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Location of Tomb Raider 2013 Saves (and how to restore)
edited by on February 8th 2016, at 15:23
I noticed it's not very straightforward where the save games for Tomb Raider (2013) are stored. Depending on how you purchased the game, it's in a different location.

Note that it is not really straightforward to restore the saves afterwards (see below). For that reason, it's better to enable Steam Cloud and have your files synced to the cloud.

For the Steam version, it is located at:

<Steam folder>\userdata\<profile id>\203160\remote

Note that the ID for the game may be different, although, if you have the latest version, it should be as displayed. In any case, if you can't find it, try searching for files called profile.dat or save1.dat.

For the retail box or Origin, the s  ...
 
The Malware Museum
edited by on February 5th 2016, at 16:09

The Internet Archive has recently released The Malware Museum, a collection of old viruses and malware from the eighties and nineties.

→ https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum

The idea behind the "museum" is to experience what it was like to have your computer infected with a virus, back in the day when there was no internet and hardly any anti-virus software available.

The malware on this site is usually so old you need to use an emulator (such as DOSBox) and has been stripped from all malicious code, leaving only the on-screen messages intact.

 
Error -800391163 when enabling Users Profile Disks on a RDS Session Collection
edited by on February 2nd 2016, at 16:39
When attempting to enable User Profile Disks on a RDS Session Collection with the VHD files stored on a remote server, you may get the following error:

Error
Unable to create virtual disk template error -800391163

This error can occur if the activation process is not able to set the required security permissions on the folder.

The handling of UPDs is done by the RDS server itself, and therefore, the computer account needs to have full access permissions on the folder where the VHD files are stored. When enabling UPD, Server Manager will automatically attempt to set up the necessary permissions. When this fails, the above error is displayed.

One such scenario can occur if the shared folde  ...
 
Set Auto Logon NT
edited by on January 29th 2016, at 16:55
Set Auto Logon NT is a quick-n-dirty tool to set up automatic logon using the "NT Winlogon" method. It works similar to AutoLogon from Sysinternals but, at the moment, does not encrypt the password.

As the program will most likely be used by sysadmins, it is published as a ZIP file (no installer), and is therefore entirely portable, and without dependencies. It has been tested on all versions of Windows, starting from Windows 2000. Windows 95/98/Me is not supported.

The real purpose of this tool was more of a personal nature and was to try out three new things in "the old Borland C++ Builder". (Yes, I know I should really switch to a newer version or use VC.)

Access 64  ...
 
Factory reset of Cisco 7911 and 7941/7961 phones (use with caution!)
edited by on January 29th 2016, at 16:13
You can factory reset a Cisco 7911(G) and 7941/7961(G) at boot time by following the procedure below. Performing a full factory reset will completely wipe the phone. This includes its firmware, leaving the phone in an unusable state if no TFTP server with the necessary files is available, along with a DHCP server that pushes the TFTP server (using DHCP option 150). If you have a Cisco Call Manager, this part should already be set up and the phone will simply download everything from the CCM.

Use with caution!
The factory reset will also wipe the firmware. You will no longer be able to use the phone until a new firmware is installed on the phone. This can only be done through a TFTP server w  ...
 
Turn off registration prompt on Adobe Acrobat Standard/Pro (useful for RDS)
edited by on January 29th 2016, at 10:24
When a new user logs on to a computer and they start Adobe Acrobat Standard/Pro for the first time, they will be prompted with a registration window. This may not be something you want for your users, especially not on RDS. Up until version 9, this prompt could be turned off through a registry setting, but this no longer works.

You can however also turn off the registration window through another way, during installation. Unfortunately, this requires you to uninstall and reinstall the software but the result does work perfectly.

If Acrobat is already installed, uninstall it first.

Open a command prompt and navigate to the installation media (or folder).

Perform the installation by using   ...
 
Publish RemoteApps and Desktops together from the same RD Host (same Session Collection)
edited by on January 28th 2016, at 14:30
By default, in 2012(R2), it is not possible to use the same RDS Host Server to publish both RemoteApps and full remote desktops. This is because a RDS server can only be part of one and only one Session Collection, and a Session Collection can only either publish remote desktops or RemoteApps.

