Config Helper » Windows

Windows 7 VM – No Network Access

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:04:59 +0000

Network Adapter Not Installed

After Installing a Windows 7 VM on VMware Server 2.0, you do not have network access and no network adapter is present.

Install Windows 7 On VMware Server 2.0

I installed a Windows 7 VM, but because VMware does not officially support Windows 7 yet, it does not show up as on option under the guest Windows OS choices. I was not sure which option to choose so I proceeded with the install using Other as the OS. After choosing the hardware configuration the install started and seemed to finish just fine without any errors. The VM came up and everything looked good until I tried to get on the network. I was not getting and IP address and there was no network adapter present. I had other VMs working just fine so I knew there was no problem with the network configuration. After a little bit of research I found out that VMware Tools was not installed because I did not select one of the pre-configured choices for guest OS. I tried to do a manual install of VMware Tools and it failed.

Install VMware Tools – Workaround

I removed the previous VM and decided to do a clean install, but with one change to the configuration. I selected Windows Server 2008 as the Guest OS. The reason is that when you select one of the existing guest OS choices VMware Tools is installed by default. The rest of the install was the same as before and completed successfully. When the VM powered on this time it had a network adapter present and I could access the network just fine. The only difference in this install was choosing Server 2008 at the beginning in order to install the VMware Tools automatically. Hopefully VMware will soon add native support for Windows 7.

Active Directory Account Lockout Troubleshooting

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:24:48 +0000

If you are troubleshooting why an Active Directory account is being locked out randomly or if you need additional password information for a specific account then there is a great free utility you can use that will help you. The tool is part of the Windows 2003 Resource Kit and can be downloaded from the Microsoft site. Once you download the Resource Kit, the specific utility you want is called acctinfo.dll. Copy acctinfo.dll from the location of the Resource Kit install (by default: C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools) to the system32 folder (C:\WINDOWS\system32). After you copy the file then run this command to register the dll - regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\acctinfo.dll

The tool is now installed and can be accessed from Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in. When you view the properties of a user there will now be a new tab called Additional Account Info.

When you click on the tab, you will see a ton of information that was not previously available, at least not easily available. The fields you will see are Password Last Set, Password Expires, whether the account is currently locked out or not, Last-Logon-Timestamp, SID, GUID. You will also see the Last Logon and Last Logoff time, the Last Bad Logon time, the number of times that user has logged onto the domain under Logon Count, and then the current Bad Password Count. Keep in mind that the Bad Password Count will reset according to the password policy in effect on the domain. Also, if you click the Domain PW Info… button you will see the Domain Password Policy.

There is a great deal of information available with this utility and it is great for tracking down annoying lockout issues. Using the Last Bad Logon information, you can think about what scheduled tasks might be running at that time that is using a certain account with an old expired password, possibly a service account running a scheduled job. Hopefully you found this information useful and please take time to review our other articles. Additionally, if this article has helped you then please feel free to link back to it or to the ConfigHelper site.

Keyboard Stops Working After Logging In to Windows

admin — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:24:19 +0000

Keyboard Stops Working After Logging In to Windows

I experienced a strange problem that ended up having a simple solution. A user called and reported that their keyboard was not responding. The mouse would move just fine, all Task Manager did not show anything unresponsive, but the computer would not respond to any keyboard commands including ctrl+alt+del. Thinking the keyboard probably went bad I grabbed a new keyboard, plugged it in and rebooted the computer. The keyboard worked for a minute then stopped responding again. My first thought was that maybe it was the port itself and not the keyboard so I moved the keyboard to a new port, but no dice, still not working. By this time I noticed a pattern, the keyboard would work just fine when entering credentials, but as soon as the profile loaded the keyboard became completely unresponsive. I logged on to the computer under my own account and as I suspected the keyboard was still working. I deleted the profile of the user who was logging in when the keyboard stopped responding. Boom! Now all of the sudden the keyboard worked just fine. Something in the profile was bad.