A few days ago I was working on a repro I got from a customer as I very often do, and for some reason after a while my IIS started to behave oddly, pages where not served, the application pool was stuck doing “something” and whenever I tried to open the IIS Manager I got the error “There was an error when trying to connect. Do you want to retype your credentials and try again? Cannot create a file when that file already exists”: Needless to say that being IIS on my local machine and I have not made any changes to the security/ACLs/DCOM etc… there should be no need to retype my credentials; and by the way, even retyping them did not help. By the way, if I tried to remotely connect to another machine of mine, I got the message “The type initializer for ‘Microsoft.Web.Management.Remoting.HttpChannel’ threw an exception”: My next step has been to try to restart the World Wide Web Publishing Service: it was (oddly?) stopped, but again I got an error “Windows could not start the World Wide Web Publishing Service service on Local Computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start”: The…
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WPF, 3D and services: supported (again)?
I wrote about why GDI+ is not supported in a service a couple of years ago but this is still a debated topic (or I should better say a misunderstood topic), then WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) came into the game and it brought some more uncertainties with it. Recently I worked on a custom application which basically was meant to made of a Windows Form client and a WCF Web Service used to get some data from a database, create a 3D image (a sort of chart) and send it to the client as a jpg image; the graphic part was done using classes such as Viewport3D, PerspectiveCamera, ModelVisual3D, RenderTargetBitmap and others taken from the System.Windows.Media.* and System.Drawing namespaces. Everything was working fine as long as the project was being developed and debugged against the ASP.NET Development Server (Cassini), but when the project was deployed to IIS7 the image returned was missing the 3D part and the fancy transparency and shadow effects added through WPF classes, it merely had a blue background, nothing more. The first thing I thought to, are the differences between Cassini and IIS: the former is a process (not a service), it runs under the credentials…
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LogParser & event logs on Vista/Windows 2008
I was discussing this morning with a customer, here’s a useful reminder to this post if you need to deal with “legacy” .evt logs on Vista/Win2008. wevtutil epl application.evt application.evtx /lf:true CarloQuote of the day: That’s the secret to life… replace one worry with another…. – Charles M. Schulz
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When Vista denies you access to “your” files…
For my work I have two desktops and a laptop I always bring with me, and despite all the online synchronization tools out there (SkyDrive, FolderShare, Groove, Mesh etc…) I’m used to SyncToy to keep my important files and folders updated across the three machines; The same is true for my backup .pst files: the laptop is my main machine, I usually make my changes and archives there and then copy the pst on the other two machines. But since Vista (and now also with Windows 2008) when I copy the new file and then try to load the data file in Outlook, I always get an access denied error: Clearly a permission issue and running Outlook with elevated privileges resolves the problem; but explicitly granting Full Control to my account (by the way, I’m member of the Administrators group), taking ownership of the file etc… is not enough, I was still unable to open the file (and I don’t want to run Outlook as Administrator). After many attempts as a last resource I tried to create through Outlook a new empty pst file with the same name of my archive one, and then I overridden it the file I…
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Share Favorites across different users on the same machine
If you have a dual boot machine like me (I installed Vista and Windows 2008 on one of my desktops in office) and you’re tired of synchronizing your Favorite folders like I was, here’s a quick trick: open the registry editor (as usual be careful!) and set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders\Favorites and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Favorites to the same folder location (for example “c:\favorites”). The former is the one read by Internet Explorer, while the latter is used to show your Favorites under the Start menu. Happy bookmarking ? Carlo Quote of the Day: Women like silent men. They think they’re listening. – Marcel Archard
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Need to print from a x64 machine? Can you wait 60 seconds?
