Category: Windows

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SharePoint site with a different name

There are quite a few situations where you want your SharePoint Web Application available to different sets of users, using different web addresses. For example, our internal users may use http://XYZ to access our web application, but our external clients may have to enter http://secure.xyz.com

SharePoint allows you to assign up to five different “end-user addresses” for each of your Web Applications. These “end-user addresses” are ones that people will type into their browser to access your site. SharePoint uses a feature called Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) to make sure that the web application is available through different addresses while still ensuring that the links in the page sent back to the user are formatted correctly.

For a standard, non-SharePoint web site, this is relatively easy. Microsoft’s IIS web server allows an administrator to specify as many addresses as they want for a single web site. These are called “host headers”. If you are careful and make sure that all the internal links in your standard web site are written without a domain (e.g. /contactus.aspx), then the end user will always get the correct links based on the address they have used to access the website.

So why doesn’t SharePoint work the same way? Well, part of the reason is that there are some scenarios where SharePoint will receive requests using one address, but it needs to translate these to another address before sending the final page to the end user. More on this later. Continue reading “SharePoint site with a different name”

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Share an Internet connection with Virtual Router

This article is for the road warriors among us…

While travelling its not uncommon to have to pay for access to a hotel, airport or airline wireless network in order to access the Internet. Whilst this generally isn’t an issue for the lone business man, when traveling with groups of people it can get very expense.

Enter Virtual Router!

Virtual Router, available at http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com, is a virtual router for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 systems. Based on Microsoft’s Wireless Hosted Network (Virtual Wifi) technology, virtual router allows you to share the wireless (or LAN) connection on your computer with multiple other computers. It does this by emulating the behavior of a wireless router and allows your colleges to connect to a SSID (wireless network name) that you define with a WPA2 password you set, then share the same connection your using.

The configuration interface is straight forward:

Virtual Router Screenshot

And consists of three user-configurable options: Continue reading “Share an Internet connection with Virtual Router”

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Synchronize time with external NTP server on Windows Server 2008 R2.

Time synchronization is an important aspect for all computers in a Windows domain. By default, the clients computers get their time from a Domain Controller and the Domain Controller gets his time from the domain’s PDC Operation Master. Therefore the PDC must synchronize his time from an external source. I usually use the servers listed at the NTP Pool Project website. Before you begin, don’t forget to open the default UDP 123 port (in and outbound) on your firewall.

  1. Locate your PDC Server. Open the command prompt and type: C:\>netdom /query fsmo
  2. Log in to your PDC Server and open the command prompt.
  3. Stop the W32Time service: C:\>net stop w32time
  4. Configure the external time sources, type: C:\> w32tm /config /syncfromflags:manual /manualpeerlist:pool.ntp.org
  5. Make your PDC a reliable time source for the clients. Type: C:\>w32tm /config /reliable:yes
  6. Start the w32time service: C:\>net start w32time
  7. The windows time service should begin synchronizing the time. You can check the external NTP servers in the time configuration by typing: C:\>w32tm /query /configuration
  8. Check the Event Viewer for any errors.

Time should now be synchronizing correctly.

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Windows Server 2008 DNS Block Feature

Windows Server 2008 (2008 R2) introduces a DNS block feature that may affect the ISA Server automatic discovery mechanism when implementing WPAD using a Windows Server 2008 DNS Server.

The block feature provides a global query block list to reduce vulnerability associated with dynamic DNS updates. Dynamic update makes it possible for DNS client computers to register and dynamically update their resource records with a DNS server whenever a client changes its network address or host name.  This reduces the need for manual administration of zone records, especially for clients that frequently move or change locations and use DHCP to obtain an IP address. This convenience comes at a cost, however, because an authorized client can register any unused host name, even a host name that might have special significance for certain applications. This can allow a malicious user to “hijack” a special name and divert certain types of network traffic to that user’s computer. WPAD is a commonly deployed protocol vulnerable to this type of hijacking, and by default WPAD look up is disabled by the blocking mechanism.

If you want to use WPAD with a Windows Server 2008 DNS, note the following behavior:

– If WPAD entries are configured in DNS before the DNS server is upgraded to Windows Server 2008, no action is required. Continue reading “Windows Server 2008 DNS Block Feature”