Technology & Life Related Musings

We had a recent Windows 7 upgrade that manifested a strange problem. At apparent random intervals the network would lose internet connectivity (but not report cable unplugged).

After trying the usual ‘re-install the drivers’ etc I eventually stumbled upon the below solution. It seems that IPV6 that was upsetting something.

Run the following in the command prompt one at a time:

netsh interface ipv6 6to4 set state disabled disabled
netsh interface ipv6 6to4 set routing disabled disabled
netsh interface ipv6 isatap set router default disabled
netsh interface ipv6 isatap set state disabled
netsh interface ipv6 set teredo disabled

Then untick IPV6 in the network properties:

I believe it’s the question on many a ‘XP user that managed to avoid the upgrade to the much slated Vista‘s lips.

I’ve recently taken the plunge and upgraded my aging Windows XP desktop to Windows 7, with mixed results.

The spec of the machine is as follows:

- Intel P4 3.20 GHz
- 2GB RAM
- NVIDIA Geforce 6200

Improvements

• Boot Time
• Shutdown Time
• Drivers (only had to source Linksys PCI wireless card driver)
• General UI (prettier, start menu improvements etc)
• Better Dual Monitor Support

Problems

• Aero struggles a little with animations
• Sometimes sluggish

As you can see my failings are all graphics based really, disabling some of the animations etc helped perk the system up a little.

It consumes about the same amount of system resources (unlike Vista..) and is generally better. In short, I’m pleased I upgraded.

So you’re in the command prompt on Windows and you’re thinking “wouldn’t it be nice if I could create a symlink.”

Well you can! They’re referred to as ‘Junction Points‘ and this post will tell you how to create them.

Creation and Result

Creating your own ‘Junction Point’

mklink /j LINK_NAME DESTINATION

For example:

mklink /j stuff C:\stuff\important\things

That would create the link ‘stuff’ in the current directory that was linked to stuff –> important –> things.

(If you’re having problems with spaces or special characters put the destination in speech marks)

This is left over from some modifications I made when the machine refused to show the Window’s login screen.

On boot it now prompt for me to decide which of the two Windows installs to use (when there’s only one really). Something like this:

This is where an extra line has gotten into the boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

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Impressed? Here’s how I did it:
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I recently had to deal with a non-responsive Windows machine, it pinged but that was about it.

In the end I managed to reboot it remotely from a cmd prompt.

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Today my XP machine decided that it was no-longer going to boot. Entirely of it’s own discretion as I hadn’t used it for days.

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In the office SSH access is firewalled based on the external IPs that each PC has and I’m often dragged away from my desk to view issues on other people’s PCs etc…

I wanted to be able to SSH out to servers from my laptop or the machine I’m visiting but I needed to somehow tunnel the traffic via my external IP so the firewalls would let me through.

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