Mike Poulson's Thoughts on lots of stuff

Getting WDS to listen on more than 1 network adapter

2008-05-13T12:49:40-07:00:00

Today I setup a WDS server with 6 network cards in it. Each adapter had its own subnet which had its own DHCP scope (which was hosted on the same system). Make sure you tell WDS not to listen on port 67 if you have a DHCP running on the same machine.

But by default WDS would only bind to 1 network card in the machine. I needed it to bind to 6 different network adapters in my multi-homed machine.

The error I would get on the PXE client was 'PXE-E55: dhcpProxy service did not reply to request on port 4011.'

After running 'netstat -a' I found that UDP port 4011 was only listening on a single IP address.

Here is how you fix it.

wdsutil /set-server /bindpolicy /add /address:<ip address> /AddressType:ip

Or you can modify the registry key HLKM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WDSServer\Providers\WDSPXE\BindInterfaces

It is a REG_MULTI_SZ and the format is ip:<ip address> per line

You also need to make sure the HLKM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\WDSServer\Providers\WDSPXE\BindPolicy = 1 (DWORD).

On some systems (W2k3) you may also run into this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929657 if you do just open the registry and modify it there.

LDAP injection attacks

2008-04-01T09:28:59-07:00:00

At Blackhat Europe 2008 Chema Alonso and Jose Parada Gimeno from Microsoft Corp published a great talk about LDAP Injection & Blind LDAP Injection.

Here are the links to thier presentation, whitepaper and tools

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-08/Alonso-Parada/Whitepaper/bh-eu-08-alonso-parada-WP.pdf

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-08/Alonso-Parada/Presentation/bh-eu-08-alonso-parada.pdf

http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-08/Alonso-Parada/Extras/LdapInjector_final.rar

Mike

Getting rid of the "I Agree" prompt on your Prius NAV system

2008-03-17T10:27:12-07:00:00

I have a 2007 Prius with the NAV system. One of the huge pains in the butt is the "I Agree" requirement when you go to the map. So whenever I show the map after starting the car I must first "Agree" to a disclaimer that says I will not use it while driving. It is very annoying!

Well the new 2008 Prius does NOT have this requirement. It will just show a short disclaimer then go to the map.

Last night we had a friend over for dinner who has a 2008 Blue Prius (very nice color). We took his MAP DVD out of his car and put it in mine. Right away the system starts to do an Upgrade. This kinda scared me because I was not sure if my old DVD would continue to work. Well part of this upgrade was that now my 2007 does NOT require me to press "I Agree"

While I know that there are "lock picks" out there that will fix this issue. This is a fix that will not require you to take apart your dash.

My HTC Touch Cruise and how it only lasted 1 week

2008-03-07T13:17:05-08:00:00

So I have been wanting a new phone for a while now. I love my QTEK 8500 (aka HTC StarTrek) but it is starting to show its age (~2 years). It was my first clamshell phone and a great upgrade from my 2125 (aka HTC Tornado) from Cingular.

The StarTrek has been a great phone! The things I love about it

· Fairly stable (after putting the Cingular ROM on the device)

· Pocket dust has not gotten under my screen (still none after ~2years)

· Main screen does not get scratch easily (because it is a clamshell phone)

These were all HUGE improvements over my Tornado which was scratched to hell and had dust under the screen in just a few days.

For my next upgrade I wanted a few additional items:

· 3G

· Longer Battery life

· Hot swap storage card

· Runs Windows Mobile 6 (or greater)

· Supports tethering for my Laptop

· No contract with a Carrier

My main push for a new phone was I wanted the ability to have fast Internet almost anywhere. So the question was do I get a 3G data card or get a new phone that supports tethering. I decided to go with a new phone to save on an additional ~50/month.

My partner (Heath) has been pushing me to get an iPhone but I want a device that can use Active Sync. Also the lack of 3G support make the IPhone just a large IPOD for me. Now if the IPhone gets “Enterprise” support and add Active Sync and gets 3G then it will be a viable option.

