My Windows laptop became almost unresponsive. By the time I investigated, it was responding again. PowerShell revealed file-operation delays of 36 seconds around the time of the freeze. Here are the commands and the evidence, including what they could not establish.
Update: An offline CHKDSK follow-up below found and repaired NTFS metadata errors, without reporting bad sectors.
(more…)While changing a domain administrator’s password in Windows PowerShell on a domain controller, I ran into a paste problem with Read-Host -AsSecureString. Typing a password manually worked, but pasting into the hidden prompt left the variable empty. Reading the clipboard with Get-Clipboard and converting its contents to a SecureString worked in the same session.
This is the procedure I used. It changes the password of the currently signed-in domain account and requires its existing password.
(more…)My Windows 10 C: drive was almost completely full. Its capacity was only about 31.45 GB, while Disk Management showed another 18 GB of unallocated space on the same disk. Expanding C: looked straightforward, but a small recovery partition stood in the way. Then disabling Windows Recovery Environment failed because the drive was too full.
(more…)This guide explains how to add a graphical desktop to an Ubuntu 24.04 VPS and access it using Windows Remote Desktop. The setup uses XFCE, xrdp, and a regular Linux user. RDP connections travel through an SSH tunnel, with xrdp listening only on localhost.
I registered a sample Credential Provider with the following .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\Credential Providers\{5fd3d285-0dd9-4362-8855-e0abaacd4af6}]
@="SampleV2CredentialProvider"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{5fd3d285-0dd9-4362-8855-e0abaacd4af6}]
@="SampleV2CredentialProvider"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{5fd3d285-0dd9-4362-8855-e0abaacd4af6}\InprocServer32]
@="SampleV2CredentialProvider.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Apartment"
On DC with IP address 192.168.0.123:
wevtutil sl Microsoft-Windows-NTLM/Operational /e:true
wevtutil qe Microsoft-Windows-NTLM/Operational /q:"*[System[(EventID=8004 or EventID=8005)]]" /f:text
net share
Share name Resource Remark
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C$ C:\ Default share
IPC$ Remote IPC
ADMIN$ C:\Windows Remote Admin
NETLOGON C:\Windows\SYSVOL\sysvol\my.local\SCRIPTS
Logon server share
SYSVOL C:\Windows\SYSVOL\sysvol Logon server share
The command completed successfully.
I realized that my LDAPS certificate is not trusted with the following command in PowerShell:
certutil -verify ldap.crt
I configured Kerberos on Ubuntu 24.04 WSL and was able to run the following command:
export KRB5_TRACE=/dev/stderr
ldapsearch -H ldap://myserver.my.local -Y GSSAPI
that produced the following output:
(more…)
