Temporarily disabling Kerberos

How to force NTLM authentication and temporarily disable Kerberos.

Sometimes you may need to temporarily disable Kerberos authentication and use NTLM instead, for example when you are trying to troubleshoot authentication issues with a server or network device. Here’s a quick tip on how you can force your XP machine to use NTLM instead of Kerberos when authenticating with the server or device: use the IP address of the server or device instead of its Service Principal Name (SPN). For example, you could map a network drive to \\ and this will force NTLM instead of Kerberos to be used when authenticating the connection. For more information on SPNs, see http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/0cb0ec27-fa3e-423c-9669-3ccef815a29f1033.mspx?mfr=true.

Troubleshooting Domain Join Issues

How to troubleshoot when issues joining a domain arise.

If you’ve been trying to join a Windows machine to a domain and you’ve encountered problems (or you want to verify if everything went OK) you can do the following.

First, try running netdiag /v to see if there were any error messages were generated from the procedure. If this doesn’t tell you anything, try running netdiag /debug next and see if any errors show up.

Finally, if you do see errors, check the Netsetup.log file which is found in the \Windows\Debug folder on your machine.

This file logs the various stages of the domain join process in detail and is fairly easy to interpret.

Using XP as a router

A cheap and easy way of adding a router to your network is to use a surplus PC with Windows XP Professional installed on it. Just install an additional network card in the box and then configure the registry setting below and Presto! Your XP box becomes able to route (forward) IP packets from one interface to another.

Open Regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters

Find the following registry value:

IPEnableRouter

Set this value to 1 to enable IP routing on the box.

After doing this, reboot the machine. You may also need to disable Windows Firewall on the machine.

Forcing a remote logoff

How to force a user to log off of a remote machine

Bob logs onto his workstation and you (who are on another workstation) want to force Bob to log off. How can you do that?

You could do it using Computer Management. Open Computer Management on your machine and connect to Bob’s computer, then right-click on Bob’s computer and select Properties. Switch to the Advanced tab, and click Settings under Startup And Recovery options. Now go to Shutdown and under Action click Log Off Current User and then OK.

Of course some things are easier to do using a script:

strComputer = “”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:” & “{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2”)
Set colOperatingSystems = objWMIService.ExecQuery (“SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem”)
For Each objOperatingSystem in colOperatingSystems
ObjOperatingSystem.Win32Shutdown(0)
Next

XP : speedup access to network shares

I have seen reports that Windows XP is slow when accessing network shares. I use XP daily on my local home network and a corporate LAN. I haven’t noticed the network slowness. But if you do, there are reports that deleting a particular registry key resolved the problem. It certainly works for Windows 2000. You can give it a try in XP. I would backup the key first.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace/{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

To backup and delete the key, In the regedt32 registry editor navigate to the NameSpace key :

• Right click {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}
• Click Export. From the Export Registry File dialog box in the File Name text box :
• Type the filename of your choice as in restoreshare
• Click Save, This saves the file names (in my example), restoreshare.reg to the My Documents folder. Its now safe to  delete the key.
• Right click {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}
• Click Delete
• Click Yes in the Confirm Key Delete dialog box.

If your system is unstable or weird after deleting this key, you can restore the key. In Explorer, double-click on your reg file. This will restore the deleted registry key.