| System and Security Information |
||
|---|---|---|
Quality system, security and network software Mirrors WorldWide: |
||
Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 This document applies to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 32-bit versions of Windows XP Professional and Windows XP Home Edition. It does not describe all of the changes that are included in the service pack, but instead highlights those changes that will have the most impact on your use of Windows XP SP2 and provide references to additional information... Downloader's Guide to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Microsoft frequently releases patches and updates for Windows and its many applications. Windows includes a feature to download these automatically, although you can check manually by going to Windows Update with Internet Explorer. SP2 is a major update for Windows XP focusing extensively on improving security, and includes updates to Internet Explorer and Outlook... Fatal Exception Errors are codes returned by programs when there is a problem. They can be caused by "Invalid data or code", or by an instruction in the program that has performed an illegal operation. Illegal does not mean "unlawful" (nobody will call the police) but rather performing an operation which is not allowed by the program, or one that the program does not know how to handle.. Universal Naming Convention (UNC) Connection Generates Error Message on Shutdown. There are < x > user(s) connected to your computer. Shutting down your computer will disconnect them. Do you want to continue? where < x > indicates the number of users currently connected... Detailed steps for a clean Win98 installation The following five sections are a guide we use to maintaining nine PCs with Windows 98 between work and home. Three PCs have been rebuilt with new motherboards and two have started a new life with new hard disks. Many of the items below have been discussed on newsgroups referenced in the previous section... Shutdown Troubleshooting, The computer "hangs" on shutdown, "Fast Shutdown" might be causing problems, Disable Fast Shutdown Using MSCONFIG, The computer uses ACPI and the Fast Shutdown is ON...
Windows XP Shutdown and Restart TROUBLESHOOTING Shutdown problems in Windows XP can be caused by many factors, just like earlier versions of Windows. These included: a damaged exit sound file; incorrectly configured, damaged, or incompatible hardware; conflicting programs, or an incompatible, damaged, or conflicting device driver. Windows XP shutdown issues mostly center around a very few issues, especially legacy hardware and software compatibility issues... The Purpose of Access Control Lists Commonly, the security process is characterized as restricting certain people from venturing into territory where they don't belong. In practice, securing Windows Server 2003 is a matter of preventing entities from doing things they shouldn't. System failures are more often the fault of ill-behaved software than any intentionally perpetrated threat. And anyone smart enough to launch a threat these days disguises himself not as a user, but as a logical entity-an innocent fragment of code making a seemingly innocuous remote procedure call... Default Access Control Settings in Windows 2000 This white paper describes the default security settings for components of the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 operating system, including the registry and file system, as well as user rights and group membership. Implications for developers and system administrators are discussed, and answers to frequently asked questions are provided... Improving the Granularity of Access Control in Windows NT ploits from buggy applications demonstrated several limitations This paper presents the access control mechanisms in Windows 2000 that enable fine-grained protection and centralized man-directory service [17], requires access control at a finer granular... Managing Access to Shared Folders in Windows XP Professional Why do we have computer networks anyway? Well, they empower us to collaborate on projects and share information with others, whether they're around the corner or across the globe. If you're working on a Windows XP Professional system that is connected to a network, you can share one or more of that system's folders with other computers and users on that network... How do I troubleshoot Windows 2000 printing problems? Cannot Print to a Network Printer After Adding ICS. After you add Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) to the network, you are unable to print. This occurs because ICS uses a Class C subnet with an address range of 198.168.0.x. To fix this issue, reset the IP address of the printer to match the subnet of the computers that are using ICS. When feeling the frustrations of dealing with an inaccessible network and experiencing the agony that often arises when you've sent an angry email to a coworker prematurely, it's