Tag: registry

WinCVS/CVSNT

CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) was once the leader in the version/revision control space. Unfortunately, it has been neglected for years and most application developers have moved to different systems such as Subversion(SVN) or Git.

March Hare took ownership of the CVS code and made the last few releases available for free on Windows as CVSNT, however their software will make prompts to purchase a supported copy and add messages to commit logging.

Committed on the Free edition of March Hare Software CVSNT Client.
Upgrade to CVS Suite for more features and support:
http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/

While I openly support development of software such as CVS, these dialog messages and commit logs are often annoying. To remove them on Windows, a simple registry change must be made:

One or both of these may exist on your system, change value to ‘yes’.
HKLM/Software/cvsnt/PServer, "HaveBoughtSuite"="yes"
HKLM/Software/CVS/PServer, "HaveBoughtSuite"="yes"

REFERENCES:

Overriding MSIE’s Friendly Error Message screens

IE overrides several HTTP error status pages but it has a size threshold. Only if the error page send by the server has a large enough body then IE decides it’s meaningful and displays it.

Usually to be safe you should make error pages that are larger then 512 bytes. The threshold varies per HTTP status code. You can look at what your thresholds are currently set to. In IE 5 and greater the settings are stored in the registry under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\ErrorThresholds]

Err Size(bytes):

  • 400 512
  • 403 256
  • 404 512
  • 405 256
  • 406 512
  • 408 512
  • 409 512
  • 410 256
  • 500 512
  • 501 512
  • 505 512

REFERENCES:

Windows NTFS Performance

For a very long time I was perplexed as to why my old 900Mhz Pentium-3 server outperformed many of my newer and faster machines, even when they all were running with essentially the same amount of memory and had the same 7200rpm hard-drives.

I recently realized that over the years, I had optimized the WindowsXP NTFS registry settings with a variety of software and manual edits, and thus had essentially changed the way that windows works with the drive itself.

Here are the current settings that these machines utilize, perhaps you can try them for yourselves:

WARNING: You need to be confortable making edits to your registry to do these changes, as such I will not document ‘how’ to open the registry itself, you can easily find that info anyways.  These are all DWORD settings.

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

  • DisableNTFSLastAccessUpdate  = 1
  • NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation = 1
  • NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate = 1
  • NtfsMftZoneReservation = 2

Cheers

Windows Remote Desktop (aka Terminal Services) Port Change

There often becomes a need to remotely access/administer a Windows machine.   While I’d normally recommend using a different method such as an VNC connection over a VPN or a SSH Tunnel, you MAY get away with using the built in services.   Even so, using the default port 3389 may prove troublesome with some security mechanisms such as firewalls and proxy servers.   Here’s a simple way around it all…To change the default port for all new connections created on the Terminal Server:

  1. Run Regedt32 and go to this key:
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp
  2. Find the “PortNumber” subkey and notice the value of 00000D3D, hex for (3389). Modify the port number in Hex and save the new value.
    • NOTE: Ports 80 and 443 are recommended because they route well across various networks.

Good luck… now go out and find a “safer” method!