Over the past few years, when approached with the question of which OS one should run on their corporate network, I unwaveringly respond, “Windows XP” [of course]. The principle argument being that most small businesses cannot afford a full-time system administrator to administer a non-Windows network. It is nice to now have some numbers to support my argument. Keep in mind, I do not state one way or the other which OS is more secure, reliable, or robust. I only mention this for the simple fact that running a Windows based network, over the long run, will almost always be more affordable.

Compete solely on price, no thanks

First off, sniff the TCP/UDP traffic

After launching TCP Viewer and letting it do its thing for a few seconds, I noticed that there was a group of three or so applications connecting and disconnecting in sequence, port scanning out my machine to my router on destination port 5678. Lo and behold, it ended up being the svchost.exe application. Not just one or two ports, but scanning tens if not hundreds if left to do its thing.

Next, Find the Application and Kill It

I launched Process Explorer to try to figure out if svchost.exe was truly the offending thread. I then isolated the application with the same PID as the one reported in TCP Viewer (in my case 1324). Yep, svchost.exe. Right-click | Kill Application. Bye-bye. No more solid blinking lights across my gigabit Ethernet connection!

Conclusion

Now you ask, what service or application would be sending and receiving such a high rate of packets (ultimately crashing my router due to the amount of hits it was getting)? Well, it turns out that the UPnP services (which I had assumed I had disabled) were for some reason hanging on the requests to my router. All requests were headed to the router’s internal interface (10.0.0.1) on port 5678. From what I can tell, the router was either dropping the packets or not responding properly so the SSDP Discover Service was scanning out ports to try to “do its thing”.

Solution

Launch the local service manager, stop, and then finally DISABLE the following services:

• Universal Plug and Play Device Host
• SSDP Discovery Service

I do not plan on going in to detail on what these services do, but suffice it to say, they are unnecessary and in this case, a pain in the behind. There are a bunch of other article on this topic, but there did not appear to be one detailing this exact scenario, so hopefully this helps someone else from having to spend hours troubleshooting.

Happy computing

When developing custom action pages for the built in Ektron forms, remember to set the Page directives as specified in the Administrator Manual.

page 312

If your site is using URL Aliasing, the action page’s header must include the following:
EnableEventValidation="false" EnableViewStateMac="false"


Apparently when you set the EnableViewStateMac attribute to true, the encoded and encrypted view state is not checked to verify that it has not been tampered with on the client. Otherwise .NET will not persist the Viewstate from the original .NET form to the action page specified in the Ektron form.

Though disabling the EnableEventValidation attribute may be necessary, I don’t see any real reason since the page that is handling the postback shouldn’t have any controls on it in the first place. However, in the event it does, the page’s validation must be turned off else the postback handler will not validate the form post.

First, you’ll need to actually be attached to Internet Explorer (will not work with Firefox, at least to my knowledge) in script mode. Once attached, you then hit the CTRL + ALT + N keys to bring up the Script Explorer window. This will list out all the files IE has loaded at that time. You can then open up any HTML, JS, etc. files and set breakpoints to debug at runtime.

Amazing and pretty dang useful at the same time. Feel free to comment if you find this useful.

‘ Create an instance of the virtual directory object
‘ that represents the default Web site.
Set IIsWebVDirRootObj = GetObject(“IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1/Root”)

‘ Use the Windows ADSI container object “Create” method to create
‘ a new virtual directory.
Set IIsWebVDirObj = IIsWebVDirRootObj.Create(“IIsWebVirtualDir”, “NewVDir”)

‘ Use the Windows ADSI object “Put” method to
‘ set some required properties.
IIsWebVDirObj.Put “Path”, “C:\NewContent”
IIsWebVDirObj.Put “AccessRead”, True
IIsWebVDirObj.Put “AccessScript”, True

‘ Use the AppCreate2 method of the IIS ADSI provider to
‘ create an application on the new virtual directory.
IIsWebVDirObj.AppCreate2 1
IIsWebVDirObj.Put “AppFriendlyName”, “NewApp”

‘ Use the Windows ADSI object “SetInfo” method to
‘ save the data to the metabase.
IIsWebVDirObj.SetInfo

In order to create a new task, we first run the Windows ‘Control Panel’. This can be done either by open the Run dialog from the Start Menu and typing and running the ‘control’ program. For those GUI fanatics, clicking Start | Control Panel will do the same.

