I needed to change a few settings on a McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.Oi client. However there was a password protection in place that locks the user interface and nobody around that could tell me the password. So what to do?

Right, we check out where this password is stored and how we can get rid of it!

I openend vsplugin.dll in Ida Pro and searched for related strings such as password, lock etc.

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On a friend’s car, a Passat B7 (3AA) the seat heaters didn’t work. So I connected to the car with VCDS to see if we could troubleshoot this.

I opened Control Module 9, Central Electronics:

Then went to 7 Long Coding, and it turned out that the Seat Heating was not properly coded.

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I needed to read out the Maximum Password age with a PowerShell script in a Windows 2003 domain.

Reading out the maxPwdAge attribute is a trivial task  in PowerShell (I am re-using the function AdsLargeIntegerToInt64):

In my case this returns the value -78624000000000 but how do we interpret this?

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I was creating a small dialog in an .hta file and to make a little prettier for the user I included a company logo:

But I wanted to deploy the .hta as a single file.

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Some Active Directory attributes return an 8 byte integer in the form of an IADsLargeInteger interface. An example is the pwdLastSet attribute from a user object.

Because the IADsLargeInteger object doesn’t provide type information PowerShell cannot read the HighPart and LowPart properties.

So I wrote the function below to get the Int64 value of an IADsLargeInteger:

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A while ago I was invited for a presentation at the UK Citrix User Group. I went there together with my colleague Ingmar Verheij and we had a great day there.

I was impressed with what I say there, a community that was very much alive and with good discussions. It was clear that the UK Citrix User Group was doing very well, thumbs up for their Steering Group!

So Ingmar and I wondered why there was no active Dutch Citrix User Group in The Netherlands. There had been an initiative in the past, the DUCUG so we decided to see if we could revive it.

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I wanted to know if a certain server had a Battery Backed Write Cache module (BBWC) on it’s array controller.

I suspected it did not, but I had to be sure. Since this server was running production I couldn’t open (Visual Inspection) or reboot it.

The server didn’t have Insight Agents installed so I couldn’t query it via iLO or the Insight Agents webpage either.

I knew that when you do a full install of the array controller bundled software it comes with a commandline tool, hpacucli.exe.

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In a Comment on my Article “Installing Dell Wireless 5530 HSPA Mini PCI“, Florian asked how to Install Dell’s R298998 driver on non authorized system and card combinations.

I decided to have a look and downloaded this driver. The structure isn’t much different from the R251153 driver I described in my earlier post.

When installing it on a non authorized card/laptop combination the error is similar:

When the error message appeared I looked into the temp folder and I noticed that just like before 2 folders were created (with a GUID as name). One of these folders contained the file driver_auth.exe which, as I already knew, performs the actual validation.

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Today one of my collegues asked me to write a script that performs two actions for all users of a certain Organizational Unit:

1. Ensure that each user has modify permissions on their homefolder
2. Make each user visible in the Exchange Address List.

Sounds like a PowerShell job right?

I reused my function to set NTFS Permissions by SID:

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For a script I needed to create an AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) Query that contained a date range.

An example of such is a range is: date:11/05/04..11/10/04

However we need to account for regional settings where for example the data seperator and the order of day and month may be different.

In my example I wanted to match any data that is 30 days or older so let’s do this in PowerShell:

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