But there is an "unofficial and very unsupported" workaround which allows you to publish the full desktop in addition to the RemoteApps from the same Collection. This can be achieved by manually toggle publishing through the registry on the server running the RD Broker/Gateway.

Using regedit, navigate to the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Serve  ...
 
Fail-Over Cluster with Cluster Shared Volumes/Clustered disks on HP EVA SANs
edited by on January 25th 2016, at 13:59
When using Microsoft Fail-Over Clustering with Cluster Shared Volumes or Clustered disks which are on a HP EVA storage box, you may run into a problem about the disk/volume only being accessible from one of the nodes of the failover cluster, usually the node on which the disk/volume was added. When trying to access the volume from another node (e.g. by moving the role using that volume to another node), the role will fail and complain that the disk/volume is not accessible. Moreover, in Disk Management, the disk is not accessible and does not show the size of the disk. This makes the use of a fail-over cluster rather useless as the role can only run on the one node that does have access to t  ...
 
Black Manticore moved to new server
edited by on January 22nd 2016, at 15:58

Our website has been moved to a new server to allow for a better and faster service.

Although everything has been tested thouroughly, please contact us (use the contact form) if you notice something's wrong.

 
BusinessMessaging.exe Qt5Widgets.dll error after uninstalling Malwarebytes Anti-Malware
edited by on January 22nd 2016, at 11:53

After uninstalling Malwarebytes Anti-Malware from a domain-joined computer, you may get the following error each time the computer reboots:

BusinessMessaging.exe - System Error
The program can't start because Qt5Widgets.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

To resolve the issue, you need to manually remove a registry key using regedit:

  • On 32-bit, navigate to the key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
  • On 64-bit, navigate to the key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

Remove the value with name Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

 
Installing Open Monitor Distribution (OMD) on Debian/Ubuntu
edited by on January 18th 2016, at 15:10
Installing the Open Monitor Distribution (OMD) is actually pretty straight forward on Debian. Consol Labs provides a OMD repository from which the latest version of OMD can be installed, providing both a stable and testing branch.

First and foremost, you need to have a Debian/Ubuntu system running, and it needs to be connected to the internet.

In order to add the repository, you need to import the GPG security key in order to trust the repository:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys F8C1CA08A57B9ED7gpg --armor --export F8C1CA08A57B9ED7 | apt-key add -

Next, add the repository to your sources.list. For Debian 8.0 "Jessie", this would be something like this:

echo 'deb htt  ...
 
'Microsoft.Policies.WindowsStore' already defined after ADMX Central Store update
edited by on January 12th 2016, at 10:22
When updating the ADMX Central Store from Windows 10 to Windows 10 v1511, you may encounter the following error when attempting to view or edit group policies:

Administrative Templates
Namespace ‘Microsoft.Policies.WindowsStore’ is already defined as the target namespace for another file in the store.

File \\domain.fqdn\SysVol\domain.fqdn\Policies\PolicyDefinitions\WinStoreUI.admx, line 4, column 80

A similar problem is referenced in KB 3077013 but basically also applies to this issue:

On a domain controller, using Explorer, navigate to the ADMX Central Store:...\SYSVOL\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions

Delete the file WinStoreUI.admx and all occurances of WinStoreUI.adml (under eac  ...
 
'Microsoft.Policies.WindowsStore' already defined after ADMX Central Store update
edited by on January 12th 2016, at 10:20
When updating the ADMX Central Store from Windows 10 to Windows 10 v1511, you may encounter the following error when attempting to view or edit group policies:

Administrative Templates
Namespace ‘Microsoft.Policies.WindowsStore’ is already defined as the target namespace for another file in the store.

File \\domain.fqdn\SysVol\domain.fqdn\Policies\PolicyDefinitions\WinStoreUI.admx, line 4, column 80

A similar problem is referenced in KB 3077013 but basically also applies to this issue:

On a domain controller, using Explorer, navigate to the ADMX Central Store:folder containing SYSVOL\SYSVOL\domain\Policies\PolicyDefinitions

Delete the file WinStoreUI.admx and all occurances of WinSt  ...
 
Manipulating AppAssure with PowerShell
edited by on December 15th 2015, at 15:21
Quest Rapid Recovery has a module for Powershell which allows manipulation of Rapid Recovery through several cmdlets. This comes in handy if you want to do some automation, and more importantly, it's a lot faster than the web interface.

