Super-Networking Blog

Need to burn an ISO to CD but don’t want to burn third party software to do it? Check out ISO Recorder, it allows you to right-click on an ISO and burn it to CD. There is a version of this software for Windows XP and Vista.  It supports DVD recording and CD recording. Best of all it is free.

Windows Versions Supported:

Windows XP

Windows 2003 (32-bit/64-bit)

Windows Vista (32-bit/64-bit)

Download here

I started running a product called TweakVI on my Vista box and it has made a pretty big different on the general speed of my machine. I have used Tweak products in the past on older OSes and have always been pretty pleased with the products.

It basically gives you one interface to make all the tweaks to your Vista OS, you can do these yourself through registry hacks and settings changed but this puts it all together into one place with descriptions. It also has some built in auto-performance tweaking you can turn on.

I put it up on my site for download to you don’t have to go out and find it elsewhere.

TweakVI

If you don’t think you will ever use hibernation like say on your desktop and you don’t want that huge hiberfil.sys file on your hard drive disable this. One less thing eating up your system resources as well.

1. Open the Start Menu
2. Right click Command Prompt
3. Select Run as administrator
4. To turn Hibernation off “powercfg -hibernate off”

If you want to turn is back on run “powercfg -hibernate on”

If you are still using telnet to mange some of your devices try to upgrade them to SSH. But I do know that a ton of switches and other lower end devices just don’t have SSH. Most of these devices do have web interfaces but if you are like me nothing beats the good old command line.

If you upgrade to Vista you will find that when you try to launch telnet from the command prompt or from run you will have no luck. Don’t worry it is still there it just isn’t installed by default in Vista.

Instructions here to install.

Well after some limited users were using the Cisco VPN Client 5 beta it worked at first then we had some more problems with intermittent connection problems.

Last post here

Cisco has just released the official Client 5.0.00.0340 which is supposed to fix most issues with Vista. Remember you cannot use the installer shield version in Vista only the MSI. We will be testing this version once again. There are also some workarounds Cisco posted if you continue to have problems.

Workarounds for Vista:
Error 412: The remote peer is no longer responding
Upgrade local NAT device’s firmware
If this is not possible, switch to TCP
If this is not possible, use the following keyword in connection profile (*.pcf):UseLegacyIKEPort=1

CAVEAT: If you are using Domain Isolation customer will not be able to use the UseLegacyIKEPort
keyword as this conflicts with Microsoft�s domain isolation.

Error 442: Failed to enable virtual adapter
Open Network and Sharing Center
Open Network Connection Manager
Enable the virtual adapter (�Cisco VPN Adapter�)
Right-click on it and select �Diagnose�
Select �Fix��

If this doesn’t work
Run the following from �cmd’:
reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters /v ArpRetryCount /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
Reboot

NOTE: If customer has UAC enabled, s/he must run �cmd� as administrator.

Error 1721 (At install time.)
Client does not support 64bit.

Well the issues with Cisco VPN clients and Vista continues. The past posts including: More Vista Fun with VPN, have fixed most of the issues with most of the users.

Unfortunately one of our users has started having the following issue.

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.

Reason 440: Driver Failure.

We have not found a workaround for this error yep but we are trying the latest and greatest Cisco VPN client 5.0.00.0090. I will keep this post up to date with changes to this issue and other Vista/VPN issues.

*Update* This version is running great so far, driver error above was fixed with this version.

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Ran across something this morning in my RSS feeds that I thought was interesting. Vista’s firewall claims to inspect traffic incoming and outgoing from your PC. Apparently though by default only incoming protect is enabled, you need to enable the outgoing protect rules.

I would not say this is such a bad this because if the outgoing rules were enable the majority of non-techies would be outrages when their stuff doesn’t work or when they are prompted all of the time.

I originally posted on running Cisco VPN on Vista here.There is actually a newer client that is working better and its version # is 4.8.02.0010. You must install the msi version because the is version doesn’t install on Vista. We have fun this to be a stable VPN client on both Vista and XP for most connections.

We have been running into some issues with running this VPN over slower network connections but the issue comes and goes. A possible workaround that seems to be working in the initial stages is the following.

Try this:

1. Open an administrative command prompt.

2. Type “netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled“.

3. Reboot.

The default autotuninglevel is “normal” if you want to set it back.

You can also try removing IPv6 from networking as this has been reported to screw up some routers.

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One of the features of Vista that I am really starting to like is one of the ways to connect to unc shares. When you click on the start menu there is a start search bar in the box. This bar is a cross between a search box and the old run bar. What makes it nice is when you start typing to the server name it will pull up any past shares that you went to on the server and once you finish the server name it also automatically shows you all the shares for you to connect it. This shows up automatically in the start search box which is really nice. Something small but can help make all the difference when you are looking for a share.

This is my first post from Windows Vista, I am running Vista Business now and I don’t want to ever go back. I haven’t found anything functional that I don’t like yet, some programs don’t work but that isn’t Vista’s fault. One of the programs I have not yet installed is Wireshark because of the warning I got when trying to install WinPcap, I need to look into that yet.

Overall the network speed in Vista appears to be faster, everything I am doing just appears to respond better and downloads are quite fast now. One of the cooling things I have seen so far is the Resource Monitor in Vista. The Resource monitor breaks down CPU, Memory, Disk and even Network usage by process! This is going to be great when looking into network performance issue when you can see exactly what process is using your bandwidth and where it is going.

As I play with Vista I will post more on it.