The phone I really wanted was the Imate Ultimate 9150. But it was scrapped even before coming to market. Which is VERY sad because it was going to be a great phone. My next pick was the HTC S730 (aka Wings) but due to its lack of HSDPA 1900mhz or 850mhz support it does was not an option because I live in the US. So in the end I picked the HTC Touch Cruise.

A few weeks ago I ordered a HTC Touch Cruise (aka Polaris) from mobileplanet.com. It was going to be delivered on ~3/22 due to back order but it magically shipped early. I was very EXCITED! So on 2/18 it was delivered to work.

The unboxing experience was much better than the Tornado or Startrek but was still underwhelming. Still included with the phone was the worthless thick as hell manual that was 50% of the total box weight. While driving home with my friend Pete I booted it up for the first time. It was a good looking phone. Thicker than the iPhone but thinner than the StarTrek when it is closed. It was overall a bigger phone that I was expecting but still an acceptable size.

Based off the title you can probably tell how “happy” I was NOT with the phone.

Good:

· 3G support

· Windows mobile 6.0 (much nicer than WM5)

· Opra browser included by default (tab support)

· SIM and APP Unlocked

· No Contract required

Bad:

· Touch screen was crappy, Either my fingers are not like the people that tested it or it just is not responsive. Nothing like the IPhone

· Many actions still required use of the stylist. WM is NOT designed to be used with a finger

· HTC Touch Keyboards while nice still made typing a text message a two hand task

· Text input location would get covered by Keyboard. This would happen when typing on some screens. Where the keyboard would popup above the input box so you could not see what you were typing

· SMS notification after sending a text. When I got the phone one of the first things I had to do was a Registry change to get the Stupid SMS notification turned off so my phone did not vibrate after sending a text

· New Pocket Outlook SUCKS!

o Folder Tree shows EVERY folder in your inbox. Not just the ones that you are syncing. This is VERY annoying and clutters the screen a lot

o 3+ screen taps to get to send a new Text Message. Why do I have to do Menu -> New -> SMS/MMS to send a new text message?

· No tilt sensor in the phone. If you rotate the device to landscape the screen does NOT follow

· Screen really collects the Face Grease

· Dust under the screen in less than 7 days!

· I am sure that there are more but I have repressed them

So in the end have sold the phone to someone that already had a HTC Touch but wanted an upgrade I am back to using my StarTrek and waiting for the release of Sony’s new XPERIA X1 or the HTC S730 US.

Cheers

Who is Sean Cleven?

2008-03-07T10:05:13-08:00:00

So yesterday 4:28AM my phone started vibrating because I got a text message. It was facebook!

"Sean Cleven has requested to add you as a friend on Facebook." Well once I woke up I logged into my facebook to see who this was.

He was friends with 3 of my other friends. His profile says he works at Boeing and the quoted a very funny line off Family Guy (one of my Fav shows).

There was only 1 picture of him on his profile. So I thought what the hell and approved the request.

Now flash forward 4 hours. My email, Facebook message and Texts start going off! A bunch of my friends are like "who is Sean Cleven?" Do you know him? I tell some of them that I added him because he was cute and I was not sure if I have ever met him. I would appear that he added every Gay person in Seattle as a friend on his facebook.

After talking about this with my SO last night he pointed out that now "Sean Cleven" has access to all my personal info on Facebook. Email, Cell Phone number, DOB and other stuff that I hide from others. So I logged back in to Facebook and removed the friendship. At that time he was now friends with 15 of my other friends (up from 4).

So who is Sean Cleven? If you know please drop me a line. Until then if you are friends with him (but you don't know him) you may want to re-think that friendship.

Mike

First days back at Microsoft

2008-02-06T21:41:59-08:00:00

Well I started back at Microsoft on Monday 2/4/2008. This was after a took a little more than 1 year off to go work at a .com Startup in Seattle.

I had a great time working there and loved the commute (~10min from home) but there is just no way I could stay away from Microsoft.

I am now a Program Manager with a primary focus on doing Networking. I am on the Enterprise Engineering Center team that hosts customers vists.

While I am not excited about my new commute I am excited for my new job.

I had to sit through 1.5 days of NEO (new employee orientation) :( Not fun at all. Being a returning employee 99.9% of the info I already knew. But I still had to sit through it.

