Thursday 3 December 2015

Windows 10 VPN using remote gateway FIX !!

I recently noticed an issue with windows 10 Pro when i was trying to connect to my vpn from home, i wanted to surf the internet but not use the remote gateway of the VPN connection, normally in previous versions of windows you could get into the TCPIP settings and tick the magic little box that uses the local gateway, so off i went and tried to do the same thing in windows 10 and i was unable to accomplish my task due to the fact that the properties button would not work for me when i tried to click on it. This is a known issue but it hasn't been fixed as of yet so a permanent fix for this is to do all the required changes in Powershell.


First things first you need to open up Powershell for those of you that haven't used this before its similar in the look and feel to a command prompt but a lot more powerful in what it can do, simply search for Powershell in your search box and click on Powershell when the search appears.
when in Powershell type or copy and paste the following command and press enter.

Get-VpnConnection

This will then show you the information about your VPN connection as per the image below
you will see that next to the option SplitTunneling it is set to False, this is what we need to change.


The next command you need to input into Powershell is below and also press enter to make the change.
 
Set-VpnConnection "Superkev VPN" -SplitTunneling 1

Change Superkev VPN to the name of your vpn (including the quotes) from the information in the first Powershell results window, as per image below.
To Confirm that the change has taken effect run the first command again and check that next to the SplitTunneling option that is says True as per image below.
That is all you need to do now you can be connected to your VPN and use the local internet gateway to surf away.


Sunday 13 September 2015

How to use Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10

Enable Windows Photo Viewer - Windows 10

Its been a while since i have blogged, so windows 10 is now upon us and as the normal IT geek that i am i decided to update all the computers in the house.

I have been pretty happy with it so far and as i am running a domain in the house i made sure that i connected them to my domain as i am running Windows 10 Pro, this was simple and works as expected, one thing that i have set by default by group policy was to turn of the very annoying UAC (User Account Control) as i want to be able to run my programs and other apps without being asked do i want to do this, are you sure you want to do this.

Now this has caused me a slight issue when it comes to viewing images, as the bulit in Photos app will not run whilst UAC is disabled much like all of the Windows Store Apps. I didn't really like it much anyway i much prefer the older Windows Photo Viewer, so i set out finding a way to get this app working so i could view my pictures again.

Follow the steps below and you will have it back working in no time at all.

Step 1.

Open up Regedit, click on start or just type regedit in the search box at the bottom of the screen, once it shows you the regedit icon just click on it.

Step 2.

Browse to the following registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Photo Viewer\Capabilities\FileAssociations

You will need to add the following entries as string values, dont worry that they all have .Tiff at the end this is normal and is not related to the image file type .TIF

.bmp PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.dib PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.gif PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.jfif PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.jpe PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.jpeg PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.jpg PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.jxr PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff
.png PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff

Regedit

Step 3.

Now open the Set Default Programs by typing settings in the search box next to the start button then click on settings.

Defaults

Now type defaults and then click on the Default app Settings, scroll down to the bottom and click on Set Defaults By app.

Defaults

Step 4.

Now scroll down to Windows Photo Viewer and click on Set this program as default, then click on choose defaults for this program, you can now select all of the file formats we put in regedit earlier and click on save.

Defaults 3

Defaults 4

Thats all you need to do, now double click on an image file and it will either open straight up in Windows Photo Viewer or you will get the option to select Windows Photo Viewer and you can tick the box that says Always use this app to open files.

Defaults 5

 

Tuesday 3 February 2015

iPhone Exchange Emails not Syncing

If you have ever used your iPhone/iPad to conencto to an enterprise exchange account you will probably of come accross this issue, or atleast your IT person will have.

Since Exchange 2007 there has been a bug where the permissions are not working as they should do, and you have to manually set inheritable permissions on the Exchange servers object in the User's Security settings on their AD Account.
To do this follow the steps below.

Go to your Domina Controller and open up Active Directory Users and Computers.
Click on View and then make sure Advanced Features is ticked as per the image below.



