LazyJeff How To and Reviews

ISSUE: We have laptops that are brand new & need to be joined to a domain.  Instead of bringing them to the office and camping there for hours we found a way to join them to the domain remotely and perform all the necessary work from home.

SOLUTION: Log in using a local account. VPN into work (using PPTP works best).  While in, join the system to the domain and reboot.  Now here was where it got tricky.  Log in again using your local account.  Again, VPN into work.  Now lock the machine.  And unlock it using your active directory account.  This will make it hit AD over VPN and confirm and cache your domain account (make sure you AD account is an Admin on the local machine).  Then when the system has logged out, log in using the domain name as a prefix for your user account (eg: fixit.local\steve.adams).  TADA!

ISSUE: We have a customer running windows xp pro clients attached to a windows 2003 server.  They are all joined to the domain.  Occasionally the users will report that their workstation is locked and they cannot unlock it.   A reboot is all the fixes it.

SOLUTION:  Put the domain name in the user name field (eg: fixit.local\steve.adams).  The unlock window doesn’t have a third field to select the domain and for some reason windows appears to be looking locally.  This tells the computer to use the domain account.

Windows Server 2003 comes with a service “ASP.NET State Service”.  It is set to manual by default.  You need to do a few things to configure it to be used as a central State Server.

1. click start – services.msc – ok
2. find “ASP.NET State Service” change its startup type to automatic and start it
3. open command prompt
4. netstat -ano | find “42424″ | RESPONSE TCP    127.0.0.1:42424        0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       5640
5. run REGEDIT
6. NAVIGATE to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aspnet_state\Parameters
7. Change “AllowRemoteConnection” Value Data from 0 to 1
8. then re-run the command from step 4
9. netstat -ano | find “42424″ | RESPONSE TCP    0.0.0.0:42424          0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING       1240

Now that it is listening on 0.0.0.0 it means it can receive requests from other servers.

Then of course – inside your app’s web.config file you’ll need to add two things:

1. Machine Key: made up of a validation key & a decryption key.

we recommend using Development Now to generate the string.

2. reference to your new state server you configured above

<sessionState mode=”StateServer”
stateConnectionString=”tcpip=SERVERNAME.DOMAIN.LOCAL:42424″
cookieless=”false”
timeout=”20″/>

The customer has a few  Dell Latitude e6500′s running Windows 7 64-bit.  It has a Broadcom wireless card with all the latest drivers and updates and BIOS.

They noticed it was taking a long time (close to 5 min) to shutdown or even logoff.  We tried this with positive results:

1. Click Start – services.msc – click ok
2. find “DW WLAN Tray Service” – stop it, then set the startup time to Manual.
3. Reboot

Now try a logoff or shutdown.

How to Allow Splunk through the Firewall on Server 2008:

Looks to be communicating over port 135/tcp.

1. Click Start – type firewall
2. don’t select the first one “windows firewall with advanced security”
3. select the second one in the list “windows firewall”
4. click change settings
5. click the exceptions tab
6. Check the box next to “Remote Event Log Management”