Preview: Handy Sysinternals Utilities

This article was first published as “Locked Files in Windows” on 22 Jul 2009.

Note to self: Sysinternals is Microsoft’s saving grace:

Process Explorer: A more advanced taskmgr, if you will. It’s most awesome feature is it’s ability to search for processes holding a certain handle, allowing you to resolve locked file issues:

Home page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Or just run it from http://live.sysinternals.com/procexp.exe

Process Monitor: Basically, Regmon + Filemon:

Home page: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

Or just run it from http://live.sysinternals.com/Procmon.exe

Make a Fat32 Partition in Linux

This is handy for transferring files between Windows and Linux, as many distro’s don’t have NTFS RW support built in. This is, of course if you do not have access to the NTFS-3G driver, which does allow for RW mounts.

Overview: fdisk w/ a W95 partition table
mkdosfs

If you need the step by step, it’s below:

fdisk /dev/sd(whatever drive you want to reparition, ‘b’ in this case), then follow along:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 20023.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): m
Command action
a toggle a bootable flag
b edit bsd disklabel
c toggle the dos compatibility flag
d delete a partition
l list known partition types
m print this menu
n add a new partition
o create a new empty DOS partition table
p print the partition table
q quit without saving changes
s create a new empty Sun disklabel
t change a partition’s system id
u change display/entry units
v verify the partition table
w write table to disk and exit
x extra functionality (experts only)

Command (m for help): n

Command action
e extended
p primary partition (1-4)
p
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-20023, default 1):
Using default value 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-20023, default 20023):
Using default value 20023

Command (m for help): t
Selected partition 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): c
Changed system type of partition 1 to c (W95 FAT32 (LBA))

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sdb: 164.6 GB, 164696555520 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20023 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000f0136

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 20023 160834716 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)

Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered!

Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.

WARNING: If you have created or modified any DOS 6.x
partitions, please see the fdisk manual page for additional
information.
Syncing disks.

root@sbrescue:/# mkdosfs /dev/sdb1
mkdosfs 3.0.1 (23 Nov 2008)
root@sbrescue:/# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
root@sbrescue:/# cd /mnt
root@sbrescue:/mnt# touch asdf
root@sbrescue:/mnt# ls
asdf
root@sbrescue:/mnt#

All done! =D

Hostnames Greater than 15 Characters Effectively Disables MSFTPSvc.

Wait, what?! Oh yeah. It just grinds to a halt, without any helpful error messages. This is just another thing that I want to jot down so I know to check for it the next time I run across a server with FTP issues.

AFAIK, it has to do with a NETBIOS limitation.

Active Versus Passive FTP on Windows 2003

For the first bit, please refer to Slacksite’s article for an excellent writeup on the difference between Active and Passive FTP.

Windows IIS’s FTP server is configured to use ports 1025-5000 for Passive FTP traffic by default. You can follow the steps at Microsoft’s support page to change the Passive FTP port range.

To enable Passive FTP, Windows Firewall must be configured to allow traffic from these ports. After verifying that the above port range is what you would like open to FTP traffic, each port number must be opened one by one. However, a simple script to automate this process is described here.

And here is a random link (ok, the link itself isn’t random, but the link behind the link is).