Below are the required commands to run on your pix:

Hostname "Name"

domain "domain name"

ca generate rsa key 1024

ca save all

ssh 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.255 inside

writ m

The reasons for each of these command are:

Hostname - You need to supply a hostname to your device for it to generate the encryption keys. In the command listed above replace the "Name" with the name you want the device to have no quotes in the command please.

Domain - Same as the hostname, you need a domain entered into the PIX for the encryption keys.

ca generate rsa key 1024 - Tell the pix to generate the encryption keys needed for SSH connections. You can change the 1024 large or smaller which determines how strong the key will be. The larger the number the stronger the key but the more memory required for it.

ca save all - This is an important and often over looked command that you use to save your encryption key to NVRAM. You can get SSH working without this command but if your Pix loses power and reboots you will not be able to get back into the device until you regenerate your keys through the console connection.

ssh - You need to tell the pix what to allow to connect using SSH. So enter the ssh command followed by the IP or subnet you want allowed. You also have to tell it what interface that IP will be coming in on.

writ m - Finally this command will save your running-config to startup-config.

You should be ready to connect to your PIX using SSH after running these commands. Don’t forget to restrict telnet after you have tested your SSH connection.

You go back into the job in Backup Exec and try to do a restore, what do you find? The folders that contain the DFS files are empty, 0 bytes. My first thought is what the hell is this all about. Was scared for a minute or two thinking I have no backups on tape of any of my DFS files.

I looked into it more and found that starting in Backup Exec 10d SP2 and continuing through 11d you cannot performance a backup of DFS files directly like you would normally do. You need to use the "DFSR Writer" which means using the Shadow Copy Components backup.

If you go into your server selection in Backup Exec, drill down into Shadow Copy Components -> User Data you will see the DFS info. Make sure to select these to backup your DFS files.

Things to keep in mind about backing up DFS in this manner:

-Backup Performance is greatly affected, could double the time needed for backing up those files.

-DFS Backups in this manner cannot be redirected to another location on restored like a lot of people including myself like to do when restoring files.

One workaround for the speed issue I have found but not tested is to run a Net Stop command for the DFS Replication service before the backup starts then a Net Start for that service when done.

You download a program called Strings.

This is a SysInternals program now owned by Microsoft that will search through text files for word strings and kick them out to you.

So I will go through an example of how you can use it and you can modify it from there.

So copy all of the IIS log files to a location, for example c:\logs

Then open up a command prompt, go to the directory where you have the strings program.

Type the command: strings.exe -s c:\logs | findstr "Your Search Text"

This will dump all the lines it finds with that search text to your command prompt window. Now take it further.

Type the command: strings.exe -s c:\logs | findstr "Your Search Text" > c:\output\log.txt

That will dump the found lines to a new text file. Either you can use that text file for whatever you want or parse it down further with the following.

Type the command: strings.exe -s c:\output | findstr "Your Search Text 2"

That will allow you to search through huge directories of IIS logs for combinations of things. If you do the same search often try dumping it into a batch file.

Thanks Goes to Steve For the Idea to Look Into Strings

Are you getting the following error in your syslogs when you try:

"regular translation creation failed for protocol 47"

All you should have to do is add a new fixup protocol entry.

"fixup protocol pptp 1723"

Now assuming that you have a PAT for all traffic from inside to outside you PPTP connections should work.

There are other factors that could cause this to fail, make sure that you are on at least version 6.3 of the Pix software.

If you still have problems check your syslogs.

You then are going to want to find two programs, instsrv.exe and srvany.exe, I would recommend making a new folder on the root of your drive and pulling over a copy of those two files. So say a folder called myservice you really could name is anything you want.

Next what you need to do is register a service to run srvany.exe with the name of your choosing. Open a command prompt and go into the folder myservice.

Command would be:

instsrv.exe "My Service" c:\myservice\srvany.exe

-Switch "My Service" with name you want the service to have.

Next you need to tell srvany.exe what program you want it to run as a service.

Go into the registry using regedit find this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\My Service

-Add a new sub-key call Parameters under My Service

-In the Parameters key create a new string value named Application

-Set the value of it to the full path of the executable file location. Be sure you use "" around the path.

That should be it, you might have to reboot otherwise go into services.msc and start your service. You should be good to go.

Wireshark for you who haven’t looked for a long time used to be the packet sniffer called Ethereal. This is a great free packet sniffer that every Network Admin worth his salt should have on his laptop and or Thumb Drive.

Download it here

Older Post on Wireshark/Ethereal:

Wireshark aka Ethereal

In the event logs I did find something that correlated with the CPU spikes:

Event ID: 7036

"The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the running state."

Event ID: 7036

"The WinHTTP Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Service service entered the stopped state."

This happens many times a day, starting and stopping. When in transition it seemed to spike the CPU for a little while.

Service Description is the following:

Implements the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) protocol for Windows HTTP Services (WinHTTP). WPAD is a protocol to enable an HTTP client to automatically discover a proxy configuration. If this service is stopped or disabled, the WPAD protocol will be executed within the HTTP client’s process instead of an external service process; there would be no loss of functionality as a result.

In looking into this more I found this is not needed to run IIS or anything else on your server. Only needed for your browser on your server to detect a proxy for Internet browsing. So do yourself a favor and disable this service, you will see it most likely set as manual and stopped but don’t let this fool you. Check out your event logs and if you see it starting and stopping disable it.

Well with Windows 2003 it isn’t easy or advisable to completely remove .Net 1.1 but you can unregister is from IIS having the same affect as far as your websites are concerned.

You need to open up the command prompt and go to the path .Net is installed in. Typically is C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\

If you have other versions of .net installed you will see all the versions under Framework as well, be sure to go into the 1.1 directory.

From the command prompt in that directory type the command "aspnet_regiis.exe -u"

This will unregister this version of the framework with IIS and in turn IIS will not see it. You will want to do a reboot to make sure everything comes up clean afterwards.

Also make sure that you do not have any websites using .Net 1.1 because you will most likely mess it up when it is forced over to .Net 2.0

You cannot use the URL removal tool because you can’t tell it to only remove https urls. The way you get around this is to remove the robots.txt restrictions from https and put meta tags for Google to remove the content only on our https content.

Tags you are going to want to user are:

<meta name="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NONE">

and

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOARCHIVE">

This will tell Google to not index the pages and remove any old caches and indexes. This could take some time for Google to crawl all of your https content. Once everything you want out of their index is gone you can go ahead and change over to the easier https robots.txt file restrictions.

I do not have the code that allows you to set different meta tag info based on http or https. If someone has that please comment on this post. This should help out the SEO on your site. Thanks

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