Archive for the ‘windows’ Category

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Getting the IP Address of a Dialup Modem User

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

Here are a few borrowed screenshots  to illustrate how to get the IP address of a dialup modem user in Windows XP. Yes, believe it or not I do run into dialup connection support once in a while. This is particularly tough to troubleshoot since I don’t have any dial up connections configured on my laptop – I don’t even have a landline at home!

Note: If the user has access to a web browser, visiting a website such as WhatIsMyIP.com is probably easier.

When the dialup modem connection to the user’s ISP has been established, the “two overlapping computers” icon is added near the time at the lower right of the screen.

Right click on it to open a pop up dialog.

XP Dialup Modem Icon

 

Left click on Status.

That opens this window, with the General tab selected.

 

Left click on the Details tab.

The user’s IP address is Client IP address, of course, if you’re reading this, you probably know enough to have guessed that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images modified from:

 

Phew, first blog post in months. It’s crazy how time flies when there’s a lot going on.

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Posted in Internet, technical support, windows | No Comments »

Problems installing the RDP Patch in Windows XP?

Friday, March 16th, 2012

If you’re in IT, and you are responsible for some Windows computers, you should have heard of the upcoming critical security issue with Remote Desktop.  If not, read about it here or here or any number of articles on other tech sites in the last week.

We have several clients using RDP and Terminal Server in various configurations. Usually, we’ve set them up behind firewalls that block by IP address or custom ports that make them a little less vulnerable. We’ve begun the process of making sure that the Windows Updates are current on these machines, especially those that have Remote Desktop enabled and connected to the Internet on the standard port of 3389.

Today, I ran into a machine that just could not run Windows Updates for some reason, and hadn’t for about 3 months. I tried many potential solutions, in which I won’t go into detail.

This post is not about fixing Windows Updates. This is about installing the critical security patch for WinXP SP3 for the RDP issue before the exploits begin.

The work around in my case was to manually install the patch.

This is Microsoft’s official security bulletin, Microsoft Security Bulletin MS12-020 – Critical Vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Could Allow Remote Code Execution (2671387). If you read to the bottom, you see links to pages specific to various vulnerable Microsoft OSs. This is the one for Windows XP – Security Update for Windows XP (KB2621440).  On that page is a download link to get the patch! Just download and run it.

Sure, the right thing to do is fix Windows Update on this particular computer; however, installing just this patch is far, far better than nothing.

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Today’s Edition of “Always do your backups” is a Win7 Netbook

Friday, January 14th, 2011

I was not pleased to see that the new netbook that I mentioned in a previous post, did not come with restore DVD’s.  However, I just realized that since there is no DVD drive, most regular people wouldn’t know what to do with restore DVDs.

Anyway, I decided to make a full disk image backup, in case the drive in the netbook crashes badly.   Hard drives have moving parts, they all die eventually, the only question is if you have retired the computer before it goes.

Without restore DVDs, my next thought was to use  the Windows 7 built-in disk image backup.  I re-discovered that this feature does not back up over  network drives*. You’re supposed to use  an external USB hard drive, which is OK, given the price of external drives. But since I’m not familiar with the Win7 backup tools, and in particular, I can’t figure out if it will backup the hidden partitions that contain the original install files for Windows and the rest of the software bundle, I decided to fall back on my favorite disk image tool, G4L.

I have used G4L (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/) for clients and personal use for years, so I strongly prefer to use it. Without a DVD drive, I needed to make a bootable USB thumb drive.  That was surprisingly easy.

To create the bootable USB drive, I  followed the instructions here: http://radified.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224777260/0

As I type this, G4L is busily sending a perfect disk image of the netbook to our on-site FTP server.  It’s not quite a factory image (the netbook has been lightly used),  but it’s close enough.  Plus, the real restore partition is being backed up in case I really need to return it to factory settings.

* There are some tricks to do Windows 7 disk image backups over a network, one using Virtual drives feature of Win7, and another using iSCSI… but I digress.

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Posted in backups, hardware, windows | 2 Comments »

Windows 7 RAID-1 (Software Disk Mirror)

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

Today, I learned more about Windows 7 and it’s built in software disk mirroring for hard drives than I ever wanted to know.

It’s virtually impossible to find this listed on an official Microsoft.com page (I can’t find it), but Windows 7 Professional has software disk mirroring enabled. In previous versions of Windows, software disk redundancy was limited to the server class operating systems, e.g. Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003, and Windows 2008. Although, IIRC, Windows NT4 Workstation had disk mirroring, but I’m too lazy to look that up.

I spent several minutes today trying to find an official page that listed software RAID as a feature… and failed. Then, before starting this post, I tried again, and still failed. There are several 3rd party sites that mention software RAID being enabled in Win7. In the end, I had to set it up myself to be satisfied that it was true.

No, dynamic disk mirrors are not really the same as RAID1, but it’s close enough for me, and better in some ways – it should be possible to move a Windows mirrored drive to a completely different motherboard, for instance.

BTW, be careful with the entry level Dell Vostro 230’s, they don’t include support for Intel Matrix Storage anymore! Yes, that’s how this whole exercise started.

P.S. I just noticed that this is blog post number 101!

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Explorer.exe Crashes After Selecting a Large HuffYUV AVI File

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I’m playing with massive 20GB-90GB video captures from the TV tuner. You learn a few tricks when you start playing with 50GB files. It’s mind boggling, only a few years ago, the hard drive in my day-to-day computer was not this big!

Anyway, they’re HuffYUV compressed AVI’s. HuffYUV is a neat codec for video capture, it’s lossless, and it’s fast. I am transcoding these files to MPEG4 on the computer downstairs, but, Windows’ explorer.exe kept crashing every time I highlighted the .avi. It was either the massive file size, or something with the AVI. It turned out to be the code, HuffYUV, I think.

Installing ffdshow tryouts, which includes a multitude of codecs for Windows, including HuffYUV, seems to have done the trick! Plus, I’ve probably updated a whole bunch of codecs that were several years old on that computer.

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Posted in annoying, software, windows | No Comments »

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