Underground And Other Stuff

An important part of hardening Windows servers against attack is disabling any unnecessary services on your machines. In Part 2 of a series, Mitch Tulloch, author of "Windows Server Hacks," shows you which services you need to enable for servers with specific roles, including domain controllers, infrastructure servers, file servers, print servers, and webservers.

<http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/12/13/identifying-essential-windows-services-2.html>

Boot defrag speeds up the startup process by placing the boot files next to each other. Some users may have this enabled already by default, but some have also noted that this is not the case after they had upgraded Windows. To enable this process:

1. Go to Start-->Run, type regedit in the box and hit enter.
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
3. Select Enable from the list on the right.
4. Right on it and select Modify.
5. Change the value to Y to enable and N to disable.
6. Reboot your computer.

Ensure that you run a backup of your registry before making any changes.

url-> http://blogs.msdn.com/gsnowman/archive/2005/10/19/482905.aspx

Six hours of presentations is just a survey of the product, but there are tons of demos, so I think developers will enjoy it. All the webcasts were rated either four stars out of five, or four and a half stars out of five, so someone must have liked them. Either that, or my strategy of hacking the survey site so only my mother could rate the webcast is looking pretty good.

Session One: Introduction. This webcast gives a flavor of the entire report lifecycle: report design, report management, and report delivery.

Session Two: Delivering reports. This webcast is about ways to get reports to users. I showed an ASP.NET application that integrates with a report by linking to a report URL, a Windows Forms application that called the web service to browse available reports and then displays the report in a browser, building standard and data-driven report subscriptions, and uaing the Windows Forms control from Visual Studio 2005.

Session Three: Report Builder. Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about ad hoc reports. How does a user create an ad hoc report? What does a developer have to do to make the database available to end users?

Session Four: Report Design. I build reports with tables. I build reports with matrices. I build reports with lists. I build reports with charts. I build reports that link to other reports.

Session Five: Extensibility. Our intrepid hero calls custom code from a report. He gets data from a web service. He does a directory of the file system using a custom data source. He even uses a third-party charting control for Reporting Services.

Session Six: Management and Security. We learn about SQL Server Management Studio, and see the security model for reporting services. We also see diagrams of a scale-out architecture for a high-capacity, fault tolerant, enterprise grade reporting solution.

If for any reason you have accidentally or purposely removed IE from your computer and want to get it back, try this tip. To reinstall Internet Explorer:

1.) Place Windows XP CD into your CD Drive
2.) Go to "Start-->Run" and type
"rundll32.exe setupapi,InstallHinfSection DefaultInstall 132 c:\windows\inf\ie.inf" and hit enter.

This should copy the IE files back to your computer so it is useable again

There are a bunch of free tools for Windows XP that many people don't know about called Microsoft PowerToys. These tools come from the original programmers of Windows XP who made them while working on Windows and other software programs. For one reason or another the utilities were not included with Windows retail, but they are fully functional and fit right in with the OS. The only thing you should be aware of when using PowerToys is that they're not officially a part of Windows and so are not supported by Microsoft. However, if you feel comfortable messing with the tools knowing this, then you should definitely go get them right away!

www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

Earlier this year, Sony BMG began distributing select CD labels with
copy protection software. When users tried to play a CD through a
Microsoft Windows machine, the software would prompt them to install a
special player in order to listen to the CD.

What Sony BMG failed to mention was the true nature of the
application--a "rootkit" designed to hide and protect the software on
the user's computer. And that omission has made headlines and spurred
countless debates in the past few weeks.

Find out what all the commotion is about, and get my take on Sony's
clandestine copy protection software.
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?c=863145-993479&brand=techrepublic&ds=5&fs=0

If you don't like going to the start menu every time you want to shut down, you may want to try this. You can actually create a shortcut that will automatically shut down your PC, log you off, or reboot.

To do this:
Right-click on the desktop and choose "New-->Shortcut". Browse to the file C":\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe", then click Next. After this, you have to name the shortcut and click Finish. Now right-click on the new shortcut and choose "Properties". In the Target box, add the command line switch -l (to log off), -s (to shut down), or -r (to reboot).