Some Notes on the Machines

Go to the Start ball, enter “Folder Options” in the search box. Under “View”, far down in the checkbox options, you’ll see “Sharing Wizard”. Turn that off, to turn off simple file sharing in 7.

Saw this for the first time; on a Windows 7 laptop, all network devices except two, were yellow-flagged, and in their properties it said code 31, which means not able to load the driver files. In this condition, I found that I could not uninstall any network objects in Device Manager: it permitted me to do so, but immediately after the deletion was done, the objects remained.

I googled it a lot, found zero of real use, except the underlying pattern that apparently one very badly-behaved network driver or virtual device, can hose the whole Windows 7 networking stack in this very way.

In this case, there was a certain high-profile vendor’s VPN client installed, and it was this vendor’s items which were not yellow-flagged, but instead, were marked disabled. So I focussed on that, deleted the .sys file involved, and deleted every registry entry for them also, in safe mode, excepting only the LEGACY entries which I could not get permission to delete, even running regedit as administrator. No change: the objects remained after reboot.

I then tried System Restore, and took the OS back to the point before the issue began to occur. This had a very positive result; networking came back. The VPN client will need reinstalling, but I will update the machine all the way as next step, and then install the latest version of the VPN client.

A very good place to get info on NASes:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews

In Server 2008, the default protocol is IPv6.  It is not recommended to disable it in any way.

Default DNS, internal and LAN-wide, is therefore also IPv6.  All you really need is an AAAA record for the forward lookup.  But in many cases reverse lookup will have been skipped at server setup, and in such a case, it can get confusing to try to set up reverse DNS.  Reverse DNS is definitely recommended, it will smoothen out the LAN in general.

It has been very difficult to find any instructions to set up reverse IPv6 DNS on Server 2008.  Howsomever, here is one.

http://www.thirdtier.net/2009/08/adding-ipv6-to-dns/

If you have an older-style workgroup, XP and before, Windows 7 can cooperate.  Here are steps:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/share-files-and-printers-between-windows-7-and-xp/

Provided by the excellent Rich McDaniel.

When workstations on a Server 2003 domain, report an insufficient memory and/or disk space profile error at login, try this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935649

It also appears to help general memory usage issues.  The same settings are listed by Microsoft in Server 2008 for an antivirus issue:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973366

This one is from the indefatigable Liz Landry.

How to fix this problem?  Try this:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/windows-was-unable-to-find-a-certificate-to-log-you-on-to-the-network/

If you have a Broadcom NIC listed for use with “Broadcom Advanced Control Suite 3”, you can team both Broadcom and Intel NICs.  Only catch:  you will need one static IP on your LAN for each.

Here is an automatic generator of IPv6 private address ranges:

http://www.simpledns.com/private-ipv6.aspx

As long as you have an administrative password for the domain, this works:

http://www.howtonetworking.com/RemoteAccess/enablerdc1.htm