Then scroll down to where your users are located and fine the relevant user, right click on them and then go to properties, and then to the security tab.



Once you are in the click on the Advanced button near the bottom right corner.



Once you have opened it up you need to select Exchange Servers and then put a tick in the "Include Inheritable Permissions" box and then click on OK.

Leave it a few minutes then your emails should start to come through, this is a bug in all versions of Exchange from 2007 upwards and is still yet to be fixed.

Monday 2 February 2015

ICMPv6 Broadcast Storm - Wireshark Network Diagnostics


Wireshark Netowrk Diagnostics - ICMPv6 Broadcast Storm When i got back to work after the wonderful xmas break i made a start on installing 50 new desktop computers, so i fired up my imaging system (MDT + WDS) and imaged all of the computers no problems.
Not to long after i had finished my imaging i noticed that the network was slowly but surely grinding to a halt, all my servers kept dropping out, the wireless controller was having a fit and then pretty much everything was stuffed, i decided i needed to get wireshark running to see what was going on and straight away i was confronted with the following image below.
Wireshark
Lots of RED NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO if you have ever used wireshark before you will know that seeing this much red is not a good thing, after 1 minute of packet capturing there was over 1 million packets, the network was literally brought to its knees.
When i stopped the capture i clicked on one of the red lines and drilled down, i found the mac address of the offending computer and then went onto the dhcp server to try to find it.
After a short while of searching i found it in the system and to my surprise it was one of the new computers i had imaged earlier in the week.
I then went on to the net to check out why it was causing issues, the network card in the new computers was the intel i217-lm, the driver i was using was the most recent one from the HP website so this should be fine right... ummmm no that would appear not to be the case, i found that the specific driver which was 12.10.30.5890 dated 16/12/2013 has issues whilst the computer is in hibernation, sending out literally millions of ipv6 requests and when you have more than one of these suckers thats when the broadcast storm starts up.
We dont use IPV6 in our network so i started the process of disabling all of the IPV6 settings on the network card, but the issue still remained so i then headed over to the intel website and found out that the driver on the HP website was sooooooo out of date, i downloaded the latest driver from the intel website and proceeded to install it on all of the other computers, once i had finished installing the driver and changed the remaining wake on lan and IPV6 settings i ran another scan in wireshark and the proof was in the pudding as per the picture below.
Wireshark 2
After a few reboots of the switches everything was operating back at a normal pace.

Friday 29 August 2014

The Specified Procedure Could Not Be Found - Windows 7

The Specified Procedure Could Not Be Found

This one was new to me, i was fixing a computer that had the power jack broken off inside the laptop, i managed to remove the broken bit by taking the whole laptop to bits and removing the offending item with a pin, once i put it back together the laptop would not boot into windows, it would boot into safe mode which tells me there is some form off corruption somewhere.

I then did the standard start up repair and windows told me that there was no errors to fix and then just rebooted with the same results, i then moved on to doing a system restore, each one of these system restores said it had failed but it actually did restore the computer to the requested state, once i had rebooted it was telling me that it was installing windows update (sigh) i let it run through and then after the computer rebooted normally i was fronted with the below error at the login screen.

the Specified Procedure Could not be found

I couldnt even log in as local admin, which to me seemed a little odd, i did a little bit of googling and pretty much found nothing of interest, other than reinstalling windows from scratch, that was not an option as the job was only to fix the broken power jack and nothing else, but i couldnt return the laptop in this state so i once again fired up windows and pressed the F8 key so that i could go in to "Repait My Computer", this time around i chose not to do the standard startup repair as they never work anyway, this time i chose command prompt and i wanted to run a CHKDSK, this sometimes works for files that are not in the correct places and such, i then chose my C drive by typing cd /D C: and pressing enter, once i had my C Drive selected i typed CHKDSK /f (this fixes errors on the volume) once this had gone through i rebooted the computer but it was still in the same state.

