clutch

Don't cross post.

I take them out just because I hate that stupid delay when you open up Windows Explorer, and it spins up the drive to check what's in there (even though you aren't browsing the CD-ROM). Other than that, I can't think of anything either.

You will see the same tools under "Admin Tools" in program files that you see on the server. Therefore, you can do all the same stuff.

Welp, this has been interesting (and long). The only thing I was going to reply to is from APK: "I know you are also a member at Ars Clutch." I am not. I haven't been there in a couple of years or so. The last time I was at Ars Technica was to read a hardware review.

I don't know, as I don't have ISA server to use. Do you have a config manual for it? Have you done any tweaking lately in ISA?

For practical purposes, not really. The only thing that would of issue is anything running as a user process (startup garbage that gets launched when a user logs on) and the general resources that are taken up when someone logs on.

Ouch! That sounds like a probable suspect though. Usually I just use "NETSEND" to annoy people, but hell "SHUTDOWN" can be entertaining at times too...

Can you just "lock" the workstation instead of logging off? I know that some services may reset when somebody logs onto the console (vs using a Terminal Server logon or something similar). I know that my TZO web client will actually shut off and not come back on if I log on, and then logoff (unfortunately, this includes Terminal Server as well, a rare problem).

Not working for me bud. Could be that you are accessing your site from the LAN-side of your ISA server, rather than from the Internet side, and can therefore see your site. Any NAT/PAT scheme will throw off the port sweep performed by that site unless you use the client that they offer.

Just get the one out of Service Pack 2. Open up the service pack with WinZip (or similar compression utility), or you can even use the nifty command line switch (notice I wrote "nifty" as opposed to "handy", since it isn't "handy" as I can't "remember" it right now) to extract the files and get that "nifty" ( ) utility.

Install the ADMINPAK.MSI file from either the Win2K Server CD, or extract it from the service pack that you are currently using (preferrably from the same service pack revision that is active on both systems). That will give you all of your AD and server-services admin tools. You can also administer shares on any of your NT-based systems by right clicking on "My Computer", and selecting "Manage". From there, right click on "Local Computer" and select "Connect to another computer". Then, just select the machine you want to manage by using the browser pane, or entering the machine name/IP into the address bar.

Welp, DrPizza seems like a pretty sharp guy, and this part: "Yes, I can. What you've ignored is that the disk controller physically isn't capable of picking up the entire deck at once, no matter how it's organized. It can pick up a few cards, then it has to wait, then a few more, then it has to wait, and so on. And it only rarely has to pick up the entire deck anyway. Most of the time, it only wants a couple of cards from the middle, and if that's the case, the only issue is, "are they in the MFT, or are they somewhere else"? As long as they're "somewhere else" it doesn't matter if they're contiguous or not." seems like a brilliant point that he is making. I can understand his perspective, and it is indeed a good one. I have just seen fragmentation take performance into the toilet on many systems, and I know the importance of staying on top of these issues. In many cases, I rarely have to defragment my primary workstation as I don't add and remove large files and/or large numbers of files. Therefore, there are not as many "holes" scattered about being annoying. Using his logic, there would not be any perceivable decrease in performance of the average "power user" that might upgrade or simply reformat his/her system once every 1 or 2 years. I have had workstations that I have defragged after 18 months of operation that don't get a huge performance boost since there wasn't a large amount of defragmentation to begin with. On partitions with large amounts of file activity (like testing/development workstations and servers) steady control of fragmentation does help out with performance greatly on my systems. But, it is nice to see a well written argument to this, and I hope to see more of this activity from DP in the future.

