Vista Business Login and RDP Problems - windows-vista

At work, I running Vista Business on a lavishly new PC, which runs great excepting two issues. In order of annoyance, but not importance:
When I reboot the machine, the Windows Splash is presented asking me to Press Ctrl + ALT + DELETE so I can logon. It takes three to five minutes and seceral key presses for me to be prompted to select my user account. After which, everything works like a charm.
As part of my duties with the firm, I am responsible for emergency work on a rotating basis and deploying patches during off-business hours. I have been given an older laptop with XPSP2 (downloading 3 for kicks right now) which I use for browsing with the intention of RDP to my desktop in the offices. If I am connected at the domain through conventional means, I am able to RDP. However, if I am using an existing broadbad connection with VPN, I am not able to get access. I am able to access other servers, desktops running a variety of OS'es including Vista.
So umm any ideas guys?

as for 2 - this happens with some proprietary VPN software (i.e. Cisco). My solution was to perform my work duties in a Virtual PC (which doesn't need its normal LAN abilities) and do my other network/internet tasks in the physical machine.

I have a Vista at work and uses my home PC to rdc in for support work. I do not experience your problem 1 so I cannot offer any advice. For your second problem have you tried the IP address instead of the machine name? We have situations where sometimes the dns resolution in the office network is not accurate.

Do you have remote access enabled, either on the machine, via group policy?
If not, you might have to go into the Control Panel\System and Maintenance\System and choose Remote Settings (from the menu on the left).
That will show you the options for Remote Deskop, including Don't allow connections, Allow connections from any version of Remote Desktop, and Allow connections from computers running Remote Desktop with Network Level Authentication (which might be the hang up you are experiencing over the VPN).
Good Luck.

I have to chalk this up to "something wierd with my laptop" as I was able to download RoyalTS and connect to the machine just fine. I had Remote connections permitted, firewall disabled, McAffee gone and others could access the machine.
The advice garnered above is excellent and useful for your typical rdp connections

Related

Odd AD workstation access issue

After working with Windows Server since NT 3.51, this was kind of a first for me. Here's the scenario.
After no issues accessing a Windows Server 2012 R2 network share for 2 years, a Win 7 Pro workstation all of a sudden can access the mapped drive to the share, but cannot see all subfolders underneath it. Only one is visible, not the other 20 or so.
When I log out as the user and login as the domain admin account, the issue persists on the workstation. Just this one workstation.
Nothing has changed in terms of the share or NTFS permissions on the server-side of things.
I look in the server event logs as well as the workstation's and don't see anything striking.
I removed the workstation from the domain and add it again. The issue still persists.
The workaround is that I created a second share to the same resource on the server-side of things. Mapping a different drive letter to this new share, the workstation can see everything again.
My only guess would be some sort of old school SAM database corruption or something? I recall years ago I had a Windows 2000 Server that would lose Computer Browser functionality due to some odd SAM database corruption. The only solution back then was to reboot the server. It was the PDC and couldn't even browse its own network shares.

UIAutomation won't work in Windows Server (VPS) if I am not connected via RDP

I have script which uses mircrosoft's UIAutomation to automate an application. The script is inside a VPS running Windows Server 2012. The script works perfectly while I am connected to the VPS via Remote Desktop (RDP).
When I am not connected, the script seems to be stuck on SetFocus for a object... which leads me to believe that the script needs a Display/Screen/Session in order to work... but I am not sure if it is possible to do it while I am not connected to the VPS.
I can see 2 possible solutions here, either modify the script in someway to work in this environment or make the VPS have a virtual desktop while I am not connected (this solution might be more related to Server Fault rather than StackOverflow).
I am very confused, thanks for the help in advance :)
I managed to workaround the issue by actually connecting to the server to itself (to 127.0.0.1) via RDP so that it will always have an active RDP session for the automation script to run.
I am not happy with the results but it works... I cannot give clear instructions on how you would need to modify the settings in Windows to allow RDP connections from self, it was a one big trial and error process, I have to modify some policies in the Group Policy Editor and then some stuff that I don't remember.
There is another downside to this, a Windows server will allow 2 simultaneous connections to it but by using this method we are reserving a slot so only 1 connection at a given time is possible, something to be aware of.

