joeware - never stop exploring... :)

Convert your system into a virtual…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx

This looks pretty cool, XP Mode virtualization without the dreaded hardware virtualization support requirement…

I poked around the web site, couldn’t tell what their business model is supposed to be. Do they intend to just give this away?

http://www.vmlite.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/18/windows_7_heart/

I found this to be an interesting article. I was really interested in the part about Heap Shimming via Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH). Of course my first thought was cool, how do you get a list of apps that this is being applied to. Up until today I had only found a command to clear the list of all apps and the event log showing events for the interceptions.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744764(VS.85).aspx

Looking around today I finally found this blog entry from the Performance Team that has some good info.

http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2009/10/02/windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-fault-tolerant-heap-and-memory-management.aspx

Looks like the apps that are being shimmed are maintained in the registry (of course ;o) at hklm\software\microsoft\fth\state. This is easy enough to script for folks so that enterprise customers that want to have an idea of apps in their environment that are having heap corruption issues that aren’t monitoring the event logs on the clients (does anyone do this???) can get the info.

G:\>reg query hklm\software\microsoft\fth

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\fth
    MaximumMemoryPressurePercentage    REG_DWORD    0x50
    MaximumTrackedApplications    REG_DWORD    0x80
    CheckPointPeriod    REG_DWORD    0x2760
    MaximumDelayFreeOverheadInMBs    REG_DWORD    0x4
    RuleList    REG_MULTI_SZ    *;0;0;ntdll.dll;0;0;0xC0000005\0*;0;0;*;0;0;0xC0000374
    Enabled    REG_DWORD    0x1
    TicketValue    REG_DWORD    0x10
    CrashWindowInMinutes    REG_DWORD    0x3c
    ExclusionList    REG_MULTI_SZ    smss.exe\0csrss.exe\0wininit.exe\0services.exe\0lsass.exe\0lsm.exe\0svchost.exe\0winlogon.exe\0SLsvc.exe\0spoolsv.exe\0taskhost.exe
    MaximumAllocationOverheadInMBs    REG_DWORD    0x10
    MaximumTrackedProcesses    REG_DWORD    0x4
    CrashVelocity    REG_DWORD    0x3
    CheckPointTime    REG_DWORD    0xcd1b9fb

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\fth\State

G:\>reg query hklm\software\microsoft\fth\state

G:\>

   joe

A friend sent this link to me… Could be useful if you are doing web dev work…

http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

I regularly get asked about people adding CNAMEs to DNS to set up an alias for a Windows machine. Like maybe the machine name is server123site5 and they want to call it oldserver1. They do that and all of a sudden when they try to use it the connection attempt results in a “duplicate name exists on the network” error.

Not going to spend the time explaining why this happens other than it is a name validation in the SMB 1.0 handshake but the solution is to use either the DisableStrictNameChecking or OptionalNames registry keys under HKLM\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters.

See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281308/en-us for more info.

Note that Windows 2008 and newer Server OSes and Windows Vista and newer Client OSes can use SMB 2.0 which doesn’t have this issue.

    joe

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357079,00.asp

I haven’t tried this but think I will start recommending it to any and everyone that says their PC is taking forever to start up. Every time I look at those machines they tend to have a bazillion apps that start on logon.