The Blog Thing

You might want to have the Internet Explorer version number of a Windows system available as an environment variable, for instance to get an inventory of all systems and the IE version installed.

You can do so by running the script below from the login script on your Windows system.
The script assumes that %TEMP% points to some writable location. Replace “SomeFile” with a file on your network (f.i. on the NETLOGON directory) or remove that “echo” line to only have the environment variable available.

@echo off
SET IE_Ver=
SET RegQry="HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer" /v Version
REG.exe Query %RegQry% > %TEMP%\CheckCC.txt
Find /i "Version" < %TEMP%\CheckCC.txt > %TEMP%\StringCheck.txt
FOR /f "Tokens=3" %%b in (%TEMP%\CheckCC.txt) DO SET IE_Ver=%%b
Echo %COMPUTERNAME%,%IE_Ver% >> SomeFile.csv

When you use the ping command, sometimes you get a “pipe” value at the end of the rtt statistics. So what does this mean? I had to dive into the actual ping source code to find out. Here it is

The “pipe” number is the maximum number of echo request packets that have been under way at one time, without having been answered by an echo reply packet (but did get answered in the end).

Normally, ping will send a so called echo request, wait for a second an then send the next echo request.
When it has sent the second echo request before the first has been answered, the pipe number is raised Read the rest of this entry »

So, for some reason I don’t want to know, you want to remove your old network connections from Windows XP, but you can’t seem to find them?
You can see them when you run “netsh interface show interface”, but that’s about the only place they show up? You’ve tried using the device manager and told it to “show hidden devices” and they still won’t show up?

Don’t worry, help is here

The problem lies in the fact that the device manager in Windows XP doesn’t show devices that aren’t connected to your system. So, the old NIC simply doesn’t show up, because it isn’t connected to your system anymore.
The same goes for any other device, by the way. An old USB stick, USB harddrive, your old CRT or LCD monitor, they’re all in there, but you can’t seem to remove them.

Do the following to get device manager to work the way you want:

1. Start a command prompt:
   Start -> Run -> “cmd.exe” <enter>
2. At the command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER:
   set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1
3. Type the following command at the same command prompt, and then press ENTER:
   start devmgmt.msc

The device manager will start and when you do “View -> Show hidden devices” , all old and unconnected devices will show up, so you can troubleshoot them, delete them or be amazed at how many devices you’ve had connected to your system but forgot about.

Happy removing

From January 2006 on, Microsoft has created a bi-annual Security Intelligence Report.

The report provides an in-depth perspective on the changing threat landscape including software vulnerability disclosures and exploits, malicious software (malware), and potentially unwanted software. Using data derived from hundreds of millions of Windows users, and some of the busiest online services on the Internet, this report also provides a detailed analysis of the threat landscape and the changing face of threats and countermeasures and includes updated data on privacy and breach notifications. The fifth volume (and previous volumes) of the report is now available:

SIR Volume 5 (January through June 2008) and Key Findings Summary

Though of course focused on Microsoft security products, it does provide an insight that is broader and gives a good basis as an input for discussion on malware protection.

Just a quick note for those of you still looking for a good starting point on securing Windows XP systems.

Special Publication (SP) 800-68 Revision 1, Guide to Securing Microsoft Windows XP Systems for IT Professionals, has been published as final. It seeks to assist IT professionals in securing Windows XP Professional systems running Service Pack 2 or 3. The guide provides detailed information about the security features of Windows XP and security configuration guidelines. SP 800-68 Revision 1 updates the original version of SP 800-68, which was released in 2005.

URL:
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/download_WinXP.html

Bye,

Vincent

I’ve worked with my new Intel D945GCLF mini-ITX board for a while now, here are some observations:

• When installing the board in any chassis, make sure that your power supply has a 4-pin ATX “P4″ connector. The board needs it and won’t run without it!
• The CPU used on the board, the Intel Atom 230, doesn’t support SpeedStep technology, and will always run at full speed. This is a no-no if you’re trying to build an as-low-as possible-power-consuming device.
• Because of the constant full speed, the CPU gets very hot when simply disconnecting the fan. It didn’t crash within 15 minutes, but I’m sure it will shorten the CPU lifetime.
• The CPU fan always runs at full speed and is quite noisy. Without any modifications, I would not use this board in very quiet environments. Maybe a Zalman FanMate will help here.
• The cooling fins attached to the CPU are quite high. So high that makes the standard cooler to big for a 1U high chassis.
• There is a problem installing CentOS 5.2 or Fedora 9 from the standard ISO’s. See this post.
• When trying to install Windows XP, make sure you’re installing it with SP2 or SP3 slipstreamed in. The install will fail with the original Windows XP or with SP1 (you’ll get a blue screen complaining about pci.sys).

