If you import a self-signed certificate into the Trusted Root Certificate Authorities store you will not get certificate warnings for that certificate. Nice to know when you are working with servers that generate self-signed certificates.
Morgan’s list of great (free) applications and utilities
So I thought I would put together a list of the stuff I use. Mostly as sort of a memo to myself, but if anyone finds this useful, so much the better.
| Name | Description |
| Audacity | Sound file editing |
| Paint.NET | Image editing |
| HashCheck | Checksum verification/creation |
| MyDefrag | Defragmentation |
| VirtualDub | Video edition |
| Foxit Reader | PDF Reader/PDF Ifilter |
| 7-Zip | File archiver |
| Putty | Telnet/SSH client |
| FileZilla | FTP client |
| Simp | Instant messaging encryption |
| VLC | Media player |
| Wireshark | Network protocol analyzer |
| Notepad++ | Text editor |
| Bullzip | PDF Printer |
| CDBurnerXP | CD/DVD Burning Application |
| Folder2ISO | ISO file creation |
| Exact Audio Copy (EAC) | CD Ripping |
| Nmap | Network mapping |
| MailSend | SMTP command line sender |
| VHD Resizer | Resizes VHD files |
| VMDK to VHD Converter | Convert VMware VMDK disk files to VHD |
| Angry IP Scanner | IP address scanner |
| WinSCP | SFTP, FTP and SCP client |
| Fiddler | HTTP Debugging proxy |
| Stellarium | Planetarium |
| TFTPD32 | TFTP client and DHCP, TFTP, DNS, SNTP and Syslog server |
| RawWrite | Disk image writer |
| WinTail | Tail application for Windows |
| Cygwin | Linux environment for Windows |
| Free Download Manager | Like the name says… |
| uTorrent | Tiny BitTorrent client |
| MediaCoder | Transcode files for portable devices |
| Frhed | Free Hex Editor |
| OpenSSL | Open Source toolkit for SSL/TLS and cryptography |
| MediaInfo | Supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file |
| Cuttermaran | Cut program for MPEG1 or MPEG2 video streams |
| iCopy | Turn you scanner and printer into a free photocopier |
| Synergy | Keyboard, mouse and clipboard sharing across computers on a LAN |
| Unetbootin | Cross-platform for creating bootable flash drives with various Linux distributions on them. |
| VirtualBox | Cross-platform hosted-hypervisor virtualization software from Oracle. |
| Xbox Media Center (XBMC) | The world’s best Media Center for HTPCs. |
| Pandora Recovery | Recover deleted files |
| HWiNFO | Hardware inventory |
Morgan’s collection of Windows keyboard shortcuts
| Keyboard shortcut | Does what | Works on | Notes |
| Win+P | Brings up the dual-monitor settings. | Windows 7 | |
| Win+X | Launches Windows Mobility Center | Windows Vista, Windows 7 | |
| Win+L | Locks computer | Windows XP and above | |
| F2 | Rename file/folder | Windows | In Windows Explorer |
More to come…
Link to a KB article that lists a lot of shortcuts: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/126449
PGP
A PGP clone that works on Windows: GPG4Win
Display GPG info: gpg.exe –version
Importing your old PGP keys
- Open a DOS Window (run CMD.EXE)
- cd to the directory where your PGP keyrings (pubring.pkr & secring.skr) live.
- Import your PGP keys to GnuPG:
gpg –import secring.skr
gpg –import pubring.pkr - You’ll need to go in and assign “ultimate” trust to each public/Secret keypair – this is analogous to PGP’s implied trust key setting:
Getting WHOIS information on Windows
WHOIS is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system number. Usually WHOIS queries are performed with a command line client and such a client is almost always a part of an OS’s TCP/IP implementation. Not so with Windows. Neither Windows 7, Vista or XP includes a WHOIS utility. Recently I had some trouble with WHOIS information from one of my domains and that set me searching for utilities to perform this task on the Windows platform. These are what I found:
- Mark Russinovich has created a WHOIS utility, you can find it on the Sysinternals TechNet Site: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897435.aspx
Mark’s implementation uses the whois-servers.net service to find the correct WHOIS server to use. whois-servers.net does not have records for all TLDs and such cannot find WHOIS info for all queries. - GNU-whois for Win32 is available on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/whoiswin/)
This utility uses a TLD list by default, contained in the file tld_serv_list. whois for Win32 is quite flexible and can query for WHOIS info using specific servers, by using the –h parameter. - Win32Whois is a graphical client available here: http://www.gena01.com/win32whois/
It offers basic features as well as some GUI specific ones.
