Karl’s Place

We are using the free Comodo antivirus product in our not-for-profit office.? It seems to work pretty well, but the updater is failing on many of our machines.

I think I’ve narrowed the issue down to the fact that we used to have a proxy server.? Even though I removed the group policy that configured Internet settings to look for the proxy, and IE and Firefox can reach the Internet just fine, the “.DEFAULT” user section of the registry is still pointing to the proxy server, and Comodo won’t update.? Nothing that I’ve found will change the .DEFAULT user Internet settings — I edit the registry, and then it reverts back.

I found a registry hack to turn on per-machine proxy settings for XP.? That did the trick!? Here’s what goes in a .reg file that you can double-click to import:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"ProxySettingsPerUser"=dword:00000000

Now I just need to see if a similar fix is available for Vista…

It seems to work for Vista, too!

We’re using mod_auth_cas on a linux reverse proxy to authenticate users to our DotNetNuke (DNN) intranet site.? After dealing with the entropy problem that was really slowing down access, we had just one problem remaining:? files that were attached to DNN pages with the built-in editor were not accessible through the reverse proxy.

It turns out that DNN uses a “fileticket” parameter in the file link URLs, and mod_auth_cas uses a “ticket” parameter.? But mod_auth_cas was mistakenly stripping out DNN’s fileticket parameters.? A DNN URL would look like this: “/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=DBDQlsksjlefwgb&tabid=70″.? After going through the reverse proxy, mod_auth_cas had mangled it to “/LinkClick.aspx?filetabid=70″.

Someone involved with mod_auth_cas pointed me to the bug tracker, and there was a fix for the URL mangling.? You need to get the latest source files, compile them, and the issue is gone!

Here’s a video by Laura Chappell analyzing the network traffic from a bot-infected host.? Good stuff!

We set up a Windows Media Server just like we’ve done many times before, but this time we were not able to connect to the streams from outside the local network.? After spending a lot of time verifying that it wasn’t a firewall problem, I found this article that gave an answer: the media server rejected the requests because it didn’t like the dns name in the URL.? Adding the public dns name to the localhost like of the media server’s hosts file fixed it.

Thanks, David!

We were trying to write some machine images to a Server 2008 share with Acronis True Image.? True Image would see the shares, but would fail with a strange “bad file name” error.

It turned out to be the same issue that stopped Mac OS 10.4 from talking to my Server 2008 shares at a different location:? the security policies on Server 2008 require SMB message signing.? Both Mac OS 10.4 and the version of True Image that we’re running don’t support SMB message signing.

Here’s how we disabled the message signing requirement (SMB messages will still be signed when a client supports it):

1. Open Group Policy Management and edit the Default Domain Controller Policy
2. Go To Computer Configuration, Policies, Windows Settings, Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options
3. Scroll down and find the entry Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always)
4. Set this option to Disabled
5. Execute gpupdate on the DC and the file server to apply the new GPO ruleset.

When our users started upgrading to Firefox 3.0.10, they began noticing that our Dotnetnuke intranet’s menu bar was broken — only “Home” showed up, not the rest of the page titles.

It turns out that DNN uses a config file to tell it what capabilities the various browser versions support.? For some reason, the user agent string from Firefox 3.0.10 isn’t recognized.

I empathize with the arguments on the DNN forums that it’s not a good practice to maintain a table like this, but I’m not going to try to rewrite DNN.? Since I’m not worried about really old versions of Firefox accessing our Intranet site, my fix was to edit the file \js\ClientAPICaps.config and add this to the first section:

browser contains="Firefox"

We have an Access database that has been used for years as a data source for merging Word documents.? A button in the Access app would run a MakeTable query and then launch Word, which would open a document that looked to the table as a data source.

Two weeks ago, the mail merge documents began refusing to see the data source.? I read all of the tips about using Internet Explorer’s security settings to put the network path in the Intranet or Trusted Sites zones.? That actually helped on some machines, but not most.

My solution was to use the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) function “TransferText” to export the table to a text file on the local hard drive.? I then reconfigured all of the merge documents to look to that local file.? The basic instructions can be found here.

I’ve been trying for a while to get the Mac “Screen Sharing” to work.? I want to control the Mac from a Windows Vista machine.? Even though Screen Sharing is just a VNC server, my RealVNC client would seem to connect for a split second and then the connection would go away.

I finally found the solution: in the VNC client (vncviewer) options, set the encoding to “Hextile” and the color level to “Full”.? Now it connects fine!

Hoping that this will help someone who experiences this in the future, I thought I’d briefly write up what happened when I switched my Windows machine from one domain to another, and my iTunes library disappeared.

What happened:? My machine had been a member of domain A, and I had redirected “My Documents” and all of its subfolders (noteably “My Music”) to D:\MyDocuments.? My iTunes music was in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music and the corresponding .itl and .xml files were right above that in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes.

I moved my computer to domain B, knowing that I would get a new profile and a lot of cleanup work.? I should have remapped My Documents right away, but I didn’t.? I ran iTunes, and it had to do some reinstallation under the new user profile.? It finally opened, showing an empty music library.

After reading some articles online, I thought I could go into Preferences, Advanced tab, and just point iTunes to d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music.? All of the documentation seems to indicate this, but it doesn’t work.? It turns out that the pointer in the Advanced tab probably only tells iTunes to look there for the music, but not for the .itl and .xml files that describe the library.? iTunes was still looking in my new profile path at a blank set of those file.? Of course, it took me hours to figure that out.

There are probably two solutions:? move the correct .itl and .xml files to the new profile path, or repoint My Documents again so that iTunes finds the existing files in d:\MyDocuments\My Music\iTunes.? I chose the second, and it worked well.

By the way, I couldn’t remember how I’d originally remapped My Documents, so I downloaded TweakUI.? The only downside was that TweakUI has you individually map My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, etc.? The method that I’d used before mapped them all when you remapped My Documents.

Here’s a great article at Lifehacker about how you can know if a file is really infected, or if your antivirus software is giving you a false positive (shouting “virus!” when there really isn’t one).

Read the article and check out the online multi-engine scanning tools at

• Jotti’s malware scan
• VirusTotal
• Virus.org