When I add new machines built with cloned drives to the network the fact that they have the same SID doesn’t present any problems, except for WSUS, which shows only one instance of the clones, normally the last one added, rather than each instance. With newsid no longer being readily available how do others manage this? Alternatively, I’d be very grateful if someone who still has a copy of newsid can share it with me.

So far I’ve only done the cloning with Windows XP, so can’t say yet if the same problem exists with later versions, although I’ll be doing this with Windows 7 in a couple of weeks.

Before anyone asks why I don’t use Microsoft’s “approved” method of cloning, these machines have a lot of applications that need to be installed and configured correctly, which doesn’t work properly, if at all, with sysdiff or sysprep. Despite the “official” statement that newsid never really worked, those of us who have used it know differently.

The SID isn’t the problem. Windows keeps a “Client ID” by which it identifies itself to WSUS. Your image has this ID, so all the machines made from it also have the same ID. The easiest fix is to delete the registry entry from the image itself, otherwise you just have to delete it from each computer the image is written to.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate will contain 2 or 4 entries:

SusClientId
SusClientIdValidation
 and optionally
PingID
AccountDomainSid

Delete the Sus prefixed entries. restart the Windows Update service if its a running computer.

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I have a Windows XP SP2 machine with Hamachi service running. Usually I connect to it using Remote Desktop, and when I disconnect I can’t connect to it again because the Hamachi VPN is down. How to prevent the Hamachi service to stop?

I am sure that Hamachi is configured as an automatic service.

When I stopped to close the window through the X button, and started to Disconnect, then the problem not occurred again.

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i have a workstation in an industrial environment that reboots twice a day with no visible indication of an issue having occured.

i have done analysis on the programs being used etc at the time but it is random. the event viewer shows nothing, there is no bsod or minidump either. there is no indication after reboot that your system had an issue or it recovered from a serious problem.

looking for a list of best practices for checking stuff out in proper order. we have already done memtest and looked for loose connections and bad power plugs/power bars. everything is pretty stable. is there a tool that can record events as they happen so we can see what was working at the timestamp period when the system rebooted. we know usually when it has rebooted since the event viewer shows certain system resources starting up again.

thanks for any advice and if more clarification is needed i would more than happy to provide.

You say this is an industrial environment – is it quite dusty where the PC is?

We have some PCs in our warehouse, and we had something similar happen a while ago with one of them. We went through the exact same steps you have done (test/change plugs, power cables, memtest etc) and these were all fruitless.

In our case, we opened the case up and it was full of fluff and dust that had obviously been building up for a while. We pulled all the fluff out of the box and gave it a good blasting with air in a can and it’s been fine since.

All I can imagine is that there was some clump of fluff either shorting something out or breaking a connection, causing the motherboard to instantly power the machine off as a safety mechanism. That would also explain why Windows wasn’t logging events, as the motherboard was taking the power out from underneath it.

Edit

Since you say this is only 2 weeks old, I don’t imagine it’s dust. Have you considered a faulty PSU? That would also explain the lack of blue screens and memory dumps.

If you bought the machine, I would just return it as faulty – they’ll probably class it as dead on arrival.

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First of all I’m not an expert in either Windows or Group Policy scripting but one of my tasks is to configure XP machines which are destined to be NOT network. Consequently I’ve used VBScript to change Registry settings but now I have some settings in the Group Policy which I currently configure by hand but want to script these or automate it in someway.

Could anyone tell me if I can make changes to the Group Policy using VBscript or do I need to use something else?

I found this page which outlines some possibilities but there’s not much detail and I can’t yet find follow up articles.

** Additional Information **

Using gpedit.msc I currently manually set the following settings in the GUI:

1. Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Logon > Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon
2. Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Turn Off Autoplay
3. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > User Rights Assignment > Access this computer from the network
4. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > User Rights Assignment > Deny access to this computer from the network
5. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > User Rights Assignment > Deny logon locally
6. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > User Rights Assignment > Logon Locally
7. Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Security Options > Network access: Shares that can be accesses from the network

I want to be able to script these changes using VBScript or some other means (.NET perhaps?)

I have found that for a couple of the above settings I can alter them directly in the registry but the changes are not seen in the Group Policy editor (gpedit.msc)

It’s possible, yes.

Not really advisable, because the supported and recommended way to do this is through the gpedit.msc tool (or GPOs on a domain). As a result, doing it with a script is semi-documented at best, and you do run into some oddities trying.

If you’re still determined to try, theses settings are really just registry keys. If can figure out which keys are changed, it’s trivial to script something up to import all those registry keys and end up with the desired configuration. I’d just use a batch file, honestly.

The problem you’ll run into, however, is that these changes need to be saved to %SYSTEM ROOT%\System32\GroupPolicy\User\Registry.pol to be enforced as local group policy, and I don’t know of a good scripted solution to that, so the common workaround is to set this up the way you want on a second machine, and copy the %SYSTEM ROOT%\System32\GroupPolicy\User folder and files to your target machines.

I personally find the whole thing to be such a pain that I’d rather set up a small domain than go through that process to apply automate applying local group policy.

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I have a Windows XP system that I cloned in June. Since then I have been using the cloned HDD (which was new).

This morning I put the original drive back into the machine, and attempted to login to it. It got this message :-
“Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found. Please try again later. If this message continues to appear, contact your system administrator for assistance.”

