The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

Yes, Windows user names can contain spaces

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/02

I forgot what triggered me querying for [Wayback/Archive] can windows user names contain spaces – Google Search.

Boy I was surprised that the answer is yes.

Following that I was totally not surprised that:

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Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 | Leave a Comment »

Windows 10/11: Skip Security Questions When Adding Local User

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/30

Based on [Wayback/Archive] Windows 10/11: Skip Security Questions When Adding Local User, [Wayback/Archive] Remove Security Questions when setting up Local Account in Windows and others:

  • if during initial Windows 10/11 setup you add a user with a password, then it will ask you for 3 security questions
  • if you do not want these 3 security questions:
    1. leave the password blank when adding the user
    2. after first logon, press Ctrl-Alt-Del and change the password from blank to an actual password

Via [Wayback/Archive] windows 10 skip security questions – Google Search.

–jeroen

Posted in Authentication, Power User, Security, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

NTFS Sparse Files For Programmers

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/25

Need to check this out some day: cs.exe compiled from [Wayback] sparse.zip which you can download from [Wayback/Archive] NTFS Sparse Files For Programmers

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Posted in C, C++, Development, NTFS, Power User, RoboCopy, Software Development, Visual Studio C++, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Thread by @LetheForgot to @SwiftOnSecurity on Thread Reader App – Windows boot recovery

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/23

[Wayback/Archive] Thread by @LetheForgot on Thread Reader App:

What we did was use the advanced restart options to launch the command prompt, skip the bitlocker key ask which then brought us to drive X and ran “bcdedit /set {default} safeboot minimal“which let us boot into safemode and delete the sys file causing the bsod.

Not scalable at all but let us get vital systems running while we try to solve the bootloop en masse

Don’t forget to renable normal booting afterwards by doing the same but running “bcdedit /deletevalue {default} safeboot

Just in case another event like the 2024 Crowdstrike debacle happens.

--jeroen

Posted in Encryption, Power User, Security, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Hopefully by now the choco client will be more resilient and informative about Chocolatey maintenance windows (and maybe even about any disruptions mentioned at status.chocolatey.org)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/19

Reminder to check-out of the 2015 issue mentioned in the tweets below has been had any progress.

At the time of tweeting, choco has no notion of [Wayback/Archive] status.chocolatey.org which would be very helpful to point to in case of errors on time-outs on chocolatey server calls especially if it could interrogate and inform of maintenance windows and outages when things fail on the client side.

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Posted in .NET, Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Shadow IT has entered the chat – got caught running scripts again : sysadmin

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/05

Shadow IT has entered the chat

Many companies have hardly any idea how many scripts are being used by their people to get the chores of day to day work done.

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Posted in Batch-Files, Development, Power User, PowerShell, Python, Scripting, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

What to do when suddenly some or many .nupkg became zero length and Chocolatey thinks none of them are installed?

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/04

A few years back I suddenly had almost all my .nupkg files that Chocolatey uses to track installed software become zero sized.

So I posted a question at [Wayback/Archive] Need help restoring .nupkg files having zero size · Discussion #2765 · chocolatey/choco which got this answer:

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Posted in Chocolatey, CommandLine, Development, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Scripting, Software Development, Windows | Leave a Comment »

With the newest PowerToys version, the Microsoft teams shows they forgot about their CUA heritage

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/30

The most recent Microsoft Power Toys version binds to Alt + Spacebar which indicates the Windows team has forgotten about the CUA (Common User Access) heritage.

[Wayback/Archive] PowerToys bring fun tweaks to Windows 10 and 11 • The Register

And that tells us something else, too: that none of the Microsoft developers involved in building and releasing this tool are old-style keyboard warriors, because since Windows 1.0 in 1985, Alt+space has been the keystroke to invoke the window-management menu. From Windows 2 onwards, the leftmost button on every Windows title bar even looked like a space bar, to remind you. So to maximize a window, it’s Alt+space, x; to minimize, Alt+space, n; to resize with the keyboard, Alt+space, s, and so on.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers @wiert@mastodon.social on X: “Stealing Alt+Space for a Power Toy, the Microsoft @Windows team has forgotten about its CUA heritage.”.

--jeroen

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

Some lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike debacle

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 »

Remote desktop connection protocol error 0x112F: usually is lack of memory on the server side, try connecting with a lower resolution

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 »