The WHOIS service uses TCP port 43. Some TLDs publish a server referral (SRV record) for the WHOIS protocol in their zone, which identifies their WHOIS server. This SRV record is of the format _nicname._tcp.<tld>. To find the WHOIS server for the TLD .no, use NSLOOKUP:
nslookup -type=srv _nicname._tcp.no
Server: server1.domain.com
Address: 1.2.3.4
Non-authoritative answer:
_nicname._tcp.no SRV service location:
priority = 0
weight = 0
port = 43
svr hostname = whois.norid.no
whois.norid.no internet address = 128.39.8.42
So the server whois.norid.no with address 128.39.8.42 provides WHOIS info for the .no TLD.
Playing with Windows XP Mode RTM
The Windows XP Mode Base VHD file (Windows XP Mode base.vhd) is stored in C:\Program Files\Windows XP Mode. The Differencing disk is stored, by default, in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC\Virtual Machines.
Dual postings
For several reasons I have decided to start publishing my blog posts to both my own, privately hosted, SharePoint Blog and my Windows Live Spaces account. This will be the first such post.
The URLs of the blogs are:
- SharePoint Blog:
www.simonsen.bz/blog - Windows Live Spaces Blog:
http://morgansimonsen.spaces.live.com/blog/
Some thoughts on Active Directory OU structure design
Over the years I have been involved in quite a few Active Directory deployments and restructures. On these projects much time is always spent, or should be spent, on designing the OU structure.
The main thing about OU structure desing is to keep thing simple. Some organizations like to take the organizational chars and copy that in AD. Chances are that that structure will not be very useful for the people whose job it is to manage the network. They need an OU structure that reflects groupings of users, computers, groups and servers which have the same management and configuration needs.
There are many approaches to the design process. Eg. geographical where your OUs reflect the geographical locations of your company or users and computers. Functional; which organizes users by the function they have in the company, for example Sales users etc. A much used variant is one where some or all of the regular approaches are combined, for example geographical and functional.
Now, let’s consider an example. You have been charged with designing the OU structure for a large school or university. You decide that you want to use the functional approach and decided to create two main OUs to hold all your user accounts. The OUs will be called Students and Teachers. Upon first inspection this would seem to work well. You would be able to manage all your student users easily, same for teachers. But what if you have a user who works at the school as a teacher but would also like to attend courses or classes? (I assume here that we want to honour the principle of one user, one account.) That user should be treated as a student at one point, but as a teacher the next. Clearly our OU structure is not cut out for this. You could try to classify the user further and determine that he or she is mostly a teacher or mostly a student, but you probably do a lot of stuff based on which OU the user resides in, so you will eventually run into trouble. Not all your users will fit neatly into your two categories.
The problem here is that OUs are exclusive. You can only be located in one at any give time. So our desing here does not fit users that have dual identities. We have to come up with something that caters to this need. Back to the drawing board.
On our next try we start out with just one OU called Users. (Yes, I know there is already an object in Active Directory called Users, but that object is a container and we are creating an OU so that is not a problem.) In this OU we put all users regardless of their role or function. We now create groups to identify the needed roles. One group for students and one for teachers for example. We add all students to the Students group, all teachers to the Teachers group and users who are both to both groups. We now use Group Policy filtering to apply our GPOs to the correct group. A GPO that configures settings for students is filtered on the Students group, likewise for teachers. The GPO links that give the most access or have the least restrictive settings, should have a higher priority than more restrictive GPOs. That way if a user is a member of two or more groups with different access levels he or she will get the least restrictive settings.
Contrary to OUs, groups are inclusive, you can be a member of more than one. This lets your users assume several identities and get access to information and settings available to both.
I realize this approach is contrary to many accepted “truths” about Active Directory design, such that your should try to never filter your GPOs, but with the tools like GPMC it is very easy to see where your GPOs are linked and how they are filtered.
Viewing the result of boot time chkdsk runs
Whenever chkdsk.exe runs during boot time it is often difficult to see the result before Windows reboots again (which is the default behavior). The whole of chkdsk’s output is saved in the Application log as an Information event, with source Winint and an event ID of 1001.
Not something you generally want to see…
“General failure”, that’s helpful. My on-board Atheros L1 Gigabit NIC sucks. There is really no other way to put it. Every Atheros chip, be it wireless or cable, I have had the misfortune to come across has been worthless. You should think that Ethernet and Wi-Fi should be pretty well understood concepts by now. Not so for the driver developers of Atheros. In this case the driver has “lost” (for wont of a better word) the NICs MAC address. So ipconfig.exe displays the hardware address 00-00-00-00-00-00. Needless to say, using that address on the Ethernet is not going to work. The first time this happened I had to open up the computer case and read the MAC address from the motherboard. After that I could use the driver properties to enter it manually. After that connections was restored.
However, Atheros still had some surprises! Whenever I chanced an upgrade of the driver, I would loose network connectivity again! Even if the MAC address was correctly entered into the device properties. To fix this I had to remove it, close the device properties dialogue, open it again and re-enter it. User-friendly, don’t you think?
So stay away from anything using one of Atheros chips.