In a week when one of our customer’s senior management team said
“No, we’re not upgrading Internet Explorer 6, we’re waiting for Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7”
A user rings up and tells me “Google Maps doesn’t work with Internet Explorer 6. I want Internet Explorer 8”
It was with some sense of Schadenfreude that I pointed the user at their senior management.
(graphic from the most excellent: The Life, Times (and Death?) of Internet Explorer 6 (Comic Strip))
Footnote:
Yes, we want our customers on a later browser. But the customers have internal business websites, which we don’t manage; which only work with IE6.
It’s enough to make an IT support guy cry.
If you’re silly enough to using IE6 on your home PC? It’s time to stop using it
How to Install GPMC on Server 2008, 2008 R2, and Windows 7 (via RSAT)
Can You See Me – Open Port Check Tool
Is a free utility for remotely verifying a port is open or closed. It will be useful for users who wish to check to see if a server is running or a firewall or ISP is blocking certain ports.
Setting up a Windows 7 Media Center
Windows XP Power Management and Group Policy Preferences
Windows XP only has one active power scheme for the entire computer and that scheme is based on the current or previously logged on user—that is to say Windows XP power schemes are only user-based. This means the power scheme can change as each user logs on. Also, it means that last logged on user’s power settings are the settings that remain once the user logs off. And yes, each user has its own power configuration; however, the entire operating system only has one active power scheme.
PHP and IE8 Web Slices
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) shipped with a new feature for web users called Web Slices. … Essentially it lets you add enhanced links to your favorite bar that allow you to preview snippets of content from websites that you frequently visit without having to open up the page. It’s really useful to do little tasks like check on your web based Inbox, check the weather in cities you live or visit, traffic status, stock tickers, headlines, sports, the list goes on and on and you can check the IE add-on gallery for more examples of useful web slices and for inspiration.
How to customize default user profiles in Windows 7 (KB973289)
To customize a default user profile or a mandatory user profile, you must first customize the default user profile. Then, the default user profile can be copied to the appropriate shared folder to make that user profile either the default user profile or a mandatory user profile.
The problem was reported thus.
Internet Explorer is not storing session cookies for XYZ website. The session cookies are stored when we use Firefox.
Two hours later, I can tell you that:
- I learnt more about web cookies than I will ever need to know again.
- Firefox does things differently to Internet Explorer.
Gentle reader, Session Cookies are cookies which only exist for the time which your web browser is open for. They are deleted when you close your browser. They are often used to cache your user name and password.
If you don’t have your username/password cached, you repeatedly get prompted for it. Which is annoying. Hence the need for session cookies.
So I started investigating the cookies not being stored issue.. The first thing I noticed was that Internet Explorer wasn’t even bothering to write the cookie down to the local hard disk. So I broke out the network sniffer (Wireshark). It didn’t tell me much, as all the web traffic was encrypted.
The next step was to load up Fiddler, the Web Debugging Proxy. Fiddler allows you to inspect all the encrypted web traffic between your computer, and the rest of the world. The session cookie that the XYZ website was trying to push down, had the following details:
There are two issues with this session cookie:
- It sets an Expires date.
This normally means that it is a Persistent Cookie, and not a Session Cookie.
In other words, we should not see Expires in a session cookie.
- The Expires date was set to a date/time in the past, which is not supported behaviour either.
So why does it work with Firefox then? – Firefox seems to be treating the expired Expires date as no date at all. So it defaults to a Session Cookie.
Internet Explorer? – A bit more complicated:
Some further reading:
The Unofficial Cookie FAQ
Wikipedia HTTP Cookies
Internet Explorer Cannot Download https://something (Eric Law’s IE Internals)
Earlier today, I was asked to troubleshoot a secure site where file downloads were always failing. Having seen this problem many times often over the years, I immediately suspected that the web developer wasn’t aware that
if a user tries to download* a file over a HTTPS connection, any response headers that prevent caching will cause the file download process to fail.
* Note that this applies to “downloaded” files that open in programs other than IE. It does not apply to resources that render inside IE’s HTML rendering engine, like images/script/css/etc.
When Internet Explorer encounters a HTTPS download that will not be cached, the download is aborted with the following dialog box:
Creating a VHD from an Installation CD (Vineet Sarda)
To create a bootable VHD from the Windows 7 install CD, you will need to locate the main WIM file which is in the sources directory of the DVD –> E:\Sources\Install.wim
With this WIM file you will have to use the WIM2VHD utility, which is script file to create the VHD.
From an Administrative command Prompt, The command line will be as follows
CSCRIPT wim2vhd.wsf /WIM:E:\sources\Install.wim /SKU:ULTIMATE
continues at the MSDN Windows 7 and Application Compatibility blog
Native boot from VHD on a Windows XP computer (Mark Wilson blog)
Like almost every other corporate in the world, where Mark and I work there is a standard build deployed to everyone. The default in our particular organisation is a 32-bit Windows XP OS regardless of the capabilities of the laptop or desktop it is deployed to. Over the years, this has caused a number of problems that have required an increasing number of “exemptions” from standard policy to allow people to run a different Windows version or platform.
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