Posted on July 19th, 2004%
One of my IIS servers at work suddenly stopped responding to SSL traffic. Normal HTTP (port 80) traffic worked fine. SSL traffic over any port (the standard port 443 as well as others) would make a connection but not transfer any data.
It wasn’t a network problem, or a firewall problem, or an IIS problem. It turned out to be a problem with the Verisign certification authority certificate. Apparently this is a known problem within Microsoft and Verisign. Read about it in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base Article #834438.
The solution is easy, and is Verisign has a certificiate authority replacement Web site with all the details. You can implement the solution even if you don’t have the problem – just to be safe.
. . .
→ Read More: SSL stopped working in IIS? It might be Verisign’s certificates
Posted on June 25th, 2004%
From time to time, the open source/freeware community comes along with a product so simple and so frightening that it makes me smile. This is one that’s been around since 1997, but somehow I never stumbled across it.
A fine Norseman, Petter Nordahl-Hagen, wrote the first version of his Windows registry and password hacker back in 1997. He’s updated it continually over the years, and today the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is available as a free download. (It works with Windows 2000 and Windows XP as well as Windows NT, so don’t let the name fool you.) The Web site includes an excellent FAQ and the source code, should you choose to confound yourself further.
Why is this frightening? Because after all the years of Microsoft touting security, there’s still a freelance programmer that can beat the billion dollar behemoth.
. . .
→ Read More: A free Offline NT Password and Registry Editor
Posted on June 23rd, 2004%
I generally use Internet Explorer to browse Web pages — not because I’m a huge fan of Microsoft, but because IE is the most common web browser (and thus something you should try to code against). Recently, the status bar — the little bar at the bottom of the window that tells you page loading progress and other useful information — would insist on not appearing until I explicitly turned it on (from the menu: View / Status Bar). The setting did not persist between IE sessions, which was rather frustrating.
Apparently this is a known problem, as Microsoft documents it in Knowledge Base Article 330216. Oddly, their workaround is to turn the option on (duh), or to jump through some hoops using IE and Windows Explorer to get the setting to persist.
And I thought there would be a registry hack to fix it… Obviously, that would be too easy!
. . .
→ Read More: Fixing Internet Explorer’s disappearing status bar
Posted on April 25th, 2004%
While at work one day this week, users started complaining about slow access times to a particular application. After confirming that all applicable servers (an application server and a SQL server) were online, and that there were no SQL problems (such as deadlocks), we took a look at the event log, and found an obscure entry:
Type: Error Source: Userenv Event ID: 1000 Description: Windows cannot determine the user or computer name. Return value (1722).
Like many good event log messages this told me little about the actual problem. Rather than scratch my head until an answer mysteriously appeared, I went to perhaps the best resource for understanding event log entries: EventID.net (www.eventid.net).
EventID.net provides a searchable index to events, and has extensive information provided by other users that can be invaluable in troubleshooting problems. Using the site is simple: enter the event ID number and the source . . .
→ Read More: Decoding event log errors with EventID.Net
Posted on March 23rd, 2004%
One of the nice things about Performance Monitor in Windows 2000/2003 is that it can be plugged into an HTML page as an ActiveX control. Even nicer than that is the fact that you can easily edit the parameters for the console by editing the HTML page.
Where I work, we have a handful of SQL servers. To monitor them, I created a performance monitor view with a handful of core counters on one server and saved it as an HTML file. (This is done using the Performance Monitor’s System Monitor. Simply set up your counters then right-click the monitor window and choose Save As.) Making subsequent views for other servers was as simple as making a copy of the HTML file, opening it in Notepad, and changing all server name instances.
Below is the contents of a simple performance monitor HTML page that can be used to monitor a server running Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or higher. To use it, copy the . . .
→ Read More: Windows Server/SQL Server Performance Monitor Template
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