Redirects TCP connections from one IP address and port to another. rinetd is a single-process server which handles any number of connections to the address/port pairs specified in the configfile.

How to use it

First of, download it from the website. The Windows 2000 version also works on Server 2003.

Create a new config file, called “config.cfg” in the same folder as where you’ve extracted the file. Add the following line. The format is “<source> <port> <destination> <port>“.

0.0.0.0 80 192.168.100.1 80

And start the daemon by executing the following.

C:\Folder\Where\You\Extracted\rinetd>rinetd.exe -c config.cfg

This will start the daemon, using the config file mentioned. The example lets you redirect all traffic (0.0.0.0) on port 80 to a new server (192.168.100.1) on port 80. A perfect HTTP redirection!

You can add multiple rules, change ports, … A new rule should be started on a new line.

Bluescreen is a screen saver that not only authentically mimics a BSOD, but will simulate startup screens seen during a system boot.

* On NT 4.0 installations it simulates chkdsk of disk drives with errors!
* On Win2K and Windows 9x it presents the Win2K startup splash screen, complete with rotating progress band and progress control updates!
* On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 it presents the XP/Server 2003 startup splash screen with progress bar!

Now that’s cool! :-)

A fun sidenote, though:

The RC will expire on June 1, 2010. Starting on March 1, 2010, your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Windows will notify you two weeks before the bi-hourly shutdowns start. To avoid interruption, you’ll need to install a non-expired version of Windows before March 1, 2010. You’ll also need to install the programs and data that you want to use.

What a way to let users know they should update/upgrade! ;-)

SQL Server Alternate Port

What ever happened to the default point seperation? :-(

But now, there’s a new kid in town; Windows PowerShell.

And they choose its name right; PowerShell. It IS powerful.

One of the most intriguing features is its ability to pipe output from one command, to the other.

How there – what’s new in that? Linux has had this for many years now, and even the command prompt in windows allowed you to pipe output onto another program.

It’s they way it pipes that output. Normal shells take the output of a certain command (which is plain text), and passes that text on as the input for the next command. PowerShell does this better; it takes the output from the first command, which can be anything from plain text, to an array of objects, to a SQL record set – and intelligently feeds it to the second command, which interprets its datatype (String, Hashtable, RecordSet, …) and can immediately process it.

This allows for much more robust programs, that get things done quicker – and in fewer lines of code. Granted, it has a bit of a weird syntax to get used to – but once you grasp it, the only limits you will reach are those of your own imagination.

There’s a very interesting video on Channel9 featuring Erik Meijer and Jeffrey Snover on how PowerShell was built, and what it’s capabilities are. Since the video features the creator of PowerShell, it really drills down to the very details of it.

Installing PowerShell

It’s a built-in feature in Windows Server 2008, but runs just as well in earlier versions of Windows Server (as well as Windows XP/Vista). You can download it, and install it (without rebooting the desktop/server!).

Get it going

Nothing fancy about that. Start it from your Start menu (or add a shortcut to %systemroot%/system32/ directory to the PowerShell executable, to start it from the Run screen).

Start PowerShell

You’ll see a new “command prompt” like screen, with a blue background color.

Your first command

Nothing like losing your virginity on a new scripting language, so allow me to pick your cherry; type the following cmdlet: Get-Date. This will print the current date, in your current open shell, in a localized language.

Get-Date: Date & Time in Powershell

One of the key features of PowerShell, is that almost everything is an object, from which you can invoke methods, of retrieve properties. If you want to retrieve a property from an object, that isn’t assigned to a variable, you need to enclose it in round brackets. Try the following command for instance:

(Get-Date).Year

(Get-Date).Year

This will parse the object “Get-Date”, and show the property “Year”. Obviously, there’s “Minute”, “Hour”, “Second”, “Month”, … A detailed overview at Microsoft’s Technet; Listing Date & Time Information: Get-Date.

Variables

Finally one of the few languages that has adopted the dollar-sign variable notation; $value = “string”.

You can try this immediately in the PowerShell: $variable = “Here’s my value.”.  This will assign the value “Here’s my value” to the variable “$variable”. Print it, by typing $variable.

Variable Assigning

To complete the example above, the following is also possible.

