Posts Tagged ‘windows’

Making Passwords for An Easier Life…….

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Hot on the heals of Companies Make VPN Easy For Yourselves……. comes another gem from the school of ‘kinda obvious if you think about it’ !

If you use the UK pound ‘£’ symbol in any passwords, at some point it will bite you in the ass when you are on an American keyboard (especially laptop keyboards).

With so many other non alphanumeric characters to choose from that are accepted in both UK and USA regions (ampersand, asterisk, exclamation mark, percent sign, carat) why run the risk of being unable to logon when not sat of your default location/system (this come from being unable to SU all bloody weekend on some Linux systems owing to my laptop be of the crappy USA keyboard variety….and yes I know about character map and such, but I couldn’t be bothered)

So from now on, I will never use pound ‘£’ or hash ‘#’ in my passwords just to be on the safe side (I guess some among you would consider this a security enhancement…….I suspect you are the same people who think obfuscation through DNS is also a security measure !)

DOH !

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Posted in unix, windows | No Comments »

Odd Windows DNS Issue…….

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Hmmmm, something is up with DNS at work. Randomly (anything from a week to 2 months) it seems to stop resolving .co.uk for some domains (especially www.bbc.co.uk) ? Nothing recorded in the eventlog for the times while it is behaving like this. Restarting DNS server fixes the problem for a while until it breaks again.

I recently patched server 2008 to SP2 as I found some issues that were fixed in that SP (like incomplete zone transfers which broke some stuff a while back).

But the service pack does not seem to have fixed this random sulking occuring in DNS.

For now I have enabled DNS debugging to a file on the system and restarted DNS, now I will need to patiently wait for it to act up again so I can have a peek and see if anything looks amiss.

I can find nothing solid on google either. If I ever get to the bottom of it I’ll re-post here, but in the mean time if anyone has any ideas let me know as I am stumped.

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Posted in dns, microsoft, windows | No Comments »

Everything Starts With An ‘e’……..

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Just read this post (admittedly, a little behind the times, but I have been very busy). It seems that in Europe, MS are being forced to remove IE from Windows 7 when it launches, and to comemerate this, all European versions of Windows 7 will have an ‘e’ appended to the product name (so for instance Windows 7 Home Premium ‘E’).

I cannot believe that with all the ‘smarts’ that work at MS this is the best idea they could come up with. The cost of x2 completely sets of packaging for US and EU materials !! And, seeing as what I suspect what will end up happening is a link on the desktop entitled ‘click here to install a web browser’ that will simply…..no wait for it…..download and install IE from the MS site, I have to ask  ‘what’s the point ?’

Without this link for dummies, they would also appear to have created and chicken and egg type scenario (at least for the lowest demonination of user). If you have no browser on your PC, how do you download a browser ? Yes, I know the smarter among us can just ftp/sftp one down from our favourite downloads site, but I dont fancy trying to talk my parents through that particular operation on a week day evening :o(

Why not simply force MS to incude a bunch of the top browsers. That way people (even dumb ones) could just sample and then remove (or ignore if they have the disk space) the ones they don’t like ?

It also looks like there will be no upgrade option for Europe either. So clean installs all round with the gnashing of teeth as people realise they didn’t get everything off that they needed before wiping the system.

What I still find more outrageous is that MS are still inflicting their version of paint on people and the EU have not said a word…….!!

e

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Posted in microsoft, windows, windows 7 | No Comments »

Scooby Doo And The Missing Printer Objects….

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I can’t say I’m a great fan of mysteries, I tend to either want to skip to the end real fast or know the outcome ahead of time. I guess it’s the uncertanty that I dislike, I like either solid ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type scenarios, it’s the binary in me :op

However, I must say I currently am experiencing a small but non-critical mystery to do with the companies printers.

We have a mix of network attached printers in the office from HP, Canon and Kyocera. They are all directly connected to the network via jetdirect cards or something that emulates the functionality of a JetDirect ethernet interface.

I have installed all of these printers onto the Windows Server 2008 that also serves as out main file server (file and printing go together in my book). I have installed the x64 and x86 based drivers without issue, and then have shared them out from the server. I then ticked the box to “List in the directory”

printer properties

Now, when I open my printers folder in Vista and click to “Add a printer” I can choose between a local printer or a networked one. selecting a networked one lists all of my configured network printers fine, and if I select them it installs the driver(s) and the whole thing just works. kudos Microsoft.

What I cannot do however is find the printer objects in active directory !?!?!?!? WTF ? Opening the active directory user and computers (ADUC) console I navigate to the “Printers” container…..empty ! yet if I search active directory for all printers, they are all returned in a nice little list.

Where do printer objects get placed by default when they are added to active directory ? Right clicking any of the printer objects in the ADUC console does glean a context menu with the “move” option, so I could place them where ever I like, but I want to know where I am moving them from in case anything breaks and I need to put them back again.

Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you ??……………….

[addendum] So my boss solved this one for me. It seems to have to enable the “Users, Contacts, Groups and Computers as containers” option in the “view” menu on the ADUC console. This allows you to expand computers as if they were containers themselves and there inside my file server were our printer objects <sigh>

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Posted in active directory, windows | 2 Comments »