I-BLOG

At times, we will be forced somehow to reinstall Windows. What happens is, all the users are gone and so the file security permission entries are orphaned! So creating a user with the same ‘User ID’ as before creates the user but with a different SID (Security Identifier). In such scenarios, the old files cannot be accessed since the new user doesn’t have any permissions on those folders (remember orphaned permissions). So the workaround is to take ownership of those files/folders. The following MS article describes in detail on how to achieve the same….

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421

How is your Windows PC doing today ? Getting sluggish day by day ? Well, cleaning up is needed for all the machines…

Clutter cleaner : http://www.ccleaner.com/

This is a great tool I’ve been using which helps me cleanup all the temp files on the disk which get accumulated over a period of browsing and computer time. Believe it or not, I’ve cleaned up 1 GB of space from one of my friends machine using this This also has a provision for cleaning up the registry clutter. No worries to the users, tool to cleanup tools.

Cleanup : http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/

This is one of the best to cleanup temp files and other temp files which can become over a lot of ‘disk eating’ mess. The sound of Toilet Flush is great too

Registry Cleaner : RegSeeker 1.45 (www.hoverdesk.net)

The tools proves to be of good use and helps clean a lot of mess in the registry. Good one.

Simple Network tool : HoverIP (www.hoverdesk.net)

This is a gui tools for IPConfig/Ping/Nslookup/Traceroute/PortScanning with tabbed interface. Looked good to me, might be useful for a couple of things to be achieved in a single tool.

AntiVirus for Home : www.avg.com

One of the best one, I use it myself and am quite comfortable with it. The virii updates are frequent and less in size, so doesn’t eat up bandwidth

AntiSpyware for Home : www.lavasoftusa.com

Adware is one of the best available out there for antispyware… Does a very good job of cleaning up. I run it once in a while to find ‘tracking cookies’…

Tune XP : http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/default.php

It doesn’t much of an explanation. It tunes well with the memory and harddisk usage.

They are all for personal use, so don’t use it over corporate machines which is ‘inviting trouble’.

To allow split-tunnel feature while connected through Windows VPN, you can enable or disable to have all the internet traffic go through VPN. Security measures is your choice.

How to do it ?

Onthe client machine go :
control panel | network connections | right click on the VPN/virtual adapter and choose properties | Networking | TCP/IP -properties | advanced | general | un-check “use default gateway on remote network”

The differentiation seems a little odd;

Manager : a person whose work or profession is management

Leader : a person who is followed by everyone

This leads to me to believe that ‘a Leader MUST be a Manager as well however a Manager may not be a leader necessarily’. So Leader has a higher sense of responsibilities than a manager  

Then how come in IT Industry, lead reports to a manager ??? Shouldn’t the terminology be the other way around ?

In Bangalore, which one do you think is easier? I can hear ‘Trip to Mars’ from a lot of Bangalore guys (The so called SiliconValley of India).

Well, I had to get one today and I kept calling those ‘PRIVATE’ guys to refill, but they wouldn’t answer, then a little bless on me -> I got somebody on phone to answer but just to say they don’t have 12kg Cylinder ready (Wow, what a response from a 24 hour delievery commitment guys). I had to take the 17 Kg cylinder for 711 Rs/-.

So trip to mars is worth its expense…
Forget it, I’m frustrated… 

Free time? Like to checkout my kids photographs then checkout rose.rsivanandan.com

In a NetAdmin’s life, one of the recurring headache is to change the Local Administrator password on all the machines in the Domain; I had to do it and this is how I did,

Very Simple;

Go to http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsPasswd.html and get the pspasswd utility.

The above link won’t work since Microsoft acquired them, so the link would be http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/miscellaneous

Then just run it this way;

Make a text file, lets call it ‘file’ and put in your machine names one by one into it.

pspasswd @file Administrator <newpassword>

Run it with domain administrator privilege and you are done. Just create a batch file and keep it for future.

Batch File:

pspasswd @file Administrator %1

Save the above into ‘change.bat’ and invoke it as ‘change.bat <newpassword>’

I thought I will put this info on this here, so that everytime I answer a question, don’t have to type it all and just link to here;

Basically one of the biggest problems encountered with ExchangeServer and Outlook client when they are connected over a IPSec VPN, it doesn’t work very well. As a solution, this is what I’ve always suggested and proved to be of use too.

1. When you connect through VPN, first find out what is the best MTU size for you to talk to your corporate. How you can do this is simple; Connect to VPN and then,

ping -l 1400 -f <insideipofServer>

what we are doing here is to set the mtu to 1400 and also set ‘don’t fragment’. So if it is possible to send the packet without fragmenting then it would go through otherwise you’ll get a reply saying ‘don’t fragment bit set and so cannot proceed’. You are in-effect finding the Path MTU.

Then slow start reducing the 1400 to 1350, 1300 etc and see when you can ping without any problems and that should be your MTU.

2. Also make sure you add the servername to ip resolution in your hosts file.

That should take care of your problem in most of the scenarios. Now how to change the MTU size on the network adaptor?

The MTU for Windows 2000/XP/2003 network interfaces can be configured here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{Interface GUID}\MTU

Seems to be a lot late in the aRENA but always better late than never