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Fixing a hibernation problem with Intel network cards
I had a problem with hibernating a Windows XP system containing an on-board Intel(R) 82566DC Gigabit NIC. The hibernation was ok, but it would wake up in a couple of seconds after shutting down. Today I looked around a little more and found the following setting: “Wake On Directed Packet”. Unchecking it solved the problem.…
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Moving to an always connected world
I was browsing through some of the PDC reporting, when this announced feature of Windows 7 caught my eye; DirectAccess. It’s supposed to be a VPN which you don’t have to set up, it just magically works. Really? I didn’t know that VPN’s were so hard to set up. My personal experience is with managing…
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Limitations of Software Restriction Policies
Update: ok, SRP is even more broken than I thought. As one of the readers pointed out (thank you Anonymous!), there is a built-in (albeit only partially documented) option on runas which circumvents SRP. For some time now there has been a friendly back-and-forth between Didier Stevens and myself with regards to the topic of…
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It can happen to the best of us
I was reading Scott Hanselman’s The Weekly Source Code 33 – Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome and came upon this piece of text: Older versions of ATL, and by older I mean pre-Visual C++ 2005, used dynamically generated code in small isolated cases. Obviously, without the appropriate APIs this is going to cause problems…
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Free space on an NTFS volume
I found this article via Raymond Chen’s blog: NTFS Misreports Free Space?. It’s very interesting (if you like getting to the bottom of technical things). Incidentally it reminded me of an old question I always had: Why don’t processes which need to read all the files from a given volume (for example AV scanners) use…
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Changing the NTP server under Windows
Disclaimer: I’m not a Sysadmin and I’m especially not a Windows/Active Directory sysadmin. From what I’ve know, there is some overlap between this and the AD stuff (in the sense that the DC also provides time info AFAIK, so please also check that possibility if it applies). As always, feedback is welcome. Setting up NTP…
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Using Perl to access PostgreSQL under Windows
This appears by a non-intuitive problem for people. Below I assume that you are using some version of ActivePerl for Windows (5.8 or 5.10). First of all: Under no circumstances (ok, I rephrase: only under extreme circumstances) should you use DBD::PgPP. It is old, not very performant (given that its implemented in Pure Perl) and…
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Vista and Dell woes
I’ve completed my first ever Vista installation on a relative’s computer and I’m entirely underwhelmed. First of all, the only hardware it recognized out of the box was the soundcard (LOL). Just to clarify: I’m talking about a recent model of the Dell Inspiron laptop line here. Second of all, it failed to read the…
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Reboot Windows – the hard way
I was clicking around via an RDP session on a Windows server and managed to kill the LSASS process (note to myself: next time pause the view of ProcessExplorer before killing processes!). The one minute till reboot screen promptly appeared and my first reflex was to stop the countdown (this is a trick which came…
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Configuring PPPoE under Windows XP for transparent operation
Lately I’ve been on a quest to provide a simple and highly secure configuration for Windows XP. As the last post focused on security, here is a small usability tip: If you are using a PPPoE link (with an ADSL line connected directly to the computer for example), here are three things you can do…