So I ran into an issue today on a Windows 2003 server today.. Client wanted to run IIS and Apache on the same server.. I figured this wouldn’t be an issue because you can tell IIS to use one IP add another IP to the Network Interface and then tell Apache to use the second IP.. Well this turned out to be something far more complex.. First off even when setting IIS6 to listen on only one IP.. it STILL listens on all IP’s available so as this story would pan out Apache wouldn’t start because it couldn’t bind to the IP address on port 80 because it was already in use by IIS but I found the following trick to get around the issue.

Please note you should schedule a small block of time to do this as it requires a server reboot.. so figure the amount of time you will need is how ever long it takes your Server to shutdown and reboot +5-10min

Configure IIS to only listen to the one IP and make a note of that IP.

Open a command prompt (Start>Run "cmd" > Hit Enter)
Then type the following at the black screen: net stop http /y
This will stop all IIS and IIS related services

Next, run the httpcfg.exe this can be found on your Windows Server 2003 CD-ROM under
\support\tools\support.cab if you double click this file it should let you open it like a folder and copy the httpcfg.exe file to somewhere on your computer (example C:\temp)

At that command prompt you had open move to C:\temp or wherever you put the httpcfg.exe file
cd c:\temp

then type the following command
httpcfg set iplisten -i :80
For replace this portion with the IP address you set in IIS earlyer.. so if that ip was 192.186.0.102 then your command would be the following..
httpcfg set iplisten -i 192.168.0.102:80

If the command is successful, you will see the following message at the prompt.

HttpSetServiceConfiguration completed with 0

In some situations it will be necessary to reboot the server after this change but you can try to start the IIS by
net start w3svc

Change to following folder cd\IntePub\AdminScripts and enter run the following command:
cscript adsutil.vbs set /smtpsvc/1/DisableSocketPooling true

Just a quickie Review, Saw this baby on DealExtreme I picked up a few of these on ebay a few months back they work great even on newer servers. I use these all the time in my Labs at work.

Great Price on DealExtreme right now $2.59 each free shipping!

The myth that to delete data really securely from a hard disk you have to overwrite it many times, using different patterns, has persisted for decades, despite the fact that even firms specializing in data recovery, openly admit that if a hard disk is overwritten with zeros just once, all of its data is irretrievably lost.

Craig Wright, a forensics expert, claims to have put this legend finally to rest. He and his colleagues ran a scientific study to take a close look at hard disks of various makes and different ages, overwriting their data under controlled conditions and then examining the magnetic surfaces with a magnetic-force microscope. They presented their paper at ICISS 2008 and it has been published by Springer AG in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (Craig Wright, Dave Kleiman, Shyaam Sundhar R. S.: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy).

They concluded that, after a single overwrite of the data on a drive, whether it be an old 1-gigabyte disk or a current model (at the time of the study), the likelihood of still being able to reconstruct anything is practically zero. Well, OK, not quite: a single bit whose precise location is known can in fact be correctly reconstructed with 56 per cent probability (in one of the quoted examples). To recover a byte, however, correct head positioning would have to be precisely repeated eight times, and the probability of that is only 0.97 per cent. Recovering anything beyond a single byte is even less likely.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the vendors of data-wiping programs offering software that overwrites data up to 35 times, based on decades-old security standards that were developed for diskettes. Although this may give a data wiper the psychological satisfaction of having done a thorough job, it’s a pure waste of time.

Something much more important, from a security point of view, is actually to overwrite all copies of the data that are to be deleted. If a sensitive document has been edited on a PC, overwriting the file is far from sufficient because, during editing, the data have been saved countless times to temporary files, back-ups, shadow copies, swap files … and who knows where else? Really, to ensure that nothing more can be recovered from a hard disk, it has to be overwritten completely, sector by sector. Although this takes time, it costs nothing: the dd command in any Linux distribution will do the job perfectly.

(Original Post )

So this is an old yet common issue I ran into today at work.
Walked in to work this morning and before I even got to mydesk my phone started ringing, A client called in saying their computer wont do anything and when I asked them what was on the screen they said it was a Blue screen that said "Unmountable Boot Volume"

Official Microsoft KB artical on this is KB 555302

Cause:
1.The file system is damaged and cannot be mounted.
2.You use a standard 40-wire connector cable to connect the UDMA drive to the controller instead of the required 80-wire, 40-pin cable.
3.The basic input/output system (BIOS) settings are configured to force the faster UDMA modes.

Fix:
If it be the connector cable problem then replace the 40-wire cable with an 80-wire UDMA cable.
If it’s a BIOS settings problem then load the ‘Fail-Safe’ default settings, and then reactivate the most frequently used options such as USB Support.

If it’s a damaged file system case then:-
1.Insert the Windows XP CD-ROM into the CD-ROM drive, and then restart the computer.
Click to select any options that are required to start the computer from the CD-ROM drive if you are prompted.
2.When the “Welcome to Setup” screen appears, press R to start the Recovery Console.
3.If you have a dual-boot or multiple-boot computer, select the installation that you must access from the Recovery Console.
4.When you are prompted, type the Administrator password. If the administrator password is blank, just press ENTER.
5.At the command prompt, type chkdsk /r , and then press ENTER.
6.At the command prompt, type exit , and then press ENTER to restart your computer.
This takes a bit longer, but the system should boot back into Windows.

If it still happens try hitting F8 and a screen should pop up before loading Windows giving you the option to select Last Known Good Configuration select it and hit Enter..

This should resolve your issue in most scenarios..

If the above process fails to restore the system then in the number#5 step use fixboot command instead of the chkdsk /r command.

If this doesn’t work you should check the cabling or consider Reformatting.
If this Issue Persists after Reformatting run tests on the Memory and Hard Drive.