Tag: windows

Remaining Windows Vista/7 “rearm count”

It is a well-known fact, that it is possible to extend the initial grace period for activating your (hopefully legitimate!) copy of Windows from 30 days to 120 days by using slmgr. This is a tool that is intended to allow the preparation of image-based installers for enterprise use by allowing to reset the initial grace period up to 3 times.

If you tend to forget the number of times you already reset the counter, you can easily check for yourself: simply run

slmgr -dlv

to get detailed licensing information, including the number of remaining re-arms and remaining grace time.

If you want to know when exactly your grace period runs out, use

slmgr -xpr

Note: This simply gives you more time, it won’t prevent you from having to buy and/or activate Windows. Re-arming is not a bug, it works as intended and is an important tool for use in corporate environments.

Novatel Merlin U740 using only Windows 7 onboard tools

I have lost the install CD of my Novatel Merlin U740, an older PCMCIA UMTS card. As a consequence I got no “Mobilink Connection Manager” after installing Windows 7 on my notebook. Fortunately I found this guide by Novatel Wireless which explains how to connect using only on-board tools in Windows Vista, by setting up a dial-up connection. It still works in Windows 7. The important part is to set the APN as part of the driver’s initialization string.

The telephone number you have to set is *99#, which should be provider-independent.

The following settings are for yesss.at only:
Username: web
Passwort: web

Remember to set the APN as part of the driver’s connection string in Window’s “Device Manager” as described in the PDF.

Again, for yesss.at this is: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.yesss.at"

For this to work properly, the SIM must not have a PIN set, as otherwise the SIM will be locked and the dialer cannot dial out. For me this is ok, as it is a pre-paid card which can hardly be abused if it gets stolen, but your situation might be different, so please consider the security implications. (I suspect that it should be possible to unlock the SIM card somehow using the AT+CPIN=1234 command, but I did not research how to separate several initialization strings, as it did not work immediately.)

The solution works quite well for me, even under Windows 7. Disadvantage is that there is no way to tell the signal strength and exact mode of operation (despite the color-coded status led on the Merlin U740).

Windows Vista Home/Business/Enterprise has a telnet client, too

For some unknown reason, Microsoft decided that only the “Ultimate” version of Windows Vista ships with the telnet client installed by default. It can, however, be easily installed on all the other versions as well.

  • Open the Control Panel
  • Select “Programs”
  • Select “Turn Windows features on or off”
  • Scroll through the list, select “Telnet client”
  • Press OK
  • Wait (for surprisingly long)

That’s it, voila, the telnet client is now installed on your Windows Vista Non-Ultimate.

Nice to know – Volume 2

udev renames you network interfaces

Sometimes udev renames your devices. This happened to me when upgrading a server, eth0 suddenly became eth1 and vice-versa. Of course, this broke nearly all firewall scripts on the server… There is a nice explanation how to get udev to name your devices the way you want.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003

When installing Visual Studio Service Pack 1 under Windows Server 2003, it might fail because it cannot verify the signature. You should take time and visit the link provided in the error message, because it will take you to a hotfix that will correct the problem.

(via Mark Caroll’s Blog)

VMWare Server on Ubuntu 8.04

A nice tutorial for getting free VMWare Server 1.0.5 running on Ubuntu 8.04.

TrueCrypt 5.1 is out!

The new TrueCrypt 5.1 version finally enables hibernation with pre-boot authentication. I am going to try it out as soon as possible. A big thank you to all the developers!

Update 2008-03-16: Today I finally had time to test out pre-boot authentication. It simply worked great. No problems at all. As I was using it on a notebook, I was very happy about the possibility to interrupt and resume the encryption process.

[tags]encryption, windows, truecrypt[/tags]

TrueCrypt 5 is out!

ImageAfter quite some time, a new version of my favorite encryption tool is out: TrueCrypt developers have released version 5 of their product, introducing a new killer feature (among others): System Volume Encryption with pre-boot authentification (only Windows 2000/XP/Vista). This means, that TrueCrypt will encrypt everything on your system drive, including page- and hibernation file, finally making hibernation a safe and easy possibility.

I am going to look into this next week, as I need my notebook on Saturday (just in case anything goes wrong).

Update 2007-02-08: As my first commenter below points out, it seems hibernation is disabled by TrueCrypt while having your system partition encrypted. I don’t really understand why at the moment, but I will investigate further. For me this is a primary show-stopper, as this was the long-awaited functionality I was waiting for.

Nitpickers Corner¹: Of course I am aware why encryption and hibernation in general are no-goes together, but I don’t understand why this is an issue when full-system encryption is enabled.

Update 2007-02-08 (again): Ok, in this TrueCrypt forum thread they explain why they cannot support it at the moment: Windows treats the hibernation file differently, it seems to bypass the TrueCrypt driver and therefore would still write keys to disk without encryption. Ok, still get to wait for my dream feature then, but I still refuse to buy PGP 🙂 Thanks to the developers for their great work anyhow!