quite common to wish you could return to the days of a wholly paper-based office, one without a network whose data you can't access when it's crashed and without an email program that sends irretrievable angry memos. Yet for the vast majority of the time, computers have changed the way we work for the better. Information can now be shared with incredible ease and flexibility, and much more quickly since documents can be sent, managed and stored electronically. However, though great advances have been made toward a paperless office, it isn't yet upon us, and it may never be fully realized. People like paper documents, especially when they can be helpful, as in the examples listed above, and paper documents are still a necessary element in a successful business environment.. Managing Network Printing in a Windows Environment Point and Print reduces administrative overhead, and simplifies and automates printing . Point and Print functionality was introduced in Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 98 Second Edition (as a client), and Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 and later. When you connect to a printer on a print server, the connecting client looks for the appropriate drivers on the print server. If the drivers are installed on the server, the drivers are automatically downloaded and configured for the client. However, if the drivers are not present, you are prompted to select and install the drivers... The following illustration shows the sequence of calls that start with an application initiating an EMF spooling request by calling GDI (labeled step 1 in the illustration) and the local print provider writing a print job description file to the disk and calling spooler process with an EndPage or EndDoc function call which signals the availability of an EMF file to despool (these two steps are labeled 8 and 9 in the illustration)... Typical Printing Process Scenario Using a Raw Spool File This section illustrates the major relationships between the spooler components during the printing process by walking through the sequence of calls between components during the spooling of a raw format spool file and subsequent playback (despooling) of the file to a bidirectional printer. The following illustration shows the sequence of calls that start with an application initiating a print request by calling GDI (labeled step 1 in the illustration) and end with the local print provider writing a spool file to the disk (step 8) and starting a background thread that will eventually initiate the despooling process (step 9). The sequence of steps in the despooling process are shown in a separate illustration... Printing Pages with Blue Background We have some pages that users may have a problem printing. These are the pages with white and yellow text on a blue background. They can be printed by changing the color options in the browser... Printing Problem Windows Help Links Windows Troubleshooting, C omputer Help Technical Support, Fast Windows Help, 24 Hour Computer Support, California Computer Repair, Canon Support, Compaq Support, Computer Troubleshooting... Unfortunately, the printing capabilities of both Netscape and Internet Explorer are rather simple-minded, probably indicating that printing is not considered a high-priority feature. In most cases everything will work just fine, however you may occasionally find yourself in a situation in which the printed output does not suite your needs. The most common example of this is printing a page with white text... Printing problems where things are coming out filled in black: Slow/Delayed printing from Windows 2000/XP With Windows 2000 and Windows XP, all MS-DOS printing is done through the Windows NT spooler system. In order to know when to send a job to the spooler, there is a time-out on the printer port. Once something has been printed to the port, if this time out passes with no more data presented to the port, the print job is sent to the spooler. The default time out is 15 seconds. Therefore, there will be a 15 second delay before the print job starts printing... Tips on Printing in Windows 95/98 If you have good eyesight and want to save trees, you can print four pages to one page from any application under Windows 95. Here's how... Tips on Printing in Windows NT You can change the default printer spool directory for all printers or the printer spool directory for specific printers. To change the default printer spool directory for all printers add the following value.. Top 10 HP printing problems and how to fix them While Hewlett-Packard printers are known for their reliability, they still need a helping hand from time to time. From the ubiquitous paper jam to the vexing 50.4 error, this article offers a top 10 list you can use to troubleshoot any HP printer... Word shows only one or two fonts in its Font list A lot of printers (inkjets in particular) are unable to print closer than .67 inches or so from the bottom edge of the paper...