The next step was to do the same again by pressing F8 on start up and selecting Repair My Computer, and again go into a command prompt, only this time i didnt run CHKDSK i run the SFC tool (System File Checker) i then chose the C Drive again as per above CD /D c: once the C Drive is selected i just typed the basic SFC command which is sfc /scannow nad pressed enter, this did not work as it stated that there was a previous repair that windows needed to reboot to fix, i ignored this and typed in the full SFC command like below

sfc /scannow /offbootdir=C:\ /offwindir=C:\windows

This took a long time to run but it found all of the corrupt files and repaired them successfully, i then rebooted and was able to login to the computer as per normal.

Friday 2 May 2014

All my shortcuts are opening with the wrong programs

All Shortcuts have changed to open with one program I have seen this one a number of times and at first it looks as though it might be an impossible problem to fix, many people will tell you that windows would need to be reinstalled or that it cant be fixed.
But superkev has the know how to get you back working as you should be.
So you open up your computer and this is what you see all of your icons have changed mysteriously to the one program and everytime you try to open a shortcut to the internet or you favorite game it fails and tries to open with what ever program is asscociated with that file type.
Shortcuts
You can change the file asscociations in Default Programs on the start menu but this wont help you in this situation as the files which have changed are all .lnk files which are shortcuts, these files do not have a specific program attached to them and that is all you can fix in Default Programs. so the first step is to download this file from my blog on another computer or if you already know how to load up your browser from the original EXE file then you can use your own computer.
Once you have downloaded the file open it up and extract the contents.
Run the program called Unassoc.exe and you will be greeted with the window as below
Unassociate
You then need to type in the search box .lnk and select the .lnk option.
unassociate 2
Press the Remove file association (User) button.
Unassociate 3
Once this has finished you can click on the OK button.
Unassociate 4
You will now notice that all of your shortcuts are back to normal with the correct icon for each program.
Normal

Repair Windows 7 Install After Replacing Motherboard

Repair Windows 7 Install After Replacing Motherboard Ever wanted to not have to reinstall after replacing your motherboard on windows 7 ? this is not a issue if you replace with identical hardware but if you are unable to find that same motherboard then this is the fix for you.
You will need to get the latest drivers for your new motherboard these can be found on the manfacturers website, the main driver that you are looking for is the hard drive controller driver IDE/AHCI/SATA.
Once it ahs finished downloading them put them on a USB or burn them to a cd.
Once you have this turn on your comptuer with your new motherboard installed and put in the windows 7 cd choose to boot from cd by pressing the appropriate button once you get to the screen as below, choose your language and keyboard layout and press next.
step 1
On the next window chosse to repair your computer
Step 2
On the next window choose the command prompt, the startup repair wont fix this issue 9 times out of 10 but you are free to give it a shot, if it does not work and you get a BSOD then follow the steps above to get back to this point.
Step 3
If you burned the drivers to a disk then eject the windows cd and put in your drivers cd or just plug in your USB, You need to figure out which drive your cd/thumbdrive/external drive is – so try different drive letters and type dir until you see the one that has your folder. if you burned a cd, chances are it’s the D: drive(unless it was an HP or something, then it will be E:)if it’s a thumb drive or external hard drive and you only have 1 cd-rom, it’s the E: drive. Maybe F: — check it out.
Once you have that figured out you need to type this
Step 4dism /image:c:\ /add-driver /Driver:X:\ /recurse
Replace “X” with the drive letter from the previous step:
Hit enter and it should find the drivers you extracted into the folder in the second step.
Step 5
After it does that, type “exit” and hit enter, then press the “Restart” button.
When windows boots it will take a LONG time to start this is normal do not press the reset button as this will make you have to start over again from the start, go sit back and grab a coffee and wait, once it has booted up fully you will more than likely have to install the rest of your drivers for your new motherboard.



The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error during installation of windows

Untitled Document Ive been a little slack of late when it comes to blogging, had heaps of work to do and not enough time to blog, but whilst i have been working away hard i have come accross a few issues that i would like to share with you all.