$dteCurrentDate = Get-Date
$dteCurrentDate.Year
$dteCurrentDate.Month
$dteCurrentDate.ToString()
$dteCurrentDate.AddDays(10).ToString()

Get-Date Properties

PowerShell’s awesomeness

Let’s get to the fun part. Piping output from one cmdlet to another, and parsing its objects/properties immediately. Issue the following command.

ls

Unix users will know this as the command to list files & folders in a particular directory (and without a parameter, the current directory). Similar to “dir” in command prompt. Output ought to be similar to this.

ls: Mode, LastWriteTime, Length, Name

Now image you only want the columns Name and Length, in that order?

ls | Select Name, Length

This will parse the output of “ls” (which normally includes columns such as Mode, LastWriteTime, Length & Name) and filter it down to only the “Name” and “Length” column.

ls | Select Name, Length

GUI: command completion, syntax highlighting & more

While writing in a plain old notepad/wordpad will work too, it’s always nice to have a GUI around for code completion & syntax highlighting. PowerGUI is powerfect (pun intended) for that.

PowerGUI Interface

Especially useful when you’re just starting to get into it, the code completion can help find that one cmdlet you just couldn’t remember. Definately worth the download.

Wrap it up

These are some of the basics of PowerShell, and don’t actually dive deep into it. I’ll be writing a few more segments on PowerShell, which go deeper into directory looping & filtering, sending mails from PowerShell, running MySQL queries, basic operations, …

I’m loving all the cool things you can accomplish through PowerShell, you should too! ;-)

In the meantime, here are some very interesting links to learn more about PowerShell.

• Expert to Expert: Erik Meijer and Jeffrey Snover – Inside PowerShell (Video)
• Basic PowerShell examples, couple useful commands
• PowerShell examples used on Ars Technica
• Is PowerShell a good upgrade for a batch file?
• How to get started with PowerShell?
• Windows Scripting: VBScript, DOS, JS, Python, …
• PowerShell tutorials

Strange how previous versions of Outlook had this functionality, and the “new” version doesn’t. Apparently, the change from rendering engine, from Internet Explorer to Word, was done for “consistency” purposes. They did accomplish that – it’s now consistently harder to get anything to work in Outlook.

Apparently, the latest definition automatically quarantines and deletes the file user32.dll, a Windows system library needed to successfully start your computer. As a result, the computer will display an option list, with choices of boot-up (safe mode, safe mode with networking options, …). A screenshot can be found below.

AVG's Missing user32.dll Effect

The problem only spread to 5 European countries: the Netherlands, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Although some users in Belgium are effected too, for using Dutch software. It only seems to effect Windows XP SP2 users.

AVG’s Support Pages: “In case you are not able to run your Windows XP operating system after AVG 8.0 virus definition update, it may be caused by a false positive on a specific “user32.dll” system file. The file was moved to the AVG Virus Vault and deleted. Therefore it is not possible to start Windows. ”

The result: hundreds of thousands of computers world wide won’t start, because of that missing file. There’s a fix, of course, but it’s quite technical and won’t be sufficient for your average facebook-myspace-youtube-generation. They’ll have to call their ICT guy, and pay royally for a screw-up some other company made.

The fix tool can be found on AVG’s Support pages. Dutch people can find an answer here (or mirror’d).

Could you charge Grisoft (owner of the AVG virusscan) for this, given the fact that most people use AVG’s free virus scanner? Will their EULA cover this sufficiently?

So, am I the only one that seriously dislikes this?

When I first saw the screenshots of a Windows Vista desktop, I disliked it. It may have had its improvements graphic-wise, and it may have looked really slick, but the default menu & sidebar were a big no-no for me.

Windows Vista's Sidebar

Take a look at the screenshot above. You’ve just lost a big portion of your screen, to a bloated sidebar, filled with information you don’t need. See that big-ass clock in the top right corner? Guess what; there’s already a clock in the bottom right one. It’s been there for at least 10 years.

Those rotating pictures in the sidebar. Do you _really_ need it? You can’t live for a day without having seen at least hundreds of your vacation pictures? It’s a useless feature, and you’re better of removing it – if only to remove a form of distraction that’ll keep you from your what you should be doing – being productive!

And to that extent, Windows Vista managed to sneak in extremely large desktop icons. I liked the size in Windows XP, why couldn’t they just keep it like that, by default? Your desktop looks cluttered if you have more than 10 icons, where this never was an issue before.

But no worries – they’ll get it right with Windows 7. I mean, they have to. Right?

Windows 7 - Gadgets

Guess again.

“We removed the sidebar to make room for … gadgets!”.

This brings me to my original point: gadgets or widgets are a step back in productivity. They fill up your desktop, makes it look unorganized and distracts you from whatever it is you should be doing. They may have tried to make it look better, but at what cost?