All in all, I like the board, but wouldn’t use it for anything else than (busy) office or home environment desktop applications. But then, that’s exactly what Intel says the board is for

Happy building!

After upgrading my system to a new mainboard, Windows XP wouldn’t start anymore. It would briefly show the XP logo, change to black and reboot over and over.
This is nothing to be concerned about and is easily fixed using your Windows XP CD. Just start the system with the CD, and choose to repair your existing installation. Mind you, that is not the repair console, it’s the option on the next screen.

After the repair, Windows will boot again and you can install drivers for your new mainboard, graphics card, etc. Most of your applications will still work fine, except for some that use specific hardware (such as burner programs, CD emulators like Daemon Tools, UltraISO, etc).

The problem I had on two computers, is that Windows Automatic Updates (WAU) wouldn’t work anymore. Manually or fully automatic, it will tell you that there are lots (80+ in my case) of updates, will download them, and will fail to install any and all. The problem reported is something very general, like “Problem: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed” or something along those lines.

What has happened, it that for some reason some components (DLL’s) of WAU aren’t “registered” anymore. To fix this, copy the text below, do a “Start -> Run” and type “cmd” and Enter, and paste the text into the cmd text box that should appear. For every line a window will pop up, saying the the DLL was registered. Restart your computer and WAU should work fine.
The lines below assume that Windows XP is installed in C:\WINDOWS. If yours is in C:\WINNT or any other, change the lines accordingly.

regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuapi.dll

I’ve started using Outlook 2007 and came across an issue that had me searching for a solution for a while. Maybe this post will help out someone

I regularly get quarantine reports from our Aladdin eSafe system. These include an HTML form to release email that has been quarantined, but shloudn’t have. In Outlook 2007, the forms don’t display and I couldn’t use the form anymore.
The reason is that Outlook 2007 doesn’t support HTML forms. The solution is fairly simple: view the message in a browser window.
To do so, choose “Other Actions” from the Action menu and then choose “view in browser”.
From there on, things will work as they used to in Outlook 2000/2003.

Did you know this? Well, I didn’t up until a little while ago.

Here’s the deal. First: this goes for the built-in administrator account in Windows OS’es, knows as BUILTIN\Administrator (RID 500). You’ll find it exists in all relatively modern Windows based systems and Active Directory.

OK, you’ve really thought about this and decided on a long and complex password for the administrator account. Sometimes a blank password might be better, though.
This is because in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, a blank password (by default) can only be used for local access. An account having a blank password cannot be used as a network credential…
So, when you can guarantee physical security of the system, a blank password might actually be better than a weak one

All in all, I’d rather have the built-in administrator account disabled. You should never need it, and when you need to use safe mode or the recovery console, it will automatically be enabled.
Good practise says that everyone who needs administrator access has his/her personal administrator account and a normal working account besides that, so…

So I started using Internet Explorer 7 a little while ago. Now that wasn’t a fun experience at first.
The problem I faced was that every time I started IE, it would “hang” for many seconds, rendering my PC useless and then decide to continue. It would do the “hanging” bit while displaying “Connecting” in the tab title, when all it had to connect to was “about:blank”…

Looking through many search engines, I didn’t find the answer (or the problem to start with), so I had to look for a solution myself. I found it and hope this post will sometime help someone out there

At some point I realised that the timeout period and the hanging part was very similar to that of my PC not finding some network resource. So I fired up Ethereal, started a capture and started IE.
What I found, is that it was trying to resolve a certain name (in this case “SIMACNET”, the name for our intranet web site) in several ways. Why would it do that? I couldn’t think of any reason…

So I fired up Sysinternals FileMon utility and started IE again. This time it showed that when starting, somewhere along the line it tries to read in the “favicons” for the links you put in the Links bar. There was the source of my problem. For some reason it tried to read that favicon from a non-existing network location.

So, I removed the link from the Link bar, and gone was my problem. I didn’t bother to investigate any further.

Overall, I’m happy with IE 7, but I do miss the instant “find as you type” function Mozilla Firefox has, where you type cntrl-f, start typing what you’re looking for and while typing, it looks for it on the page it displays. Well, maybe this is something for the next version