Category Archives: Microsoft

Everything that MS has branded as their’s.

Windows 7 connect to Samba Domain

Windows 7 has some special requirements for it to become a member of a Samba based Windows domain.

I worked through a number options including trying the old Windows XP solution of changing the registry settings NetlogonParametersRequireStrongKey but this did not work.

There are also many mentions of the Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level change to “LM and NTLM – use NTLMV2 session security if negotiated” but that did not work on the two systems I have tried and after setting that back I changed just the two LANmanWorkstation settings as per this link.

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Windows7

Worked fine with both an older Windows 7 downloaded installation and on my Windows7 notebook from TechEd AU 2009. But it failed on a Dell system that has been upgraded to Win7. Still working on that one.

An Update:

I updated the Samba version on the SMEServer that I was trying to connect to from Samba v3.0.33 to Samba v3.2.15 (using the sernet archive) and tried to connect the Dell notebook again using the modified registry settings as per this post and it worked first time.

Sharepoint Menu and Navigation

The issue that I had was managing the menu’s at the top level of a Sharepoint site (site collection) and one of the sites within that collection.

The top level home page menu contained sites and then within the drop down option the subsites of those sites.

The issue was to hide a particular item from that drop down menu.

Editing the navigation options is the correct location. There are two ways to get to this

Sharepoint Site Settings Menu

which leads to the Site Settings page where you select Navigation from the Look and Feel column

Sharepoint Navigation tool

Alternatively just use the shortcut from the Site Actions ->Site Settings menu ->Modify Navigation

Sharepoint Site Settings

Once on this page there is a list of the navigation for the current site collection and you can hide or move items around.

The trick is with the option for Global Navigation

Selecting global navigation option

There are two options:

Display the same navigation items as the parent site
or
Display the navigation items below the current site.

The first option leaves the modification control only within the scope of the local site, while the second option adds the Global Navigation to the list for modification and allows for hiding or moving the global menu for this site.

I think, given my current limited Sharepoint knowledge, that this is due to the relationships within a site collection. The sites I am working with are within a single site collection. The top level menu takes up all the sites within it as the first menu level and sub-sites as the second level menu.  The options above are to either accept that the Global (site collection) Menu will display all the site/subsites or to have control passed to the site level and have the Global Navigation modified at site control level.

Windows XP Lost or Forgotten password

You would think that doing something to recover a password or clear a password would be simple. Reading through all the various offerings and comments accross the web it appears that it is not simple and certainly not cheap!

This open source linux based solution manages to combine free and easy.

PC Login Now is available from SourceForge

It’s an iso CD image that you burn to a CD.  Boot the offending computer with this CD and it loads a Linux shell with the PC Login Now application.

Select the operating system that you want to access – generally you will have only one – and click on Next. Select the user that you want to access and check the Password is Empty (i.e. blank) option box and click on Next. You can then select another user or reboot the computer.

Under Windows XP (although I expect this on other Windows versions as well) you will get a prompt to scan your hard disk. I am sure this is a side effect of making the back end system change and not an issue. Let the scan run and then access your Windows system using the local user account with a blank password.

IE8 install issue: ie4uinit ordinal 654 error

I had an issue with a Windows 2003 server today with these errors in sequence.
The ordinal 654 could not be located in the dynamic link library iertutil.dll.
The ordinal 654 could not be located in the dynamic link library iertutil.dll.

Followed by another 4 or 5 including references to ordinal 672 and IEDKCS32.DLL. 

It appears to be related to a failed install of IE8 and because there is no browser Windows update will not run. 

My remedy was to download IE8 installer for Windows 2003 server.

You might need to use another version from Microsoft Downloads.

I ran this installer which then indicated that it was updating IE8 rather than installing IE8 and a reboot was required.

After this Windows update will run but there are no icons for IE to click on, so I added IE8 shortcuts “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe” to the desktop and all was working.