¹ a tribute to Raymond Chen 🙂

[tags]security, encryption, truecrypt, windows, linux, osx[/tags]

Vista UAC: Firefox (and other Mozilla apps) automatic updates

If you disable the automatic installer detection of User Account Control (UAC), for instance because it interferes with your every-day operations (like in my “Git and Windows Vista” article), you will notice that the Mozilla updaters don’t work as expected. Automatic updates will fail. This is due to the fact that the updater will not be automatically elevated any longer.

As the easiest workaround, you should perform the following steps:

  • Once you get notified about the update and you are asked if you want to install it, say “No”.
  • Close the Mozilla application in question.
  • Search for the application in your “Start” menu.
  • Right-click the entry and choose “Run as Administrator…”
  • Choose “Check for Updates…” in the “Help” menu
  • Confirm you want to install the update and walk through the update process.

The installation will now work. For security reasons you should close the application once installation is finished, because it will still be running with elevated privileges. Now start the application again normally.

The same principle works for any application that is not Vista-aware and fails on automatic update. For security reasons make sure you keep the time you run with elevated privileges as short as possible.

git-svn on Windows (cygwin)

Update 2008-10-10: Often perl will not work due to memory-remapping problems. A solution can be found in my article about the issue.

What I really love about Git is the fact that it nicely integrates with existing Subversion repositories. At our company, we are using Subversion as our SCM, but I personally like Git more and I want to use it as a side tool for more flexible branching, merging, and for checking in versions I wouldn’t check in the shared repository.

Git is supplied with git-svn, which can import an existing SVN repository and also commit back to it. Under cygwin, you need to perform two additional steps for getting git-svn to work, otherwise it is likely to fail with “failed to include Error.pm”.

You need to download Error.pm from CPAN. You have to save it to <cygwin-dir>\lib\perl5\Error.pm

Voila! git-svn should work now.

Git on Windows: “You have some suspicious patch lines”

Update 2008-04-24: as commenter Jakub Narebski correctly points out, it should be better to use core.autocrlf and crlf attribute for resolving this issue, but I have had no chance to test this up to now. The solution below is still valid, but more of the sort of an ugly hack.
Update 2008-06-11: I have stopped using this solution and only use “git-config core.autocrlf true” and “git-config core.safecrlf true” any more. It works reliably and is exactly what I need and not such an ugly hack.
Update 2008-06-22: Well, of course you can still get “You have some suspicious patch lines” if you follow the core.autocrlf approach… but this time it really means you have trailing whitespace, not just line-breaks. If you really don’t care about trailing white-space at all, my initial solution is still valid, as it simply disables this check.

If you are using Git under Windows using cygwin, and you got through the initial problems, you will soon realize that Git likes to fail with “You have some suspicious patch lines” when committing.

The cause for this problem is the carriage-return/line-feed problem of Git under Windows/cygwin: The patches contain a trailing line-feed if you edited them with a Windows editor and not strictly inside cygwin. This will trigger the pre-commit hook to fail on patches where the last line of a file has been changed.

To solve the problem, you need to edit .git/hooks/pre-commit and comment out the following lines:

if (/\s$/) {
bad_line("trailing whitespace", $_);
}

Now committing should work.

Git and Windows Vista

I recently started using Git, the version control system now used for developing the Linux Kernel. While there is no native support for Windows at the moment, you can install it using cygwin. While this works reasonably well in Windows XP, I got into severe troubles when trying the same in Windows Vista.

First, I ran into troubles installing cygwin. I figured out, that it seems to work well if you run both the installer and bash in “Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode”. I needed to adjust the file system permissions of the cygwin folder to give me write permissions, though. (Note: you have to manually install the TK-libs if you want the GUI elements of git to work.)

But Git kept failing with “access denied” messages when trying to commit from command line. The failure message said it was denied access to git-update-index. I soon found out this is due to the “User Account Control” (UAC) default behavior of auto-detecting installers and prompting if you want to execute them with raised privileges. You can see if this is the case by running git-update-index manually from bash; if you get the UAC confirmation dialog you have this problem. It seems the substring “update” triggers this behavior. As the git-update-index is launched by git commit, it won’t display the confirmation dialog of Vista, so the execution will be denied.

There are two possible workarounds:

  • Run bash with administrative privileges (not recommended!)
  • Disable the auto-detection of installers by UAC.

I used the latter way. You can disable the auto-detection by following these instructions. Brief summary:

  • Open the Local Security Policies
  • Disable “User Account Control: Detect application installations and prompt for elevation”
  • Reboot (the security policy will not be updated before!)

It should work now. You can confirm this by running git-update-index manually again. If you do not get the UAC confirmation dialog now, it worked. Try git commit now, and verify it is working. Of course, you will from now on have to right-click and “Run as Administrator” every installer you want to install, as most installers will require administrative privileges.

Update 2007-08-22: Reader EGarcia posted an interesting comment below: using the Microsoft Manifest Tool you can add an according manifest to the git-update-index.exe and git-update-ref.exe

Update 2009-02-12: Reader Kevin Broadey points out the best solution so far: create a seperate .manifest file for the affected files. He has provided an example for git-update.exe.manifest.