I guess some of you might have developed a web application which, among other functionalities, prints some kind of report; and sooner or later you might consider to move the application to a 64 bit machine. At this is what this customer did. They had this ASP.NET application which allows the user to run some queries on a backend database and then print the result on a network printer connected to the web server; under some circumstances the application was hanging for 60 seconds (always 60 seconds) before timing out; of course everything was running fine on a 32 bit machine (i.e. we never managed to reproduce the issue there). At the beginning we thought to some kind of network timeout on the customer’s network or a configuration problem on the server (the application is quite complex so was not possible to have a repro to run and debug on my machine), and this was partially confirmed by a hang dump which showed some error messages about the printer, but this was not consistent enough to get a clue. What was consistent was the use of winspool.dll ntdll!NtDelayExecution(void)+0x15 kernel32!SleepEx(unsigned long dwMilliseconds = 0x3e8, int bAlertable = 0)+0x68 kernel32!Sleep(unsigned long dwMilliseconds…
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SyncToy not working on Vista x64?
I’ve been using SyncToy for quite a few months to keep in sync some folders between my laptop and the other two machines I have in office, and it always worked just great for me (I know, I should be using Groove instead but I’m not happy to have services and programs running when they want, instead of when I tell them to run… ?). When I switched my primary desktop in office to Vista x64, I very quickly discovered that SyncToy was crashing immediately after running it, with no error messages or clues about what is going wrong… I didn’t had much time to spend debugging it and try to figure out what was going wrong (it’s not a must have tool for my work, after all…) so I simply used the laptop to synchronize folders between the two desktops, too… Until this morning, when I had a few minutes free and decided to get back to this problem and try to fix it once for all (and write a blog post on it, too ?); anyway before even opening WinDbg, a research on the Internet brought me to this blog: http://joshmouch.wordpress.com/2007/03/27/synctoy-14-and-vista-x64-error-fixed/. I tried, and it works like a…
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Process on Vista: Administrator or user?
This is an easy (and maybe already known) one for this hot summer day: how can you know if a process on Vista is running as ad Administrator or as a user? Process Explorer will tell you: Carlo
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Avoid UAC prompt in IE component
Wow, this has been a tough one I closed this afternoon. The customer has developed a custom IE toolbar to interact with their portal, and found that when running this on Vista, IE displayed a warning dialog asking the user’s consent to run an external program; in particular that was happening when the toolbar was calling a Web Service to retrieve some content from the web server. If for test we denied the permission to run the external problem, we got this error message: “System.Runtime.InteropServices.ExternalException: Cannot execute a program. The command being executed was “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\csc.exe” /noconfig /fullpaths @”C:\Users\Vista\AppData\Local\Temp\Low\ev4a0rzg.cmdline“.” The exception occurred when the SOAP client proxy tries to spawn the compiler to generate the type serialization assemblies the first time the web service is called. After the usual log analysis we setup a repro in a virtual machine, and we found that this was not an UAC issue but rather an IE Protected Mode problem (by the way, Protected Mode in IE is currently available only on Vista, so maybe this is why the customer thought to this as an UAC issue); this was confirmed by turning off Protected Mode for a test, and the prompt to the user disappeared.…
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Security bug in Vista recovery console? Well… not quite…
My colleague Feliciano Intini (Chief Security Advisor here at Microsoft Italy) just pointed me to his post were he comments about a news which is (re)spreading across the web about a security hole in the recovery console in Windows Vista: if you can read Italian here is the post, otherwise go on an ready my translation. Third episode of my anti-FUD column. True story (unfortunately): a few days ago someone has stolen the motorbike of a colleague of mine whom was working at a customer’s site.How was the bike protected? With that special padlock which locks the front wheel, without any sort of chain to fasten to a physical stand. How did they stole the bike? They arrived with a truck, a few guys got off it and they loaded the bike by sheer force in less than 5 minutes! What do I want to say? Here is a fundamental concept in security field: physical security is the basis for all security. False fact: I’m reading in various posts which quote an article by Finnish Kimmo Rousku, which Windows Vista apparently has a security hole which “allows to gain unlimited access to anyone who has physical access to the pc, even if…