Archive for December, 2010

Restoring URL autocomplete feature in IE.

Internet Explorer | Posted by p_lider December 29th, 2010

I recently faced strange problem with IE8 browser. The URL autocomplete feature suddenly stopped working. I searched the internet deeply to find the fix for this problem with completely no luck. Analyzing how the IE8 browser works I found, that it is looking for a COM object with class ID {80A3E9B0-A246-11D3-BB8C-0090272FA362} when trying to autocomplete URLs. I then googled for the library which contains the object with mentioned Class ID and found that it is “langwrbk.dll“. Having that in mind fixing the problem was as easy as executing one command:

regsvr32 langwrbk.dll

This worked in IE8 browser, however I am almost sure it will work in other versions of IE as well.

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Restoring Selfimage’s partition image to a greater partition

Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, Windows XP | Posted by p_lider December 19th, 2010

Sometimes you must restore you partition images made by programs like SelfImage to a greater partitions – for example after buying new greater hard drive and setting the partitions’ sizes to greater values as they were in original drive.

The problem with such operation is that after restoring for example 20GB partition image to a partition which has 40GB, you will see, that the file system says that there is only 20GB of total partition’s space. This is caused due to old partition size information saved inside internal filesystem’s structures, which was made during the format of the partition on the original drive. Fortunately, the DISKPART utility built in Windows XP and newer systems can fix that problem. To do that follow the following steps after you restore the image to the new, reater partition:

  1. Launch the diskpart command line utility.
  2. Execute “select volume <number>” command, where “<number>” is a number of the volume containing the restored partition image (the list of all volumes and their numbers can be retrieved by executing “list volume” command).
  3. Execute “extend filesystem” command.
  4. And this is all – now exit the diskpart utility by executing “exit” command and the system will correctly see the real partition size.

Thanks to this tip you can use programs like SelfImage not only for making backups but also for moving entire partitions (including system partitions) to other hard drives even, when they size do not match.

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HYPER-V and wrong time measurement in virtual servers

HYPER-V, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, Windows XP | Posted by p_lider December 3rd, 2010

If you have a virtual server which has more than 1 virtual processor and is hosted by HYPER-V technology then you can face problems during time measurement. As the result you can see that login to such server can take quite long time and you can see strange errors in EventViewer saying something like “Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network” etc.

The solution to such problems is quite easy – you only have to add /usepmtimer switch to your server’s boot.ini file and restart the virtual server. This will cause a different approach during time measurement and will fix mentioned problems.

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VPN connection and internal DNS names

Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, Windows XP | Posted by p_lider December 3rd, 2010

Sometimes after you connect to your VPN network by means of any VPN client (CiscoVPN, OpenVPN, etc.) you are not able to access network resources using their names, however you can access them using IP addresses. This is caused by the DnsCache service, which sometimes may cache wrong IP addresses for your internal network names.

To fix this irritating behavior clearing the dnscache will not always work. The best way to cope with this problem is to stop DnsCache service – after doing that every time you try access any network resource by its name, the DNS name query will be passed directly to your DNS servers omitting your local cache.

EDIT:

After some time I noticed one more problem with DNS especially when using VPNs established using RRAS. Simply the names were not being resolved by DNS servers provided by RRAS but they were trying to be resolved by DNS servers outside of VPN. This prevented accessing VPN network resources using names. The problem can be fixed by following the following steps:

  1. Go to Network Connections in Control Panel.
  2. Go to Menu: Advanced -> Advanced Settings -> Adapters & Bindings
  3. Move DialUp connections to the top of the list.
  4. Save changes by clisking OK button.
  5. In Windows XP & 2k also follow the instructions described under the following link: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;311218
  6. Reboot your computer.

After performing the above operations you should not have any DNS issues when using VPNs on your computer.

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