow are from Windows 8.1.

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App Pools Gone Mad!

IIS.  I’m not a fan.  But it’s a requirement where I work, so there you go.  Occasionally one of our IIS servers will slow to a crawl or stop responding altogether.  Often it’s a application pool run amok.  An app pool is essentially a container that holds the processes of a web application.  And if your web application isn’t written well, and doesn’t have decent controls in it, it can go nuts.  If someone can, say run an open ended database query with the potential to return a bajillion records because your app doesn’t disallow this sort of irresponsible behavior, the app pool containing that process is going to fill. And fill. And fill, eventually gobbling all  your processor cycles. An easy way to discern this is if the process w3wp.exe is pegging your CPU at 99%.  Find this in Task Manager.

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Active Directory Account Lockout – Creation – Deletion – Disable monitoring

We’ve used a variety of third party tools to monitor Active Directory domain account changes.  They’ve all either been expensive or kind of sucked (or, unfortunately, both).  But if you’re running a relatively new OS on your controller you can use the magick of Powershell to ship you alerts on account changes!  Powershell can monitor the local Security Event Log on your controller and ship you an email when events matching your description are entered.  Here’s an example Powershell script:

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PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_29D4&SUBSYS_281E103C&REV_02

Rebuilding an old HP dc5800 to Windows 8.1 64 and a pesky PCI Simple Communications Controller can’t find its driver.  Its hardware id is:

PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_29D4&SUBSYS_281E103C&REV_02

Googlin’ turns up lots of dead links.  It’s the Intel Management Engine Interface, and here is the driver.

Yeah, I know the title of this post overruns the right column.  I figure by having the hardware id be the post title it will be easier for people in need to find, so I’m leaving it.

Windows 8 Preview Pane woes

I don’t like the Windows 8 preview pane.  It makes moving and deleting things difficult, especially over network shares.  It likes to lock shit up thanks to the (usually hidden) thumbs.db file it creates.  So, turn it off.  It’s a simple reg hack:

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoReadingPane"=dword:00000001