command prompt

Fix weird Internet connection problems with ipconfig

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

One of the most maddening things that can happen when you’re using a computer is that a web site you visit routinely quits working. Your Internet connection appears to be fine, but suddenly, for some reason, you can’t go to the site you were just using. Try to go to another site you haven’t visited in a while, and it’s fine. But whatever site you were using a minute ago doesn’t work anymore. The site becomes accessible again immediately after you reboot, but that’s a really big hassle.

There’s a much less drastic fix. It’s easy too, but non-obvious.

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My first really bad day in IT

Dave Farquhar security, War Stories , , , , , , ,

Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. I can’t remember if it was one Thursday or two Thursdays before Labor Day weekend in 1997, but one of those two days happened to be the beginning of the first crisis of my career.

Whichever Thursday it was, it was getting close to midnight when my phone rang. It was Max. The print server wasn’t working. That happened a lot. That server had IBM’s Services for Macintosh on it, which never worked all that well, and, worse, tended to make the rest of the server act up a lot. That in and of itself shouldn’t have been a crisis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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How to power your computer up from away from home

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, security, Servers and Networking , , , , , , ,

The low-tier, DIY VPN has proven popular. The biggest drawback with its approach has been that it requires you to keep a PC on at home. But if your computer is configured to hibernate after a period of inactivity, or if the power goes out, you’ll have a problem.

If you’re willing to do some work, you can use Wake-on-LAN over any Internet connection to solve that issue and power on the computer at will.
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MBR rootkits don’t mean you have to wipe the drive

Dave Farquhar security, Software , , , , , ,
MBR rootkits don’t mean you have to wipe the drive

There’s a nasty rumor going around that if your computer gets infected with the Popureb rootkit, your only recourse is to wipe your MBR, reformat your hard drive, and reinstall (or run your factory recovery disk, which is essentially the same thing).

Not so fast.

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Can’t get system restore to run? Force it.

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

If your computer brings up a window every time you click on a program’s icon asking what you want to open it with, there’s a not-so-obvious way out.

Ve hev vays to get a command prompt when executable files won’t run normally. And from there, you can run anything you want, old school DOS-style.

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How to use Sticky Keys to change/unlock a forgotten password

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

This isn’t a particularly new trick, nor did I invent it. But it’s a good trick for breaking into a Windows system when you don’t have a lot of tools at your disposal, and have legitimate reason to do so–like a lost or forgotten local administrator password. I’ve talked about some of those reasons before. I’d also add someone locking themselves out of their own computer to the list. It happens, just like people locking themselves out of their cars, or their houses.

Not every writeup I’ve seen of this trick goes into what I would call sufficient detail. So I’ll take a shot at it.

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My proposal to improve Windows 8

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I propose a new user interface for Calculator, because the one we’ve been using since 1990 is too confusing, and the one that came with Windows 7 didn’t help. It’s just different, not better.

The only thing that can save Calculator is the ribbon interface.
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Using Robocopy to root out PST files

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

So the word came out that the office is migrating to Windows 7 at some yet-to-be-determined time, but soon. It’s in testing now. (Too bad they didn’t recruit me as part of the testing team, because breaking Windows 7 is one of my superpowers.)

We’ve been told to back up our data. Lots of people are paranoid that they’ll lose their Outlook PST files, and with it, their ability to do top-drawer work. Frequently we have to search our archives to find forgotten details about old projects. It helps to make the new projects go more smoothly.

I came up with a surprisingly easy solution. It doesn’t even require admin rights–which is good. I won’t elaborate.
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Attempting to tame C:\Windows\Installer

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Nobody seems to know why the C:\Windows\Installer directory sometimes spirals out of control.

All I can add is that I’ve seen this kind of behavior. At a previous job, I administered a couple hundred servers. I had web servers, database servers, domain controllers, utility servers, installation servers, and the old web servers which basically served as a playground for the people who had more clout than me.

Everything but the playground servers theoretically started out identical to each other except for the IP address. They were built following the same instructions.

But invariably, one or two servers in each team would suffer from perpetual low disk space. To keep things running, I had a few Red Green-like solutions.
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A free SSD alignment tool

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Windows , , , , , , , , ,

We’ve talked recently about the importance of aligning your partitions on your SSD or your RAID array. What if I told you you could align an SSD or RAID array for free? Here’s where to find a free SSD alignment tool–it’s just not normally billed as such.

Alignment helps performance, sometimes tremendously, and it also dramatically improves your SSD’s life expectancy. Newer versions of Windows automatically align their partitions, but only if you do a clean installation to an empty drive. Older versions of Windows created their partitions starting at sector 63, for tradition’s sake. Maybe moving off sector 63 made dual-booting with Windows 9x harder.

Two readers, Jim and Xrocode, suggested utilities to do the job. One costs $30 and seems fairly automatic. One is free and requires a small amount of work. Grab the freebie here. It’s a 274 MB download, so it doesn’t even take all that long.

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