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
Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category
NTFS Sparse Files For Programmers
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/25
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
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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+spacehas 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’sAlt+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
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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 »
A big oops: “Researcher finds a way to invisibly reverse Windows updates • The Register”
Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/07
Keeping an eye on this: [Wayback/Archive] Researcher finds a way to invisibly reverse Windows updates • The Register
--jeroen
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Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »
The 2002 “Cruft Force” scale in Aug02: The New Adventures of Verity Stob
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
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Posted in LifeHacker, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 