To load the AppAssure module for PowerShell:

Import-Module appassurepowershellmodule

Then, to get a list of all available cmdlets for AppAssure, run:

Get-Command -Module appassurepowershellmodule

The majority of core and agent functions are available through PS. There are quite a few, and it would go beyond the scope of the article to explain them all. You can get (limited) help by prepending a cmdlet with the keyword help.

Suspend all backups for all m  ...
 
Disable sticky keys shortcuts through group policy
edited by on December 7th 2015, at 12:58

You can disable the keyboard shortcuts, the so-called sticky keys, through a group policy. This is a user setting, and although there's no true policy for this, you can disable it through a group policy preference registry entry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys\Flags="506"

Navigate to:

User Configuration → Preferences → Windows Settings → Registry

There, create a new entry:

  • Action: Update
  • Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER
  • Key path: Control Panel\Accessibility\StickyKeys
  • Value name: Flags
  • Value type: REG_SZ
  • Value data: 506
 
Updating a single Application icon on Mac OS X
edited by on December 5th 2015, at 16:24
If you want to replace an Application icon (e.g. when using Wineskin to run Windows-applications), you can do so by replacing the icon file inside an app, located at:

AppName.app/Contents/Resources/AppName.icns

However, sometimes, you will still see the old icon in Finder. This is due to the Finder icon cache, which only gets updated if certain files within the app have a new modified date. The icon file itself isn't one of them. In order to trigger Finder to update its icon cache, it is sufficient to update the modification time of two items by "touching" them from a Terminal:

touch /Applications/AppName.apptouch /Applications/AppName.app/Contents/Info.plist

Normally, this wil  ...
 
PowerCLI: get a list of VMs, the datastores they're using and the folder they are in
edited by on December 5th 2015, at 13:19

You can quickly get a list of VMs, the datastores they are using and the logical folder they are in through PowerCLI:

Get-VM | Select Name,@{N="Datastore";E={[string]::Join(',',(Get-Datastore -Id $_.DatastoreIdList | Select -ExpandProperty Name))}},@{N="Folder";E={$_.Folder.Name}}

Combine it with Export-CSV to export the results to a CSV file.

 
Mac OS X Prefs Editor
edited by on December 2nd 2015, at 21:09
Configuration settings and preferences of Mac OS X apps are usually stored in a so-called plist (Property List file) file, stored in the folder ~/Library/Preferences. These files store a list of properties in a serialized way, and are binary (not readable/editable).

Mac OS X itself has some tools to view and edit property lists but they are not very efficient and easy to use. Luckily, the internet provides all sort of (free) tools to perform the task of viewing/editing these files much more easily.

The most easy-to-use I found is Prefs Editor, written by Thomas Tempelmann.

It is a very easy to use, intuitive, and foremost, a free tool which can view and edit property lists in real-time. I  ...
 
Increasing the service kill timeout on a Windows Server
edited by on November 26th 2015, at 15:52
By default, when rebooting a server, Windows will wait for 20 seconds for services to shut themselves down, after which Windows will kill the service. For most systems, this "kill timeout" is sufficient but some applications require more time to do a graceful shutdown (e.g. Quest Rapid Recovery is one of them).

You can change this timeout value by adjusting the string value WaitToKillServiceTimeout in the registry, located at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

WaitToKillServiceTimeout sets the timeout value in milliseconds. You can change it to whatever you like. For example: for 10 minutes, set the value to 600000.

Note that increasing this value does not mea  ...
 
Properly scheduling a Powershell script using Task Scheduler
edited by on November 26th 2015, at 15:10
When scheduling the run of a Powershell script through Task Scheduler, it is highly recommended to set up the task to run accordingly:

powershell.exe -NoProfile -NoLogo -NonInteractive -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "path\to\script.ps1"

Scheduling Powershell scripts in this manner will prevent the dreaded 0x1 exit code from happening.

-NoProfile prevents loading of the user's profile, speeding up the startup of the script and preventing the script from depending on user-specific settings and scripts.

-NonInteractive will allow a script to exit rather than waiting indefinitely when a user prompt occurs.

Setting the -ExecutionPolicy to ByPass or Unrestricted will allow unsigned s  ...
 
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