Performance monitoring is the process of capturing and analyzing performance data from various components of your server environment (including applications, memory, CPU, hardware, and your network) to locate bottlenecks. A bottleneck can be caused by processes backing up because the server does not have enough processor cycles to efficiently complete a request, poorly designed code in a custom application, or a multitude of problems related to the network and hardware... Locating Performance Bottlenecks Once you have brought your Dynamo system up to maximum throughput, you can look at the components of the system to determine which components are limiting factors in performance... These are free services which will monitor your URL (or other Internet devices such as email servers) for downtime, and notify you via email and/or pager. Many are only free for a trial period, but some offer service for an unspecified length of time... Situational Awareness of Systems Fortifies Reliable Communications Network monitoring tools, long the purview of the U.S. Defense Department logistics community, now are moving to the warfighting environment to support future military operations. The technology continuously examines the health of networks, then reports this information to a central location. It also can prevent system slowdowns by predicting problems and offering solutions... Live Testing Prevents Critical Failures Network outages and slowdowns seriously impact productivity, costing service providers and enterprises millions of dollars annually. The effect is apparent with network outages, but the cost of a network slowdown, or sluggish data transmission, is more difficult to measure. Until recently, detecting the cause of disruptions and slow traffic has been a time-consuming and costly trial-and-error process... Ten Tips for Domino Administrators Run Domino as a service. When installing Domino on Windows NT or Windows 2000, you should run the Domino server as a service. This ensures that the Domino server always starts up correctly when the server is restarted, and also prevents the problems caused when a logged-on user at the server starts the Domino server. In that case, if that user is logged off at the server, then the Domino server processes are automatically killed... Windows 2000 can be told how to adjust the priorities for multitasking purposes, such as user requests vs. background services. This can be a powerful tool for speeding up your server, but can also turn heavily against you if nost handled correctly. In this series, MCSE Brien M. Posey tells you how to tweak these priorities, identifies the issues, and shows how to handle them. Source: EarthWeb (April 5, 2001) Monitoring Apache, Log Monitoring, Log Management, Configuration Management, Security and Passwords, Keeping Apache Up to Date, Other Systems and Extensions, Scheduling Maintenance... Windows Server 2003 Server and Macintosh To give you the short and easy answer, there is none. The only changes made to SFM for all Whistler releases (now called XP and 2003) were bug fixes (mostly minor ones at that) and taking out Print Services for Macintosh from XP. There may have been a few slightly large bugs fixed, but as I recall, there were very few blue screen show-stopper bugs in SFM to begin with, so the developer focused on other tasks he had... Windows Server 2003 Security Guide There are numerous steps that system administrators can take to protect their servers from attack. The increase in the number and severity of hacking attempts in recent years has lead to the forming of many organizations that offer consultation on issues of computer security. Many of these organizations freely offer lists of recommended "best practices" to counter the hacker problem. We have examined many of these documents and based on the most current data available, we have compiled our own set of recommendations. Most of the attacks that we have experienced on campus would have been prevented or at least minimized had the recommendations below been in place... A few Windows server security settings Following are some very important security settings to minimize attacks and keep any outside hacker from poking into your server.. . New Tools Strengthen Windows Server Security Even as Microsoft attacks viruses, worms, and security on several fronts, two ISVs provide new management tools that allow admins to limit access, privileges, and permissions to Windows Server files, folders and resources... This next section is dedicated to providing an overview of how to secure a Windows or Linux OS. This will only be a rough sketch of what procedures and steps you should perform. For more in-depth and comprehensive information, consult the articles and books listed in the reference section... Securing Microsoft Windows NT Installation Microsoft® Windows NT® operating system provides a rich set of security features. However, the default out-of-the-box configuration is highly relaxed, especially on the Workstation product. This is because the operating system is sold as a shrink-wrapped product with an assumption that an average customer may not want to worry about a highly restrained but secure system on their desktop. This assumption has changed over the years as Windows NT gains popularity largely because of its security features. Microsoft is investigating a more secure default configuration for future releases. In the meantime, this article talks about various security issues with respect to configuring all Windows NT version 4.0 operating system products for a highly secure computing environment...
Most people on the internet are good, honest people. However, there are some people browsing the internet who derive fun from poking around websites and finding security holes. A few simple tips can help you secure your website in the basic ways. Now, obviously, the subject of data security is a complicated one and way beyond the scope of this column. However, I will address the very basics one should do which will alleviate many potential problems that might allow people to see things they shouldn't. Partners WorldWide:
|
||