Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/20
About a month from International CrowdStruck Day, just a few thoughts, more likely to follow:
- How well does your infrastructure behave when none of your Windows machines can boot?
- How well is your out-of-band management?
- How well is your CMDB doing key management, for instance for BitLocker encryption?
- Is checkbox compliance more important than a single point of failure?
- Can you ensure all updates from your supply chain are staggered/staged/phased with a kill switch when things get out of hand?
- Are the worst case scenarios in your disaster recovery plans really the worst?
- Do you understand the human factor of large scale outages (both of the people that – often indirectly – triggered them – hello #HupOps – and the ones that cannot work because of them)?
- Do you value your people – especially the ones that pulled you out of this situation – enough, and did you rename your Human Resource department into something that is more friendly to your people?
- Do you realise this could have happened on any of the platforms you use, including Linux and MacOS?
- If you were mentioned in the media by not recovering well, do you have any idea how much a target you will be from adversaries?
- Did CrowdStrike finally show some real postmortem instead of the half-hearted communications they did mostly after the weekend following the debacle?
- How does your organisation perform dates of critical files?
- Would other platforms be less or more risky? If so: why?
- Will eBPF solve most of this, or at least centralise the issues and what consequences would that have?
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Posted in Configuration Management, DevOps, HugOps, Infrastructure, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/19
Usually I work at high resolution monitors and sometimes I got error 0x112F when doing Remote Desktop.
After a reboot of the target machine, that error always goes away, but I wanted to know the underlying reason.
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Posted in Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/05
All computers acquire cruft over time, though with the ever increased data storage space capacities, nowadays it usually takes much longer to notice the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on your computer until it is way too late.
I got reminded of the “Cruft Force” scale in the 2002 DDJ column [Wayback/Archive] “Aug02: The New Adventures of Verity Stob” by [Wayback/Archive] bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺: ‘…”cruft force 9″…’ – Fosstodon
Spent the best part of a day attempting to recover a friend’s Windows 11 machine that had shat itself. Was reminded of the most EXCELLENT description of Windows putrefaction by Verity Stob www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/cruft.html “cruft force 9” – in this case, Adobe had deposited a new Adobe Reader install one directory lower apparently every time it had been used (!). There were also 34 numbered Teamviewer binaries getting progressively bigger.
Having known Verity Stob from DDJ (often named “Dr Dobbs”, but officially named “Dr. Dobb’s Journal”) and El Reg (officially named “The Register”). Until recently totally unaware .EXE Magazine had existed, I didn’t know that before DDJ she wrote columns for it nor that DDJ took over after it got renamed to “EXE Magazine”.
Learning new things every day: I love it!
--jeroen
Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/30
I love the new title-text for the 2018 “Clippy” picture at [Wayback/Archive] CrazyMyra: “After AI took his job as an online assistant, Mr Clippy was obliged to seek work in other sectors…” – beige.party
A metal toilet paper holder in a corner od a bathro,with an empty roll, that looks similar to a large paperclip
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Posted in AI and ML; Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Fun, History, JavaScript/ECMAScript, LifeHacker, LLM, Meme, Office, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Web Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/25
A few years ago I asked for some help figuring out what to whitelist so that winget can update its sources and install packages.
This is how I found out.
The queste started with [Wayback/Archive] Need help trying to figure out what domains/IPs to whitelist for installing packages · Discussion #2304 · microsoft/winget-cli
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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Firewall, Fritz!, Fritz!Box, Hardware, Network-and-equipment, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, winget | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/09
Related to WhatsApp Desktop for Mac or PC cannot only chat but also voice and video call: installing WhatsApp from the command-line.
That was easy to do via winget:
c:\temp>winget install -e --id WhatsApp.WhatsApp
Found WhatsApp [WhatsApp.WhatsApp] Version 2.2222.12
This application is licensed to you by its owner.
Microsoft is not responsible for, nor does it grant any licenses to, third-party packages.
Downloading https://web.whatsapp.com/desktop/windows/release/x64/WhatsAppSetup.exe
██████████████████████████████ 145 MB / 145 MB
Successfully verified installer hash
Starting package install...
Successfully installed
This was a while ago, so the version number by now is dated, but it is about the command winget install -e --id WhatsApp.WhatsApp
Via:
–jeroen
Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, winget | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/01
This happens a lot with apps that auto-update before package manager contain that update: [Wayback/Archive] MSI installation error 1603 – Windows Server | Microsoft Learn
Cause
You may receive this error message if any one of the following conditions is true:
- Windows Installer is attempting to install an app that is already installed on your PC.
- The folder that you are trying to install the Windows Installer package to is encrypted.
- The drive that contains the folder that you are trying to install the Windows Installer package to is accessed as a substitute drive.
- The SYSTEM account does not have Full Control permissions on the folder that you are trying to install the Windows Installer package to. You notice the error message because the Windows Installer service uses the SYSTEM account to install software.
Query: [Wayback/Archive] Exit code was ‘1603’ – Google Search
--jeroen
Posted in Chocolatey, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/05/23
More than a decade ago I wrote about Programmatic alternatives to Windows-L keyboard shortcut (SwitchUser / LockWorkstation).
Still, I see many scripts invoke rundll32.exe or to call the [Wayback/Archive] LockWorkStation function (winuser.h) inside user32.dll. Don’t!
The BOOL LockWorkStation()function has a calling convention that is incompatible with rundll32.exe () which will corrupt the call stack likely will lead to random problems as after two decades, this post from Raymond Chen still holds: [Wayback/Archive] What can go wrong when you mismatch the calling convention? – The Old New Thing
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Posted in .NET, Batch-Files, C#, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Security, Software Development, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2016 | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 