Windows – Export / Recover WEP and WPA Wireless Keys
KB ID 0001015 Problem If you need to connect to your wireless network with a new machine and have forgotten the key, you can view the WEP or WPA key in cleartext using the following procedure on a machine that has connected before. Solution 1. First launch PowerShell, ensure you ‘Run as administrator’. 2. To show all the wireless profiles stored on this machine, issue the following command; netsh wlan show profiles 3....
NDES – Fails to Issue Certificates (Signature Algorithm)
KB ID 0001021 Problem I was trying to enroll some ASA firewalls to NDES to get some certificates. Each time the process failed with the following error. % Error in receiving Certificate Authority certificate: status = FAIL, cert length = 0 That’s a pretty generic error, and does not give me a lot to go on. So I thought I would try from another network device, (a Cisco Catalyst switch). It’s a little easier to...
Why Securing Your VPN Solution With Computer Certificates ‘Only’ Is A BAD Idea
KB ID 0001055 Problem After a large AnyConnect 4 roll-out, I had the following conversation with a client; Client: Can we change the way the clients authenticate? Me: Yes, no problem what do you need? Client: Well instead of user based certificate authentication, we want to use computer certificates only. Me: Really why? Client: So when we roll out a lot of imaged new machines we don’t need to get the users to log onto them and...
Access a Windows Share Through a Firewall
KB ID 0001061 Problem I needed to access a folder on a server in a clients DMZ the other week, and the thought struck me ‘I have no idea what ports I need to open to accomplish this?’ Solution Bear in ming I’m just talking about the ports that need to be open, you will still need to authenticate to the remote machine with a user-name and password (unless you have the share wide open which I would not advise). The...
How to Play .MKV files in Media Center
KB ID 0000564 Problem You have a video encoded in .mkv format, and that video is not listed and cannot be played in Windows Media Center. Solution Playing an MKV file is one problem, getting them to be displayed in Media Center is another. 1. First we need to get Windows to “understand” what a .mkv file is, to do that we need to install a codec. The one I’m using is from the shark007 website. If you’re x32 or...
Force Media Center to Update its Libraries
KB ID 0000627 Problem I use Media Center a lot, and the one thing that bugs me is, every time I add a new film or TV series etc, I have to restart Media Center, restart services, or reboot the entire media PC before I can see them in the list. After some searching it appears that Media Center uses the same repository/database of media that Windows Media Player uses. There is a convoluted method of stopping services, deleting files...
Error sqlservr.exe is using too much memory
KB ID 0000190 Problem Seen on SBS 2008 with WSUS. The Windows internal database (the one used by WSUS) has no memory reservation limit, so it can use as much as it wants, this is a BAD thing! Your server will struggle because the following consumes to much memory. SQL/MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE Solution 1. Click Start > In the search/run box type CMD {enter}. 2. At command line issue the following commands, sqlcmd -S...
SQL Install Error “SQL Server Browser Service Group Does Not Exist”
KB ID 0000689 Problem Seen when reinstalling SQL 2008 R2 on a domain controller. Note: as a background the SQL Server was installed previously and then the server was promoted to a domain controller. Then when the attempt to reinstall SQL was carried out this happened: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Setup The following error has occurred. SQL Server Browser service group does not exists. Check for earlier failures in the setup Note:...
Deploy ODBC Settings via Group Policy
KB ID 0000805 Problem I’ve briefly mentioned this before when I wrote about Group Policy Preferences so when I had to do this on-site this week, I jumped straight into the group policy management console, and found that because my ODBC connection was using SQL authentication (with the SQL sa account), this would NOT WORK, (it only works with Windows authentication and even then it needs a tweak). If you are using SQL...
Microsoft SQL – ‘Error While Enabling Windows Feature : NetFx3’
KB ID 0000958 Problem I was installing SQL Server 2012 and suddenly this popped up; The following error has occurred: Error while enabling Windows feature: NetFx3, Error Code: -2146498298, Please try enabling Windows feature: NetFx3 from Windows management tools and then run setup again. For more information on how to enable Windows features, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=227143 Solution I’ve been bitten by .Net on...