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Run Sysinternals directly from the Internet
Microsoft has announced a beta of Sysinternals Live - a service that allows you to execute Sysinternals tools directly from the web without searching for and downloading them. Simply enter a tools Sysinternals path into windows explorer or a command prompt like this:
And believe it or not, after clicking the go button, a share will show up:
If you are on an older system (Not sure what versions of windows support this yet)...you can browse over to their public website to easily grab any of the downloads at http://live.sysinternals.com
I would imagine this is a new drive sharing feature of Vista, and Windows 2008...I will have to explore the possibility of offering our free tools in the same way.
Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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Update your DNS Server - NOW!
I have been struggling with a strange DNS issue on my network for the last month. I have tried everything under the sun, and nothing has worked. The problem was that many times you would need to go to a site twice before it would resolve properly.
Then I heard yesterday that ICANN (The organization that handles the core DNS system for the internet) released a statement back in 2007. The short of what they are saying is that one of the 12 root servers is going to have a different IP address.
This didn't make it to the major news outlets as breaking news (surprise surprise) because something like this is as interesting as watching paint dry.
This means that most administrators had no idea that the IP address had changed (Including me)
I started thinking that this could be the actual cause of my strange DNS issue. I decided to check my DNS server and see if it automatically updated - and of course it did not.
It would seem like a simple change, but this has never happened before. Those 12 servers have had the same IP addresses forever (Well not forever, but for 99% of the internet it has been forever). If there were bugs in the MS DNS server it would be hard to notice if these had not changed before.
To make things worse, according to this blog article ICANN let the IP address go, and some rouge server was put in its place. This means that they had 1/12th of the internet in their hands. Who knows what they did with it. It could have been a good Samaritan move - or it could have been something nefarious. We will probably never know.
After I updated the root hint for l.root-servers.net my DNS resolving started working perfectly again. I find it hard to believe that this was a coincidence (Needed a full reboot for it to take effect).
So the question is, what do you need to do? If you run a Windows DNS server you need to update this root hint manually.
Here is how you do it. Open your the DNS server manager, and right click on the DNS server you want to update
Then click on the "Root Hints" tab. See the "L" server entry I have selected below:
Click edit after selecting it, and remove the old IP address of 198.32.64.12 and change it to 199.7.83.42.
After clicking OK you will need to reboot your server. It seems that even restarting the DNS server service will not force it to reload these settings.
Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Tuesday, May 20, 2008
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Block XP SP3 - Stop the madness
If you have not heard about it already, many people are having big problems with Windows XP SP3.
I just want to remind everyone that we have had a tool out since January that will delay the automatic install of SP3 for 12 months.
You have 4 options for preventing the automatic install of SP3:
1. Download our Network Administrator to deploy the change across your network.
or
2. Download and use the free GUI tool we have to make the change on a single system
or
3. Download and use the free command line tools from MS
or
4. Update the registry manually. To do this you simply need to go to this key:
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
Create a new DWORD value named DoNotAllowSP and set it to 1 (To disable the SP install), or 0 (To allow the SP install)
One final reminder - all of these blocking options are only valid for 12 months following the release of the service pack. After that, Windows will ignore the registry change and install.
Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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