"The mind of a Mad Tech!"

Windows 2008, by default has all ICMP requests turned off. This of course can cause issues with ping requests or using any type of monitors that ping the server for heartbeats. However turning this option on isn’t exactly how it was in Windows 2003 and it’s not located in the Windows firewall settings.  To enable it, you have to goto the Windows firewall with advanced security settings, which is in the administrative tools section.
To get to the Windows firewall with advanced security, you’ll need to goto the control panel and the administrative tools. You can also goto to the administrative tools directly if there is a link in your programs bar.

Once there , look inside of the inbound ruleset and scroll down to the file and printer sharing. You’ll need to right click and enable the “FIle and Printer Sharing (echo request – ICMPv4-in) rule.

This will enable the rule and it will no longer bt grayed out (it will be green now).

You can also enable thiss by running the following command from the Windows command prompt.

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8

To disable incoming ICMP requests, type the following.

netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 disable

Tags: firewall, ICMP, incoming, ping, requests, windows 2008

To disable Windows 7 / Vista from downloading automatic updates, follow these simple steps.

Open Start menu, right-click on Computer and click Properties. This will open System dialog box that will show basic information about your computer. On the left sidebar, under See also heading, you will find Windows Update. Clicking it will bring you to the Windows Update dialog box, now on the left sidebar click on Change Settings. You will now see a window that will look like this,

You will notice that Windows has enabled option as default, to disable it, simply select Never check for updates and you are done.

Note: Microsoft recommends that you must keep your windows up-to-date in order to remain secure. And I recommend the same, my computer is always up-to-date, this is one reason I never get attacked by any kind of virus.

Tags: automatic updates, disable, windows 2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista

1. To get started, lets goto the Server Manager and open up the IIS manager. You can do this by going to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

2.Once IIS Manager opens, expand out the web server and then expand the Sites folder. Right click on sites and then click on Add Web Site

3. In the Add Web Site window we have some basic information to fill out for a static site: Site Name – Name of the site, this will be either domain.com or *.domain.com (Where * would represent a sub domain name such as www or blog for example). Physical Path – The location on the local server that will hold the files for the website. If you did not set this up beforehand you can create a folder through this interface. Type – choose either http or https depending on whether your site will use Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate or not. IP Address – From the dropdown you can specify what IP the website should answer on or use the default switch of All Unassigned. Now, if you have multiple IP addresses, you can simply choose the one you wish to assign to the website as well. Lastly, if you even neeed to change the IP address, you can do so by going back and clicking on binding’s, which will take you to the section that allows IP address changes. Host Name – If you would like this site to respond to other domain names you can put these here.

4. That’s it. You’ve just configured your first website in IIS7. While it is a bit different from IIS6, the process is still the same.

Tags: IIS7, Internet information server, setup, Website

Credit to http://www.thewebhostinghero.com

Installing FastCGI And PHP on Windows Server 2008

As opposed to previous versions of Windows Server, the FastCGi module is already bundled with Windows Server 2008 so you don’t have to install it.

First of all, let’s make sure that the CGI role service is installed. Click on Start => Programs => Administrative Tools => Server Manager. Expand Roles, right-click on Web Server (IIS) and select Add Role Services. Make sure that CGI is checked and if not proceed with its installation.

Next head over to PHP.net’ download page and download the PHP Non-thread-safe Win32 binaries. At the time of this writing, the latest version of PHP is 5.2.5. Extract the content from the PHP archive into c:\php.

Launch the Internet Information Server Manager by clicking on Start => Programs => Administrative Tools => Internet Information Server Manager. Select your server from the left panel and then double-click on the Handler Mappings icon.

Click on Add Module Mapping from the right column:

Fill-in the PHP module mapping information as illustrated below and click on OK when done:

At this point PHP should now be working even though there no php.ini configuration file yet. To find out if PHP files are parsed correctly, create a new file at the root of website’s folder and name it phpinfo.php. Insert the following content into the file and save it:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Now try pointing your web browser to http://yourserver.com/phpinfo.php. If everything works properly you should see this page:

Configuring PHP

By default, IIS will look for PHP’s configuration file (php.ini) in c:\windows. To change this, launch the registry editor (Start => Run => regedit) and add a new key named PHP in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\. Under the newly created key, create a new value named IniFilePath and set its value data to c:\php.

Close the registry editor when you’re done. Using the Windows Explorer, rename c:\php\php.ini-recommended to c:\php\php.ini and open it with your favorite text editor (no word processor). Find the extension_dir parameter and set its value to “c:\php\ext”. You might also want to uncomment extension=php_mysqli.dll and / or extension=php_mssql.dll if you plan to use MySQL or MS-SQL.

Once you’re done editing PHP’s configuration file, save it and close your file editor. You will need to restart IIS in order to apply the changes. This can be done through the IIS Manager:

Tags: FastCGI, IIS7, PHP, Windows

Tags: Remote Desktop Color