Some Notes on the Machines

with the right router/firewall. I’ve had at least three different Netgears at home over years, all mid- or mid-high range in their consumer range at purchase. Every time, I tested using OEM up-to-date firmware, and tested with DD-WRT, many tweaks on both. DD-WRT gave a little improvement. On a little divine inspiration, I just did this:

• Took a ten-year-old quad-core Vista box with three gigs of RAM
• Put in a $40 quad Intel server NIC I bought from Amazon.com
• Installed pfSense and set it up in very default fashion, exceptions being use of 192.168.2.0/24 as LAN subnet, 192.168.2.1 as LAN IP. Not using the motherboard NIC, just two on the Intel card so far.
• Set my current DD-WRTed Netgear to do DHCP forwarding instead of serving, set it static to 192.168.2.2, left it otherwise alone
• Connected one LAN port of the Netgear to the LAN port I set up in pfSense
• Disconnected the WAN port of the Netgear, plugged Internet directly into the WAN port in pfSense

Suddenly WWW and Roku respond much faster, much less latency and jitter and other delay, and most unexpectedly, Internet download speed is much, much faster, even though the wifi is still running through the Netgear. And after a bit of performance tweaking, pings are lower, from 28ms down to 22 wired and 24 wireless.

Haven’t tried Squid proxying yet, or IPv6, but will be!

Good article, sent by the remarkable Zach Hogan:

https://sysblogging.com/2015/12/29/how-to-migrate-windows-file-server-shares-with-ntfs-permissions/

Remote Web Workplace. Certificates are verified AOK, and yet at the point of RDP, you receive a popup reading “Your computer can’t connect to the remote computer because no certificate was configured to use at the Remote Desktop Gateway server. Contact your network administrator for assistance.”

To fix this, you’ll need the Remote Desktop Gateway Manager. If you have it, it’s in Start, Administrative Tools, Remote Desktop Services. If you don’t have it, install it:

dism /online /Enable-Feature:Gateway-UI

Then:

1. Open the RDGM.
2. Right-click the server object, open properties.
3. Open the SSL Certificate tab.
4. Click Import Certificate.
5. Choose the correct certificate — it’s the Exchange list, if this is SBS — and click OK.

SFTP, also called SCP, is not, accurately speaking, FTP. SFTP is “SSH File Transfer”, transfer of files over the SSH protocol, and not the FTP protocol. The FTP protocol has its own excellent secure (FTPS) capabilities, FileZilla being a recommended graphical FTP server for Windows; but GUI servers for SSH are much harder to find. Happily, here is one:

https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/free-sftp-server/registration?program=961&c=70150000000FJX0&CMP=BIZ-TAD-PCWDLD-SW_WW_X_PP_PPD_FT_EN_TOPFT_SW-SFTP-X_X_X_X-X

1. There are three ways to reset the password if you need to do so:

https://www.mydigitallife.net/reset-and-fix-incorrect-or-wrong-password-for-windows-xp-mode-xpmuser/

2. If you need to transfer an XP mode virtual from one user profile to another, create a blank XP mode on the new user, then copy all of the old files replacing the new. Use the default filenames, don’t change anything. It will work, but you will need to change the password, above.

A registry entry:

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced" /v SeparateProcess /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

which can be set up in group policy, under Computer Configuration, Preferences, Windows Settings, Registry.

Here’s a great tester:

https://ftptest.net/

Very nice:

https://gist.github.com/Zenexer/ae98c2b80d60fffcc588

This will make any Windows 10 machine run much faster, at the cost of the fancy Cortana query and search component.

1. In REGEDIT, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Software, Policies, Microsoft, Windows.
2. Create key “Windows Search” no quotes.
3. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortana” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
4. Create DWORD32 “AllowCortanaAboveLock” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
5. Create DWORD32 “DisableWebSearch” no quotes. Make sure the value is one (1).
6. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWeb” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
7. Create DWORD32 “ConnectedSearchUseWebOverMeteredConnections” no quotes. Make sure the value is zero (0).
8. Reboot.

Possibly the best:

http://www.mediaelementjs.com/