Blog: Networking

I have been having an annoying problem with right mouse clicks and Windows-E keystrokes for some time on my laptop. Finally, I got disgusted enough to spend the time to research and fix. It turns out that these problems are typically related to context handlers that are instantiated when you do the right mouse click on a file/windows background etc. There is a program from NirSoft called ShellExView which will list these programs that are available to the context menus. It allows you to disable a particular shell extension and test to see if that particular shell extension is causing your problem. One of our network engineers also reported that this happened to him when he had a program he removed (the removal process must be defective) and the context menu item was still available but missing.

Public folder permissions can be challenge with Exchange 2007, primarily because Microsoft removed the options from the GUI and replaced them with Powershell commands.  It’s particularly difficult to make mass changes because there’s not a single command to propagate permissions to all subfolders.  However Microsoft does provide Powershell scripts to help with this.  By default they are saved at C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Scripts.  [more]

More information about these scripts is available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997966%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx.

I was working remotely on a customer’s network using a PPTP VPN connection. When my work was completed, I clicked on the network icon in my system tray expecting to find a “disconnect from” option for the connection.  It was not there.  I opened up Network and Sharing Center, but could not find a way to disconnect the session.  Finally, I disabled my network interface card (NIC) and re-enabled it.  That disconnected the session.

I knew I didn’t want to have to disable my NIC every time I used a PPTP VPN connection, so I looked for a solution.  I found an online forum that mentioned that this was a known issue. The workaround for this problem is: [more]

Open up a command prompt window.  At the prompt, type rasdial “connection name” /disconnect and then enter.  That will disconnect the session.  The connection name will need to be in quotations if the name of the connection has spaces in it.  If it does not, then quotations are not needed.  If you need to identify the connection name, you can just type rasdial and then enter.  This will give you a list of all your active connections.

If you utilize the same PPTP connection(s) quite often, you can also create a disconnect shortcut for each connection, which will simplify the process.  Just create a new shortcut and add the listed command string in the location.  Then, when you need to disconnect from the PPTP session, just use the shortcut.

I was trying to connect a VPN from Terminal Server that was recently upgraded to Windows 2008 and when I would connect, I would lose my terminal server connection completely.  I would then have to log my session from a different server using Terminal Services Manager.  I tested the same VPN connection on a local Windows 7 machine and experienced similar issues where all of my network connections were dropped upon connection. 

Upon examining the properties of the VPN connection entry, there was a checked setting to use the default gateway on the remote network.  Unchecking this box through the IPv4 properties stopped the disconnects from happening.  I also recommend unchecking the use of IPv6; it also has the same options to use the remote network’s gateway.  [more]

Here's a helpful hint that will save you some time trying to figure out why your additional paper tray won't work after moving your HP printer.  I recently encountered this problem after moving an HP printer to a different spot in the same office.  After I plugged it back in the add on paper tray wouldn't work.  Turns out, the paper tray had to have power before the printer was turned on, or the printer would not recognize it.  Power applied simultaneously did not work.

We are continuing to work through issues with a new VMware View v4 deployment and we had another weird problem come up the other day. I had created a new linked clone desktop pool and View Manager had completed the automatic deployment of several desktops. However, when we would try to connect to the newly created desktops with the View client via PCoIP, we would get a very small (400x600) resolution window as the display instead of the full screen that we had requested. When we requested that PCoIP use multi-monitor display, this small display window would show up in the middle spanned across both monitors in the same small window. Right off I remembered one of a coworker's former gotchas about adjusting the resolution via the .vmx file and that seemed to fix it…however, it kept happening every time a new VM was created by the linked clone pool. I finally found after a VM is created, it must be restarted via the View Manager using the VM reset feature in order for the display settings in the VM to display correctly in PCoIP. Here is another article regarding this issue -> http://www.thatsmyview.net/2009/12/18/how-to-get-pcoip-with-view-4-to-work-every-time/

We had an issue where one of our customers could not synchronize any of his files on his laptop (the last time he tried was over three months ago). He continued to get an error saying “Access Denied” for each of the offline files he was trying to synchronize. After some troubleshooting I found that the error went away if the offline file encryption was turned off. Why was this causing the errors? Well after doing some more research I checked the group policy setting located under “Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Public Key Policies\Encrypting File System” and sure enough, the certificate there had expired around 3 months ago. [more]

I had to generate a new certificate using the command “cipher /r:file_name” from the windows command prompt and then use the generated certificate to replace the expired one in the group policy. During the process of making some of these changes his offline file settings could not be changed, several of the buttons were grayed out and you could not select additional files to be used offline.

In order to fix this I had to clear the offline file cache. In order to do this in Windows Vista you have to create a new dword in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CSC\Parameters called FormatDatabase and set the value to 1, then reboot the computer. Afterward all of the offline file cache will be removed. This also fixed the problem with not being able to add new offline file items.

The RSA iPhone app displays a PIN to use for logging into a protected server.  The displayed PIN consists of two 4-digit codes separated by a space.   When you enter the code, do not enter the space.   The RSA software wants the numbers in one continuous block.

Two quick Windows 7 tricks that I ran across a short while back.

• Shift+Maximize will span across two monitors. Don’t know about three or more.
• Shift+Minimize will apply a window shade effect on the title bar instead of minimizing it to the task bar.