IT Knowledgebase Articles

How can I easily discover who’s the user that encrypted a file? The Windows Explorer user interface (UI) shows which files are encrypted but not who encrypted them, causing a lot of confusion when trying to access specific files needed by other users. As an administrator, you could rectify the situation by decrypting the files….

How can I check to see if a file is encrypted with EFS or not? When you try to access a file on an NTFS file system volume, you may receive an “access is denied” error message. The file’s NTFS permissions indicate that you can access the file. Sometimes this means that the file is…

How can I quickly change the default logon screen saver in XP? This small utility will allow you to change the Screen Saver that is displayed when the Welcome Screen is displayed, and no user is currently logged on. The %systemroot%System32 folder will be scanned for SCR files for you to choose from. You must…

How can I quickly add items to the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows 2000/XP/2003? The Quick Launch toolbar is the area that’s just right to the Start menu button, and where you can place your own shortcuts to some of your most used applications. Launching applications in this manner is much faster then having to…

How can I quickly abort a shutdown command on Windows XP/2003? Some worms, such as the Blaster worm, use known bugs in Microsoft Operating Systems to force the computer to shut down itself. Best Practice: In order to protect yourself from such worms and malicious code you should first make sure that your computer is…

As you all probably know by now, Vista’s new Aero Theme is one of the cool features of Microsoft’s current operating system. The Aero Theme has, however, some drawbacks. You can read more about these issues in my “Aero Theme is bad, disable it” article. The Aero theme has one major drawback you might want…

Virtual machine technology enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single machine. Microsoft Hyper-V, a key feature of Windows Server 2008, enables one or more operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical system. Hyper-V provides scalability and high performance by supporting features like guest multi-processing support and 64-bit guest and host…

This article is a non-direct continuation of the “What is a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)?” found on the Petri IT Knowledgebase. Public-Key Cryptography and One-Way Functions As written in previous articles, Public-Key cryptography (as opposed to symmetric key cryptography) relies on one-way functions, which are functions that are easy to calculate but hard to invert…

The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) (RFC791) there is a field, called "Protocol", to identify the next level protocol. This is an 8 bit field. In Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) (RFC1883 and RFC2460) this field is called the "Next Header" field. Protocol Numbers  0 HOPOPT IPv6 Hop-by-Hop Option 1 ICMP Internet Control Message 2…

One of the major headaches when dealing with Active Directory is the issues of accidental deletion of objects by un-trained or malicious people. Of course one must have the right permissions in Active Directory in order to be able to delete any object from it, but this does happen now and then. For example, you…