I tried my account, an ex-employee who left before me, and another colleague attempted to login as well. All Fail with the above message.

Using the cloned (newer HDD) drive works fine.

I logged in as local Administrator, and the Domain Controller is pingable from this machine. I also mapped a network share using my network logon ID, and password, and created a file on the network.

The System Administrator (small company, not much network management experience) hasn’t seen this before.

Thanks in advance of your assistance.

Though Chris McKeown is correct about the fix, he is incorrect about the cause of this problem.

It is most probable that you’re seeing this issue because the machine SID Active Directory uses to identify a machine is different between the cloned drive and the original drive. Removing and rejoining the domain should fix the issue, however, I’d advise changing the machine name to something slightly different so you don’t encounter this issue again. (And, in general, it’s usually best to take a disk image or clone before joining a machine to a domain, not after, to avoid experiencing this issue altogether.)

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What, other than magic, could cause multiple similarly configured XP Pro machines (non-domain joined, windows update disabled, no scheduled tasks) to bugcheck within 15 minutes of each other? The error message recorded in the event log is reproduced below:

Error code 10000050, parameter1 bc6ffff0, parameter2 00000000, parameter3 bf84cd45, parameter4 00000000.

Note: Windows update being disabled is not my choice. These are not under my control and are used in factory automation.

Note: I have considered a power anomaly, but there are many other similarly configured machines that had no apparent issues.

I think the first thing to do is to look up the reason for the bluescreens – I swear by whocrashed and bluescreen view – these either interpret or look up the precise errors easily. I’d look at each system seperately – It might be a co-incidence that these systems crashed together. If its a one off incident it may not be worth following up on – else, well thats the right place to start.

Once you’ve looked at individual systems then hunting down a common cause is easier.

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I have created some “Additional Rules”, in “Software Restriction Policies”. The rules work as expected, but I get a dialog message box every time they disallow the specified application.

How can I disable this message box from being displayed? Is this possible? For specific “Additional Rules”? If not even a blanket configuration, preventing all these type of messages is acceptable. They are almost worse than the software my “Additional Rules” prevents from executing.

I would very much appreciate any help, regarding my question.

Windows XP does not have this feature build-in, as far as I’ve read during investigation.

A 3rd party solution is required, and although I never found one as described, I’m sure one exists.

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I am working on a REST API which I have currently deployed on a Win XP Professional SP2 development machine running IIS 5.1. The site is currently being hosted on port 81 and being accessed via HTTP. I would now like to configure the site to stop using HTTP and use HTTPS only.

I have developed a self-signed certificate using the SelfSSL.exe tool from the 6.0 Resource Kit Tools and set the Common Name to be the IP of my server (as it’s a local development machine it has no domain name). I have also already configured the site to use SSL using the How To Set Up an HTTPS Service in IIS tutorial as my guide.

However, whenever I try to access a resource in the API via HTTPS I get a 404.

Any ideas?

Binding Configuration

SSL Configuration

Fiddler Response

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:06:35 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 DAV/1.0.3 mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8g
Set-Cookie: iomega=194.205.46.74.58091341929195981; path=/
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-814 
404 - Page Not Found
0

OK,

Based on your Fiddler it looks like you might actually have an Apache box listening on port 443. It can be easy to overlook, especially if it was bundled with another piece of software. Run the following command, see if port 443 is being listened to and what program is listening on it. This should help us figure out if IIS is indeed controlling that port of if some other program is.

netstat -aon | findstr 0.0:443

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Client OS – Window XP

Domain Controller:- Window server 2008 Standard R2

I had one Window XP system, i want to find out when the system has started or boot ( at what time and at which date ). I don’t know which parameter / word should i search in Event Log.

For finding out shutdown time, i simply find the word “Shutdown” in Event Log.

Can you guide me which word should i find for finding Start up or boot time

Look up the following event in EventViewer ( System )

6009 and 6005 same time stamp, system just started.

6013 – system has been up for a day or more, time in seconds.

6006 – the system was rebooted or shutdown.

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I have some old workstations with WindowsXP that I can install pretty much anything on, an office with about 80 people, a wintel environment, an existing Server 2003 file/printer server, and everybody wants to be able to print PDFs, preferably in color, and preferably with the option to add password encryption to those PDFs. Oh, and license costs for Adobe’s PDF print server are prohibitive.

I’d rather not have to write code, I’m more of a scripter than a programmer in capability. So PHP or Perl based solutions would probably be a preference, though I’m willing to try anything a few times.

Optimally, I’d like a system where the PDF processing is handled by one (or more) of these old workstations. A shared PDF Printer on the print server that anybody could install would direct jobs sent to it to this old workstation which would process the files, creating the PDF and adding security if so requested, and then drop the resulting file out into the personal network directory of whoever printed the file.

File names aren’t important, to prevent dealing with duplicates I’d rather they simply be a string based on date and time.

What sort of libraries or scripts are out there that I should look at? If you’ve done something like this, how’d you do it? What should I stay away from and why?

You can install PDFCreator on one of the computers, then share it out. The other computers will have to Connect to the Shared Printer (which can be done by script or GPO, or manually). Install it in the Server mode, it will walk you through most of the configuration. And it’s free (beer).

Configure Auto-Save with the network directory you want the files dumped to (unless you want the user to have to choose a location every time). You can also configure Save settings to give it a unique name (lots of other settings too, but these two are the most important IMHO).

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