Once in the Control Panel, look for the ‘Scheduled Tasks’ applet. This little program launches the tasks application (or tasks folder to those of us who really know what it does.) You’ll notice either a whole slew of previously configured tasks that have been configured by your friendly neighborhood virus scan application or other task intensive applications.

From the tasks windows, click ‘Add Scheduled Task’, this will launch the Scheduled Task Wizard.

The first screen you’ll see is the Welcome screen. Click ‘Next’.

After a sometimes very long delay (the wizard has to rebuild your application list from the registry) you’ll see the application selector window.

As the defrag application usually does not appear as a standard application, we need to browse for it, so click ‘Browse…’.

If you are using Windows XP (home or pro) all you need to do is type in the file name:

d:\windows\system32\defrag.exe

The Windows auto-complete will help you out if enabled.

If you are NOT running Windows XP or are unable to locate the defrag with this path, you can manually locate the defrag.exe under your System folder by opening a command prompt and typing:

and the hit the Enter key.

Once you’ve located the defrag application and have a valid path in the browse applet, click ‘Open’.

You will now be able to name and schedule the task. I usually enter something explanatory like ‘Defrag C Drive’. The title doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s something you’ll remember. Choose your run frequency, I do weekly, then click ‘Next’.

In the time and date applet, set the schedule for the task. My schedule is set to run when I’m am least likely to be on my computer AND a time when another task is not running. Click ‘Next’.

Since this task is going to be automatically run, the OS needs to know with which user account to run it (or runas account.) I usually select the administrator account, or an account that has full permissions to run the defrag application and modify drives. Click ‘Next’.

At the schedule success screen, click ‘Open advanced properties when I click Finish’ box and then click ‘Finish’.

This is the advanced task editor applet. First we need to tell the defrag program which partition we want to defrag. Most computers will be configured with only one partition so this should be pretty straight forward. At the end of the ‘Run’ string, put a space then type the letter of the drive you wish to have defragged. In my case, the C:\ drive. So after you’re done, your command should look something like this:

Now that we’ve told the defrag program which drive to defrag, click ‘Settings’.

In the Settings dialog we want to set the ‘Stop the task if runs for:’ value (the kill time) to 4 (or more or less depending on the size of your partition and the speed of your system.)

Now that we’ve limited the run time for this task we’re ready to go. Click ‘Ok’ to close out the advanced settings applet.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully scheduled a Windows Task.

The only thing left to do now is test that the scheduled task will actually run.

First we re-open the ‘Control Panel’ | Scheduled Tasks applet. Locate the task we just created, right-click the task icon and then left-click ‘Run’. After a few seconds right-click the task icon again and check to see if the ‘Run’ command is disabled and the ‘End task’ command is enabled. You can also check your running tasks (CTRL + ATL + ESC) to see if the defrag program is running.

After a long period, the right-click menu should re-enable the ‘Run’ command and disable the ‘End task’ command signalling the task has completed.

If you are still having complications in getting the task to run, you can manually troubleshoot the defrag program by opening a command prompt and typing in the same command you entered as the run command for the task:

You can troubleshoot any errors that are returned here.

Though there are more complex and robust partition defrag software solutions available, for those of us who are perfectly fine with the Windows provided defrag application, scheduling regular partition defrag routines can drastically increase your system performance without requiring the purchase of expensive and sometimes time consuming system upgrades.

Microsoft has a couple of articles on performing this same process.

How to Automate Disk Defragmenter Using Task Scheduler Tool in Windows XP
Schedule a Task to Defragment Drives

I’ve had this link lying around for a while and thought I’d post it for historical purposes.

Enjoy.

A great article on the ins and outs of UNICODE. Something I ran across a couple of years ago but have yet to add it for reference.

A great article from Wired Magine about how four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship and won.