Networknet.nl Blog

The following script will help you to silently install the East Asian languages for Windows XP. This checkbox can be easy set during the winnt.sif installation or when the image is syspreped. What happens if you did not set this option and you need to change this on more than 500+ Windows XP clients.

When checking the “Regional and Language Options” in Control Panel the checkbox is not set.

Create file c:\temp\east_asian.txt

[RegionalSettings]
LanguageGroup="7","8","9","10"

Create file c:\temp\east_asian.cmd

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\ /v SourcePath /d \\server\share\windows_xp\ /f
%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe shell32,Control_RunDLL intl.cpl,/s:\\server\share\windows_xp\i386",/f:"C:\temp\east_asian.txt

Make sure you have the Windows XP source files on the network as the installation will need them. In 5 minutes the East Asian language files were installed.

Today I watched the 5 part screencasts series presented by Bjørn’s from the USP Journal. If you never worked with creating custom workflows with Sharepoint Designer before than this is a good start. These series helped me build some business logic for a internal Sharepoint project I am doing right now.

Part1

Part2

Part3

Part4

Part5

For more information check out this website here.

Well this is something to consider if you don’t have any virus protection so far. You should and Microsoft offers it now for free. I will install it on my Windows 7 systems.

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

Click here to download your copy.

Last night we lost our Openfiler SAN with a “kernel panic” stop message and all virtual machines located on the VMWare ESX cluster were frozen. After I found the problem and I reboot the SAN box;  I than encountered another problem on one of our development SQL server.  Just after the POST phase a black screen was shown and boot process stopped. I did not create any screenshot of this window but it was something like:

Windows  Server could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

Last time I had this error I was not able to fix this problem without reinstalling the OS. No recent backup of this VM and I run out of my options  to get this VM up and running again.

What I did than:

• Shutdown the VM
• Shutdown another working VM
• Mount the virtual disk of the failed Windows installation on the second VM and boot.
• After Windows was boot of the second vm I assigned a disk letter of the failed Windows instllation.

I went to E:\Windows\System32\config and got the following error message.

\Windows\System32\config is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.

I than right clicked on the volume; went to properties and opened tools tab. I clicked “check now” to repair the volume. After 9% I got warning volume and the process stopped.  I was lost again. But than I remembered one tool which I tried than.

chkdsk e: /f

After the process and check & fix were finished I was able to access all folders. I than shutdown the VM disconnected the virtual disk and boot the development SQL server. After 5 minutes the machine was up and running. This saved me at least couple of days of work to restore the configuration and make everything working.

Windows showed me the warning ” Windows-Registery Hive Recovered”. I was again being able to logon on the server and make sure proper backup was in place now. Same can be done with physical disk but make sure you install the HDD into another machine!

Did you ever needed to login into a Cisco Switch and change the configuration? The responsible person is on vacation or out of the office; you forgot the password of the switch or whatever; you just want to login and do your job to make the network configuration working.

Some months ago I had same problem with a network segment with a failing network configuration  and I needed to act quickly in this production area. I found a spare switch but was not able to login.

See the screenshots below and instruction how to reset the password while keeping the VLAN and switch configuration.

Power on the switch; connect a console cable to it and follow the steps below:

CRTL-C to stop the process. You are now at “switch:”

Type flash_init + enter; type load_helper + enter to load the basic IOS.

Type rename flash:config.text flash:config.backup to rename current configuration file to backup. Type boot to reload the switch.

Choose no for the initial configuration.

Rename flash:config.backup config.text and copy flash:config.text system:running-config

You are done now and can add or change the usernames or enable secret.

Thanks to this I will able to quickly act and in 15 minutes make the spare switch working.

Networknet.nl Blog logo May 2009.