Well, it's nice to see such a wealth of info from you guys on this topic. As for me, I only have a few things to say about it. 1. A scattered file on a harddrive takes longer to load than a contiguous load, period. MS states it here, and it's been a pretty widely accepted by product of the destructive and scattered behavior of hard disk systems. The only effect this has on the OS is that it will only slow down on reads (and writes if there's a small amount of freespace to write files to), and that's about it. However, I have heard of NT boxes that would grind to a hault due to extreme fragmentation and wound up formatting and reinstalling this system. Yeah, it seems odd, and I would think it had more to do with corruption than fragmentation, but my friend and his crew determined this on a few workstations at his office. This behavior is the same thing that is exhibited in any database that has had numerous reads and writes to it, and then had many rows/columns (or entire objects) removed. Once you defragment it, performance will increase and return to normal. Many database system exhibit their own defragmentation schemes (such as Exchange 5.5/2K) that run auto-magically, while others can perform "offline" and/or manual defragmentation/compression runs (MS Access). The hard disk will work in the same way as a database with the main R/W portion being the tables/rows/columns and the MFT$ (for NTFS) as the index. The index will keep up with the location of data regardless of its location on the disk, but moving all the empty space to one area, and moving all your data to another helps a great deal. Funny thing about databases though, is that they always tell you not to run defragmenters and virus scanners on the same partitions as the DBs themselves (unless they are specifically designed for them, like McAfee Groupshield and such). I can only imagine that the R/W behavior of each product tends to clash with most DB software. 2. Symantec is evil. They just HAVE to write their "software" (read: crap) SO specifically for an OS version (I would imagine by bypassing the MS APIs) that they break easily with OS patches/service packs/new versions. This happened with WinFax Pro 8 (the damn thing wouldn't let my PC reboot when I performed my brand-new fresh install of Win98 when it came out. Of course, it worked great in Win95 and needed patches to work again in Win98. Then, PCAnywhere v9.0/9.1 had this WONDERFUL ability to keep Win2K boxes from rebooting again upon installation due to a NETLOGON (awgina.dll in this case) filter to allow the software to interact with NT/Domain accounts. I saw this on CDs that indicated that they were "Windows 2000 compliant" as well. After a nice visit to the Symantec site, I found out about this file and they had a fix for it provided you either had a FAT 16/32 disk, or an OS/Utility that could provide access to the system partition if it was NTFS. Besides that, Speedisk killed my dad in 'Nam. Bastards...

There was a commercial here in the US (and probably at other locations) that show a party on a subway train, and it has this kick a$$ track playing in the background. Anybody know who it is that wrote/performs it?

Never mind, I found it. If anybody is interested, it is from "Methods of Mayhem" and the track is "Hypocritical".

Please don't double post here. If you feel that you need to spread the word to other forums on something, then post links to your topic to the relevant forums. Like this.

Yes, in some cases, the "average" user account may not have enough privies to run some of these worms. This happened for me (fortunately) when a user of mine kept trying to view this "joke" (a vbs worm) over and over again. He then came to me looking for help on seeing this "joke". I told him that he was actually launching a worm and there wasn't a joke in his email. He still wanted to see the joke. So, I just told him that he was the joke, and I then checked his system for infection. The script couldn't execute itself due to the nature of his permissions in NT4, and the PC managed to save itself in spite of its user. Bear in mind though, that this doesn't work for all or even most of the worms and viruses out there. You still need a virus scanner if you are at risk to exposure.

Basically, for the average home user, NAT is about as much "protection" as they are going to need. By default, it won't accept incoming packets that weren't requested and SYN/ACK attacks don't do any good since the NAT device won't know who to forward them to. But, that's about it. If you like the router now, then cool. Otherwise, if you just want to find holes in the unit (as a product), well that's easy enough. It was never meant to "secure" a network no matter what the brochure reads, and can't do what true security products like the ones mentioned will. Also, the problems that you have been having with certain applications are the same ones that happen with any NAT system without special tweaks being employed. Good luck with HTTPort. Post what happens.

If you are looking to protect from internal as well as external enemies, then whatever "protection" NAT affords will never be good enough. If you want to totally lock down your network, you will need a several layer protection scheme. It may start with a true firewall (one that can lock down all internally and externally sourced traffic across any port), along with local network traffic monitors that will detect machines going into promiscuous mode and report them to the admin and/or give warnings to those that attempt to pick up these packets. I use Network Monitor from SMS 2.0, and you can configure your primary "targets" (ones that I monitor for load) to read for unauthorized traffic. This is a very simple method, of course, but if you are totally concerned about this type of compromise, then you should look at intrusion detection solutions. Of course, these vary in what they do and their price, but hey, you're worth it, right?

Quote: Do updates through stored procedures rather than recordsets if possible. Now that's something I haven't really thought of before. Right now, I am only doing single record updates anyway, but have you observed much of an improvement using SPs in such a small scope?

I have a zip drive in case anybody brings one in, but other than that I don't mess with it. It would be fine for moving large files that you don't want to burn, but the disks are expensive and my IDE zip drive at home is dead.

Well, he did say "ex-hairdresser" and nothing about "current girlfriend" so I would say "no".

Unfortunately, it would appear that some forum users do not which was why he was double, triple, quadruple, posting all over the place in the past. Some have mentioned that they, in fact, do not read all of the forums. I am kind of surprised since this messageboard is so small in comparison to others, but it still happens.

He did a link to it, and that's perfectly fine. This way, there won't be any confusion regarding what post to respond to for the people that actually use all of the forums. Thank you APK.

Ummm, ditto. I have no idea why that's the case. But then again, I haven't really pursued it either.