A desktop should be kept for your most used application icons, not for duplicate information (2 clocks, really?). A clean, well-organized desktop is a true haven for productivity. You know every icon by heart, every position. You know where to click. You have your workspace just the way you like it.

Don’t spoil it with Gadgets/Widgets. Just don’t. I’ll stick to my Windows XP with Windows 2000 look for a while, as long as this “evolution” of gadgets continues.

You can use to shut dow services that are slowing down your computer, ending programs that aren’t responding and in general finding out which programs are currently operating.

Did you know you can get the same information (+ a crapload more) through the command line?

Your task manager could show you the following information.

A full list of your processes is shown, some more clear than others. “Firefox.exe” is the obvious executable for the Firefox browser. “PaintDotNet.exe” is the advanced Paint-editor program. But what is “svchost.exe“, run as a Local Service? And why does it have multiple instances?

This information isn’t shown in the default Task Manager, but can be obtained through the command line. Open up your command line (start > execute > cmd) and hit the following command: tasklist /SVC

The /SVC parameter will make each running process display the services. This’ll give you your task-list, with additional info – like this.

You now see that the service “svchost.exe” (split this up in “SVC” and “host.exe” and you see where the parameter name /SVC comes from), together with the services that belong to it.

Several instances of the “svchost.exe” are active, each with a different set of services. There’s a process to keep track of the DNS Cache, one for the networking-functions such as DHCP, SharedAccess, time-sync, …

By issuing the command tasklist /M, we can see all the external DLL-files a certain process uses.

You can also use filters, to only display those processes you want. By adding the “/FI” parameter, you can filter on process name (imagename), the status of the process, …

This is the result for tasklist /FI “IMAGENAME eq SVCHOST.EXE”. A list of all running processes with the name “svchost.exe”.

This can be expanded to show all the processes titled “svchost.exe”, and to display the extra services-info; tasklist /SVC /FI “IMAGENAME eq SVCHOST.EXE”.

There are a lot of possible options available, and it can give you a great deal of extra information about your current processes & services, that the normal Task Manager can’t give you.

You can find out more by launching tasklist /? to see all the possible parameters.

There is a very detailed walkthrough available, on how to reset an Administrator password on a NT/2000/XP/2003 machine, which will guide you directly through all the steps involved.

Some notes;

• If you have a server with a (software) RAID1 config, the boot-disk will see 2 separate disks. Just apply the password-reset to the first one.
• After applying the reset, your server will first perform a checkdisk, and require another reboot – afterwards, the reset will be completed.
• It was verified to work on a Windows Server 2003 SP2, in October 2008.

You can do so by logging into the IIS Manager, and right-clicking the particular website. Select Properties.

At the tab “HTTP Headers“, at the bottom, there is an option to define “File Types“. Add a new MIME type, and define it as “flv” extension and “video/x-flv” as content type.

Save it, and you’re good to go.

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

How do you come up with this stuff?!

Here’s what you need to do on that specific PC:

Go to Start > Run > “gpedit.msc” (without quotes)

This opens up the Group Policy Editor, where you need to change a small thing. Use the menu on the left, to browse to Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options. Once you get there, double click the “Accounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console login only“-option, and change its value to Disabled.

You can now leave your password blank or empty, when connection to that remote host. This also works to allow empty passwords in network shares as well.

This can be annoying when you’re used to publishing things through SVN, or when uploading several directories. The silly Thumbs.db will be uploaded as well.

You can disable it by going to Tools > Folder Options and checking the option “do not cache thumbnails“.

Do not cache thumbnails

When you select “Apply to all folders“, not a single folder on your PC will create that file. If the file already existed, it’ll still be there – so you should still manually delete those. (Start a search in your “My Computer” for “Thumbs.db”, select them all and hit the delete button)

The service has returned a service-specific error code. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

The event viewer will only tell you the following message:

Event ID: 115
Source: SMTPSVC
Description: The service could not bind instance 1. The data is the error code.

This means the service couldn’t start on its configured port (by default SMTP uses port 25), and thus throws an error. It could be due to another mailserver that is already installed, or because another application is using up port 25.

You could quickly check this by telnetting to your localhost on port 25, to see which service responds. Open a command prompt and type the following.

telnet localhost 25

It should give you a message which will point you in the right direction to track down the culprit that ‘s using up your precious SMTP service port.

Here are some useful links.

• The service could not bind instance 1. – Skype Issue
• Microsoft KB: Although the SMTP service starts, the SMTP virtual server does not start in Exchange 2000 Server