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Showing posts from November, 2009

Me Talking About Wireless Security

This one is me talking about wireless security on a spot with the local TV news in Winnipeg. http://winnipeg.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20080904/wpg_personal_info_080904/20080904/?hub=WinnipegHome

Runas for Windows Explorer

We do a lot of our support for clients remotely. The offer remote assistance functionality in SBS is a real timesaver for us. Although, offering assistance based on username rather than computer would be a nice touch. Today I was providing remote assistance to a desktop computer that was out of disk space. The user didn't have sufficient permissions to clean up the disk and I didn't want to work outside of the user's profile. So, I wanted to run Windows explorer a Administrator. Here's the command line: runas /user:domain\username "explorer /separate"

Ballad of the Duplicate SPN

So, here's the scenario. We need to replace defective hardware with a new computer. We don't need to restore anything in particular, we're just going to put a new server in with the same name as an old one to save some reconfiguration issues. Step 1: Dcpromo down the server Step 2: rename Server1 to Oldserver so there is no conflict Step 3: rename new server as Server1 Step 4: Join Server1 to domain So far, so good. However, after joining the domain we get this error: The security database on the server does not have a security account for this workstation trust relationship Verify that the computer account is there and try several combinations of different rejoining and deleting the computer account. No resolve. After a bunch of searching, it turns out that there is a property of a computer account that cannot be repeated in other computer accounts. The servicePrincipalName propery cannot have conflicting values with other computer accounts. Each computer account should ha

Virtualization on Windows 7

Windows 7 has a nifty new feature called XP mode that uses Windows Virtual PC in the background. My first surprise is that I had to download the software for this from MS which was about 500GB. However, that was the least of my worries. It turns out that Windows Virtual PC will only run with hardware assisted virtualization. On AMD processor systems this isn't an issue because almost all AMD processors have hardware assisted virtualization. Intel, on the other hand, has been using hardware assisted virtualization as a differentiator between upper and lower end chips for the last several years. Basically trying to get a premium out of it. Many computers with Intel processors do not have hardware assisted virtualization. Unfortunately, my laptop is one of these. Fortunately, even though it is unsupported (like I'd be calling for support) Virtual PC does run on Windows 7. A blog documenting it is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/08/19/running-virtual-pc-2007