Category Archives: Solved Problems

Problems and solutions. Good stuff.

Resetting an Aeon Labs Z-Stick S2

From the manual: This must be done through the host software which takes control of the Z-Stick USB adapter while the Z-Stick is in SerialAPI-Mode. If you have the Danfoss ZWave PC Controller, previously available here, you can use the “Reset Controller” button to do so. This works fine in VMware Player too, so you […]

Reverse SSHFS mounts (fs push)

sshfs is a neat way of mounting a file system from one machine to another over an encrypted ssh channel. However, for machine CLIENT to access a file system that resides on machine HOST, CLIENT must generally be able to log in to HOST. In addition, CLIENT must be able to connect to HOST in […]

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 […]

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, […]

Enable username and password in URL in Internet Explorer

After IE6, usernames and passwords in URL’s are no longer enabled by default in Internet Explorer, the reasoning being that saving usernames and passwords in the browser history and referral headers is a very, very bad idea. Still, it’s sometimes needed, especially when dealing with old IP cameras, which is when I last bumped into […]

Disable UAC in Windows 8

While Windows 7 let you disable UAC by simply typing “UAC” into the search field on the start menu and disabling it from the UAC options that show up, Windows 8 made it a bit more complicated. In short, press Windows+R, type secpol.msc, go to “Local Policies => Security Options” and set “User Account Control: […]