Looks like the attack that was found in the wild has several components: A social engineering component, in which an Office document which interests the target is sent to them… could be downloaded via a webpage, emailed, or delivered via a USB thumb drive… The victim opens the document, and it auto-starts Adobe flash content… […]
Enabling Remote Desktop on Server 2008 R2
I setup a new virtual server in VMware 6.0 yesterday. Of course, I was logging into the console. Then, I remembered, if I wanted remote desktop to work, I needed to explicitly enable it. Run Control Panel | System Click the “Remote Settings” link on left Select the “Remote” tab Check “Allow connections from computers… […]
Task Manager Missing Tabs
I was working happily, remoted into a Win7 administrative machine which happened to have the VMware client installed upon it. And, inexplicably, I noticed that my task manager window was barren of both tabs and menus. I had no idea what happened, expected it was a memory probable of some sort, so rebooted the machine. […]
PowerShell version by OS
I am working on automating some administrative functions and wanted to leverage Powershell coding. But, my servers come in a variety of flavors: 2008R1, 2008R2, 2012R1, and 2012R2. So, I wondered, what version of Powershell do I have available on each, and can it be upgraded? Googling, and found a reference to the original versions […]
Determining the IE Zone
In the “Internet Options” menu item of Internet Explorer, you can add websites to particular zones. If you don’t manually do this, IE seems to allocate the websites for itself. Today, I was attempting to debug an issue, and I wondered “Does Internet Explorer understand this website is on its intranet”? For that matter, how […]
Displaying Unused Device Drivers
Last week, I was trying to debug a network problem that was being experienced by one of my virtual machines. This VM had a bit of “history” having been moved several times between different hosts, and having originally been a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion. Anyway, it wasn’t working correctly, and I couldn’t find anything obviously misconfigured. […]
Skype for Windows
Last week, I patched my Windows 7 machine, and was surprised to see a Skype update listed as an available download and patch. What surprised me about this optional update was that Skype is not installed on my Windows 7 machine. This implies that now you can complete a fresh install directly from the Windows […]
KB967723 Fails Daily on Server 2008
I was patching a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine, and noticed that one patch kept consistently failing. The failed patch was “Security Update for Windows Server 2008 KB967723” and it failed with error number 80070490 which I googled and was one of the many generic errors that can occur when using Windows Update. What should […]
Running Executables in Compatibility Mode
As the deadline draws near for the summer retirement of Windows Server 2003, last minute upgrade projects are scrambling to be finished. I got involved in one such project this month, trying to get an application that was previously running on Windows 2003 to run on Win 2008R2. The first challenge was getting the installer […]
Who is Currently Logged In?
I am helping to upgrade some desktops from Windows XP to Windows 7. What makes the upgrade a little odd is that many of the Windows 7 machines are “themed” to look like XP, so that saying something like “what does your Start button look like?” becomes meaningless. Of course, I could go into Control […]