Skype probably breaking Windows Internet connectivity

I have three cases when using Skype on Windows is most probably the cause of Internet connectivity interruption on the computers in question.
Two of computers affected run Windows 7 Eng 64-bit, one runs Windows 8 Eng 64-bit, latest updates installed.
In two cases (one of Windows 7 computers + Windows 8 computer) after using Skype for some time Internet connectivity is broken, namely
All local network connectivity isn't affected
Traffic that should be
passed outside local network, doesn't leave the computer (when
recording traffic on gateway, not a single packet comes from the
computer in question)
"route print" displays normal routing table
(no duplicate routes/other routing errors)
Uninstalling/Reinstalling Skype in the above cases cured the problem immediately.
The third case (Windows 7): using Skype to generate much traffic (e.g., holding audio/video conference) causes short-time Internet connectivity loss. As in earlier mentioned cases, local connectivity isn't lost, but all outer hosts, when tracert'ed, are displayed as available in single hop, yet they do not respond. In this case the problem heals by itself.
Linux-running computer serves as gateway to Internet (NAT).
Checked and adjusted already: routing, DHCP/DNS settings, firewall rules, malware scanning (nothing found), checking hardware, replacing patchcords/network cards, all for no avail. Switching "UPnP" in Skype off in the latter case made no difference, the first two didn't yet exhibit the mentioned problem again after disabling UPnP.
Skype version used: the latest one, available from Skype.com. The rest of systems running Skype, on Windows or not, do not report similar problems.
Question: are there known Skype-inflicted connectivity problems in Windows, and, if yes, what are ways to solve them reliably?
Skype uses port 80 by default. You could try changing the default port to something else that doesn't already have a service running on it.

Extreme slow PC if logged on as domain user remotely

I'm using windows XP to do the development.
Since I working remotely from home, I found a serous problem, some applications for instance MS excel, even just open up the start menu became to extremely slow .
If I logged into the local pc without domain then the problem fixed, my domain user account has 300 mb local user profile.
Anybody know how to fix this?
Thanks
The problem is caused by My documents, as it is been referred to the domain server which is unavailable.

Remote debugging across domains

I have two machines in two different domains. On both I have VS 2005 installed. I want remote debug between them. Without authentication it is possible but I want to debug managed code. I don't want to debug directly since it is really crappy machine.
When I try to attach with debugger I get message "The trust relationship between this workstation and primary domain failed." Any idea how to overcome this ? I tried tricks with adding same local username on both machines but with no luck.
EDIT: I have same local users on both machines. I started both VS2005 and Debugging monitor with RunAs using local users. I turned Windows Auditing on debug machine and I see that local user from VS2005 machine is trying to logon. But he fails with error 0xC000018D (ERROR_TRUSTED_RELATIONSHIP_FAILURE)
Gregg Miskely has a blog post on this. You might get it to work if both local accounts have the same user name and password. You might also try dropping your good box from it's domain so that you are going from a workgroup to a domain rather than domain to domain.
I seem to remember that I have sometimes found it useful to use RunAs when you run msvcmon (or whatever it's called this week - the remote debugging stub anyway), to force it to start as the user which you have set up to be the same on both machines.
I would guess that on the machine you're running VS on, you will also need to log in as the local user rather than a domain user (or start VS with RunAs).
I have never understood why this needed to be so hard, given that unmanaged debugging is so much easier, and must expose every security hole that managed debugging could.
The blog post wasn't totally clear that this would work, but I was able to run Visual Studio as my domain account and still debug a process on a machine that was not on a domain.
I have a physical development machine PHYSICAL on a Active Directory domain DOMAIN. I'm logged in and running Visual Studio as DOMAIN\employee.
I have a virtual machine VIRTUAL that is not attached to an Active Directory domain at all. This is the machine running the process I want to debug.
Like the blog post says, create local accounts PHYSICAL\employee (on PHYSICAL) and VIRTUAL\employee (on VIRTUAL). They both must be Administrators and have the same password as DOMAIN\employee.
The remote debugger and the process to debug must be run on VIRTUAL while logged in as VIRTUAL\employee. Then on PHYSICAL while logged in as DOMAIN\employee I can use "Attach to Process..." and connect to VIRTUAL to get a process list.

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