Information Technology

Group Policies Not Applied After Switching Domains

October 23, 2012 0 Comments

Ran into an issue where the group policies were not being applied to the workstations. Not the most ideal situation, but I found myself having to drop some Windows XP workstations after the domain controllers had been demoted and taken off-line. Normally, you would remove the workstations from the domain and put them into a workgroup prior to demoting the domain controllers, but I just wasn’t able to do that this time around (Long story). This is the problem I ran into. While on the old domain, I was pushing…
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Microsoft Windows

Setting up a T1 Controller on a Cisco ASR1000

October 22, 2012 0 Comments

I’m not too verbose with Cisco, and I’d barely call myself a network administrator. But I’ve done enough to realize each Cisco router seems to be a little bit different. For example, on some routers the interface is the only thing you need to configure. But on some routers, you must also configure the controller as well. That was the case on our Cisco ASR1000 series router. As such, I had to configure the T1 interface as follows: config t controller t1 0/2/2 channel-group 2 timeslots 1-24 framing esf linecode…
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Network (Cisco)

Windows Server 2003 – Clustered Disk Signature Problem

October 19, 2012 0 Comments

I ran into an interesting problem with one of our Windows 2003 clusters the other day. I presented a new 2 TB LUN from our EVA8400 to one of the cluster nodes and for some reason the physical disk signature never replicated to the secondary cluster node. The result being, when I failed the cluster over to the secondary node, the disk immediately failed to come online, as did the share folder which was dependent upon the physical disk. My solution was quite simple, although I still don’t know what…
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Microsoft Windows

Disable External USB Storage Devices – Windows XP

August 3, 2011 0 Comments

In some business environments, it’s usually a good idea to lock down the usage of external USB storage devices and memory sticks to prevent users from accidentally introducing a virus onto the network or copying data off the network. You can manually modify the registry to lock down the USB storage devices by changing the following Windows XP registry value: HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUSBSTOR Change the Start REG_DWORD value from a decimal 3 to a decimal 4

Information Technology

WSUS Disconnected Network Updates Not Downloading

January 23, 2008 0 Comments

WSUS Offline Updates

I work on a network that is completely isolated from the internet. Therefore, I need to have two WSUS servers; one connected to the internet, which harvests the updates and the metadata, and the second on the isolated LAN. If you’re in the same situation, read below. Each week, check for updates on the internet connected WSUS server and approve if needed. Once the content has finished downloading, export the metadata and the content data to an external storage device. Sneaker-net copy it to the isolated network, import the metadata…
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WSUS

Disable Windows XP Indexing

February 4, 2007 0 Comments

Windows XP by default enables a feature called Fast Indexing. This is only useful if you frequently use the search option to find files or folders on your computer. Now, if you aren’t using this search capability every day there is absolutely no reason to have it enabled and it’s only slowing your computer down and taking up disk space. Disabling fast indexing will not hurt your computer at all. You can also re-enable it at any time: Open up My Computer Right-click on your local disk (c:) Select Properties…
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Microsoft Windows

Disable Windows Error Reporting

February 4, 2007 0 Comments

One of the great enigmas of the Windows operating system has been the error reporting “feature”. When an application or process crashes, by default, Windows will pop up a message box prompting you to either send an error report or not to send an error report. If you chose to send the error report … well in reality, nothing good will ever come of it because in all likelihood the program that caused the error is not a Microsoft product. And why would Microsoft change their software to fix someone…
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Microsoft Windows