Fileshares: Connecting with the wrong hostname

Situation: Occasionally I need to connect to servers with names formed from a spoon of alphabet soup - impossible to remember. Of course, since the customer is always right, he gets to choose the names of his own server. I however, need to refer to computer names I can remember or that has a meaning.

Workaround: Put an entry in your hosts/lmhosts file (in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc folder), or if you have access to the DNS or WINS server, put the entry there, using your preferred name and the IP of the server you want to reach. If, for instance, a server is named something like SA823SX3B and you want to name it FILESERVER, just put in an entry for FILESERVER with the SA823SX3B's IP. It works for ping and many other services, but:

Problem: This does (by default) NOT work if you want to connect to a NetBIOS fileshare. You can verify that firewalls etc. is not the cause of this problem by connecting via \\SA823SX3B\fileshare and even by using \\192.168.0.1\fileshare (given that that's the IP of our example server).

Solution: You need to hack the following registry key on the server in question:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\
DisableStrictNameChecking

Set the value to 1 and reboot. You can now connect to the server using any name you please, as long as it is referring to the right IP address.

Caveat: On a NT4 computer, you will still not be able to connect without using either the real name or the IP address as reference.

See Microsoft KB 281308 for a description of this parameter.

eBay thumbs - Always with Greasemonkey!

Not very technical this time, but definitely nerdy

Ever been annoyed by eBay ads with only the green camera icon on the item list page? eBay charges extra to let sellers display a thumb aside the item title, so obviously many eBay sellers only put images inside their ads - showing up after you click to view the ad.

With Greasemonkey and the Firefox web browser, the world in this respect looks a bit brighter. Greasemonkey is a client-side scripting engine addon to Firefox that processes web pages that you view in realtime.

Add this script to Greasemonkey and you get thumbs on all eBay ads that have images!

WinMed Connect preferences & setup

Situation: A client computer that were running the WinMed healthcare software application had been replaced and an attempt had been made to transfer the software to the new computer. The WinMed program and data files all reside on a server network share with no values stored in registry, so apparently recreating the shortcuts to the server located apps on the new computer should do the trick.

Problem: The WinMed Connect program was asking for path specifications every time it was run.

Solution: The WinMed Connect shortcut points to a program called xmlparse.exe in the xml subfolder of the WinMed system files. There was also a xmlparse.ini file in this folder. This needed to be copied to the Windows folder and modified with the right paths. Also the winmed.ini file located in the WinMed folder on the server had to be copied to the local Windows folder. Both files had to be given change permissions to the user who was running the program.