Any who

System Center Agent Fails to install

2007-09-26T16:28:28-07:00:00

Today I was working on getting the System Center Essentials Agent to install on a Vista and Windows Server 2008 machine. And every time I tried to do the deployment it would return an "RPC Server is unavailable" error message.

The MOM Server could not execute WMI Query “Select * from Win32_OperatingSystem” on computer <computername>

Operation: Agent Install

Install Account: <Service account Name>

Error Code: 800706BA

Error Description: The RPC server is unavailable.

<\error text>

After some digging I found how the "Windows Firewall" was to blame. But all the options of "enable File and Printer Sharing exceptions" did not resolve the issue.

After looking at the "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security" settings with the "Domain Profile" I found that all the required ports (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb437377.aspx) were allowed with the existing inbound rules. But the pfirewall.log file would still report a DROP of TCP ports 445 and 135 when an incoming request was received.

I found that in addition to enabling "Windows Firewall: Allow inbound file and printer sharing exception" you must also enable "Windows Firewall: Allow inbound remote administration exception". Once the "remote administration" option was enabled the agent could be deployed without any issues.

I was able to test configurations changes without going through the deployment wizard by executing a simple WMI query against the target server

strComputer = "vistabox"
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colQuickFixes = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_QuickFixEngineering")
wscript.echo colQuickFixes.count

</vbscript>

I am back!

2007-09-19T08:28:52-07:00:00

I know I have not post in a while. But now that I have setup my blog at its new home (I hope I never have to move it again) I will be posting more.

Exporting RSA Authentication Manager Log events into XML

2007-09-19T08:11:47-07:00:00

Using RSA SecurID technology there might come a time when you will need to export the events that the Authentication Manager logs programmaticlyRSA was nice enough to provide an API that can be called to execute Queries against the Database.

The script will use TCL and run under the tcl-sd.exe tool found under C:\program Files\RSA Security\RSA Authentication Manager\utils\tcl\BIN

To run the query first you need to make a TCL script that you will push into the tcl-sd.exe. The example below will query the database and return all events for a given day with the LOCAL TIME as the time (NOT GMT). The output will be saved as output.xml.

today.tcl
<code>

puts [Sd_ApiInit "" "" 1]
set line 0
set line [Sd_DynamicSelect output.xml 1 0 0 0 "" "" "SELECT dtLocalDate, tLocalTOD, chTokenSerialNum, chDefaultLogin, chShortMessage, iLogEntryNum, SDLogEntry.iMessageNum, chClientName FROM SDToken JOIN SDLogEntry ON SDLogEntry.chTokenSerialNum = SDToken.chSerialNum JOIN SDLogMessage ON SDLogEntry.iMessageNum = SDLogMessage.iMessageNum JOIN SDUser ON (SDUser.iUserNum = SDToken.iUserNum) WHERE dtLocalDate = DATE(\"11/26/2006\") ORDER BY SDLogEntry.dtLocalDate, SDLogEntry.tLocalTOD "]
Sd_ApiEnd
exit

<code>

Open a cmd prompt and execute C:\program Files\RSA Security\RSA Authentication Manager\utils\tcl\BIN\tcl-sd.exe today.tcl

The billionaire (SteveB) that flew in coach

2007-09-19T08:11:15-07:00:00

On Thanksgiving day 2006 I was on an Alaska Air flight from Seattle to Phoenix when I noticed that Steve Balmer (Microsoft CEO) and almost his entire family were on the plane me. And they were all in coach!

SteveB is the 15th richest American (http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/54/biz_06rich400_The-400-Richest-Americans_Rank.html) with about 13.6 Billion dollars. Yet he was just like another average Joe on Nov 23 2006 when he was enjoying his bag of peanuts and little to no leg room for the ~2 hour flight to Phoenix.

It makes me happy to know that people like SteveB and his family (His parents sat directly in front of me) don't act like most billionaires. They were nice and polite to the flight attendants and others around them. If I did not know that he was the CEO of Microsoft I would have never guessed that he was a rich as he is.