Author Archives: bolt

regedit access denied

The registry on newer Windows systems has access control lists. This means that even if you run regedit.exe as an Administrator, you can still get “Access Denied” trying to erase or alter some keys (CurrentControlSet/Enum/USB comes to mind). The solution to this is to run the registry editor as the “System” account, which can be […]

Removing a WIFI-network in Windows 8

After having to look this up a third time, I found a post on Vonnie’s blog about it. I made a copy here. In short, Microsoft fucked up and you’re left with the command line to do this, unless the wireless network is in range. The following commands list all the WIFI networks you have […]

Shrinking a vmdk with VMware Player

It seems VMware has removed the GUI for the disk shrink feature in VMware Tools, but the good news is it’s still available from the console. The following command will shrink the disk image for drive C: “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareToolboxCmd.exe” disk shrink c:\

Logging out of a samba file server

When changing your password on a samba (Linux) server, the tokens a Windows machine holds get invalidated, yet Windows does not automatically prompt for new credentials. Instead, it consistently says “access denied” when trying to access a previously available share, say, \\myfineserver\share If you previously mapped this drive, disconnecting is trivial in explorer, but if […]

Creating persistent SSH tunnels in Windows using autossh

Download Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) Install Cygwin, selecting the autossh package. Start the Cygwin shell (Start -> Programs -> Cygwin). Generate a public/private key pair. At the command line, run: ssh-keygen Accept the default file locations Use an empty passphrase Copy your newly-created public key to the SSH server. scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub user@ssh.host.name:id_rsa.pub Add your public key to […]

Running PulseAudio in system mode with TCP listening on Debian Wheezy

On this thin client I’ve set up, I wanted pulseaudio to run before logging in, and not have any specific users on the machine. System mode was called for. On Wheezy, pulseaudio is by default configured for per-user sessions. To remedy this, edit /etc/default/pulseaudio, putting PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1 Then, edit /etc/pulse/system.pa – this is the file that […]

Mysterious IGMP Query Request packets from 0.0.0.0 to 224.0.0.1

On my Debian KVM hosts, and on the firewalls that guard them, I noticed that every two minutes, plus a couple seconds or so each time, I’d see blocked IGMP packages from 0.0.0.0 to 224.0.0.1. Googling around, I found this post, explaining that it’s the multicast_snooping option for bridge-utils that’s causing it. Being KVM hosts, […]

Cygwin auto started sshd service as single user on Windows 8

On a single user desktop, you might want to run cygwin sshd autostarted as a specific user, without privilege separation. Here’s a short reference: Disable UAC Open a Cygwin terminal ssh-host-config Select “no” on privilege separation Enter nothing, [], as the value of CYGWIN for the daemon Select “yes” to use a different username than […]