Something Evil for 06.06.06, Day of the Beast...

Here's a great way to kill a Windows Server 2003 + SP1 / R2 box...

1. Create a new reg DWORD TcpTimedWaitDelay in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
2. Give it a value of 0
3. Reboot

The box will never come back, and give a very ambiguous STOP 0x7F bugcheck. And since it's so early in the boot process it doesn't write a dump file. I found this after reading about the new 'smart TCP port allocation' functionality of the TCPIP stack in 2003+SP1 (and hence R2). I was investigating a problem that I thought may have been caused by the feature, and thought I could effectively switch it off by setting the above. Not sure if it affects 2003 RTM or 2000 in the same way... try it and let me know :-)

VBScript header...

And while we're on the topic of VBScript, here is what I currently use for a standard script header:

Dim objFSO,objShell,objWMI,objRegEx,strSystemRoot
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:" & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2")
Set objRegEx = New RegExp
objRegEx.Global = True
objRegEx.IgnoreCase = True
strSystemRoot = objShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%SYSTEMROOT%")

My Favourite Editor has a free version!

I've been using EmEditor for at least 4 years. Initially it was for administrative scripting, but after my favourtie HTML editor (HomeSite) went on the backburner at Macromedia, I started using it for everything. ANd I've never looked back.

Not sure how long the free version has been out, but it's well worth a look. Get it from http://www.emeditor.com/download.htm.

Version 6 should be out soon, with some cool new features. The 'snippets' feature has been a long time coming!