This one was a bit of a pain when i was recently recapturing my distribution image at school, over the school holidays i thought it would be a great time to re-image the student computers with all the latest updates for the applications i had previously installed.
I fired up my previous image i had in Hyper V, so that i could install the updates and recapture it again ready for deployment, to my surprise when it turned on i was greeted with the screen shot below, i was aware that running SYSPREP would make the computer think that it was a fresh install on the first turn on, but i wasnt expecting to see the error below.
Error Message
so here is how to fix the error then you can boot into your image to install your updates.
Step 1. When you see the error dont click on OK hold down the SHIFT key and press F10, this will open a command prompt window.
Step 2. type in regedit like the image below and press the enter key.
CMD Window
Step 3. Navigate to the following registry entry HK_Local_Machine/SYSTEM/SETUP/STATUS/ChildCompletion, find the key called Setup.exe and change the value from 1 to 3, once you have done this close down regedit and then hit the OK button on the error window and the computer will reboot, it will go through the same process as before "Setup is preparing your computer for first use" but this time it will actually get you to the login screen then you can login and continue installing your updates.
Regedit

Sunday 13 October 2013

iOS 7 Voice Memo 00.00 Fix

Have you upgraded to iOS 7 recently and tried to use the Voice Memos App ?

If you use the voice memo for long recordings (above 15 minutes) you may have noticed that when you finish your recording and it asks you to name it that when it has been named that th length of the recording shows at 00.00, and does not play back what you just recorded.

after much research and reading online including on the apple forums not one apple rep had mentioned when or how to fix this issue. although i do not have an iPhone anymore i still have an iPad and Apple TV, not that i use the memos but even so this still needed to be investigated.

So as a temporary fix (maybe permanent) if you have any previous recordings from your older iOS from before the upgrade, then make sure that these are backed up in iTunes.

Once they have been backed up then delete them all out of your voice memos app, and try a new recording i tried a long recording of about 35-40 minutes just to ensure that it was not a fluke that it worked, once it had finished recording and i had renamed it i then checked to see if it worked and it did.

I then proceeded to make another recording to see if the initial fix would work (the fact that old recordings were present) once again i made a 30 minute recording and then i renamed and saved and once again the recording saved and replayed fine, thus leading me to the conclusion that any older recordings made prior to iOS 7 are not compatible with the new revamped Voice Memos app for iOS 7, so until apple fix this issue i would recommend that you do the above to capture your meetings/lectures.

Tuesday 1 October 2013

MDT Error - Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass

So its the school holidays with a week left i decided i needed to install some new applications on the school computers and the easiest way to do that was to create a new image and roll it out using MDT 2012.

I made my image in Hyper V and installed all the latest versions of java,flash and a few other new applications that we want to use in the new school term.

All good i created it all and captured it ready for deployment, imported the WIM file into MDT and recreated my Litetouch files and then reimported them into WDS ready for PXE booting.

I have a test machine in my office that i roll out all new images to before i go ahead and do the rest of the computers, i fired it up pressed the F12 key to tell the computer to PXE boot, it connected to the server and started into the Deployment system, i then chose the new image and told it to begin.

All went well until the computer rebooted after seeing the screen ( Setting up your computer fo rthe first time) then this error appeared.

Windows could not parse or process unattend answer file [C:\windows\Panther\unattend.xml] for pass [specialize]. A component or setting specified in the answer file does not exist.



I was thinking this is a little weird as nothing in the answer file MDT creates would have chenged as it was the same answer file i had used before i just updated the WIM file.

After a little digging and checking the log files i realsied that it was to do with the fact that the new image had Internet Explorer 10 installed, so i had to look through the answer file to find out where it was specified.

This took a little bit of research and trial and error but i eventually found the issue, it was basically this line of code in the asnwer file.

<IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg>

To fix this issue i simply commented out the whole line saved the xml file and then ran the deployment again, and viola it works as it should do.

So open up your answer file in either notepad or another plain text editing program and search for the line of code

<IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg>

And change it to this

<!-- <IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg> -->

If you use notepad ++ then it will automatically change the line to green to show that it has been commented out.