Computer Yay!

On Tuesday evening, I'll be doing the WOOO, NEW COMPUTER dance. It's a very special dance, and no, the event will not be televised.

You see, I'm a computer nerd. But I'm a computer nerd on a somewhat tight budget. Back in the day, I had the luxury of building a new computer once every year and a half or two years. Just frequent enough to stay inside of 'the curve'. Then again, I was also working a shitty job, lived at home with mom, and racked up the credit card debt. Anyway.

About 5 years ago, we got a sweet Dell laptop that has been my primary computer ever since. I'm a computer game player, and I've been crazy lucky that it's been able to keep up. At least, until now. I finally got a game for my birthday that I'd be waiting on forever for, and..... it would not run on the laptop. At all.

So, here's what happened, along with some story. As I may have said, we're expecting a baby in April. Cool! We've both taken job cuts, and I won't claim that we make retarded money in the first place. Eh, not cool. On the other hand, we've worked fairly hard to pay off ALL of our credit cards, and now just have a car payment, student loans and a mortgage. Cool!! We are kinda scared stiff about affording a kid. I mean, we can all eat and keep the heat running, but like, we want to do Montessori, which ain't cheap, and live generally like upper middle class fat cats. And with Krissi planning to take at least a few months off, we have some anxiety about our income.

I don't know why I'm on here stabbing myself in the hand while telling you this. Maybe its somehow like getting something off my chest. Imagine your loved one bursting in and saying in a loud and anxious voice, "Okay, don't panic, I bought this really awesome thing. I know it wasn't the best idea, because we could have used that money elsewhere, but I did it, and its done, and I'm happy with my decision." And then staring at you really hard for a second, and saying "Are we okay?", as though prepared for an actual physical fight.

That's not at all what happened in my case, but strangely it feels like that. In my head. No, I'm very fortunate and Krissi gave her blessing, and BAM! Faster than you could blink, I ordered my computer shit. We also threw a hefty sum into savings.

I started to inventory the shit I got on here, mostly because I love looking back at stuff years later to reminisce, but also just a tiny bit to brag, but then it felt too bragy, so I'm not. Right now.


In the "Everything else" news quick round up... Maddie and John are still alive and going. Their new family additions have been a joyous and tiring and perhaps even stressful experience for them, but they're all doing fantastically. Maddie's mom was down for a few weeks helping, and I know that having her there was invaluable to them. She's gone back home, and everyone misses her, but hopefully she'll be back sometime in the near future.

My D&D game might be going on hiatus earlier than I'd anticipated. We're loosing players as everyone all the sudden has kids, or family obligations, and so forth.

Um, that's all I can think of.

Computer Yay!!

Domain Permissions Freak Out

So we have a new salesperson. He's going to work out of his home-office in Indiana, but he's down here at our corporate office for a couple of weeks.

I got him a laptop, and got it setup, and decided not to put it on the domain, since he'll be using VPN to get back to our Terminal Server, where he'll access all of his stuff. So he's been down here for about two weeks, and I handed him the laptop a week ago, and have been tweaking stuff as we go, making sure that he has access to the stuff that he needs.

So today I'm fooling with some random small problem, when I go to browse to our network file server. I get in, and accidentally click on the wrong folder. Now what should happen is that he should get a little message that says "You don't have access, blah blah blah". But I don't. Instead, I'm right in. It also occured to me, right at that second, that I did not authenticate when I hit the file server. To put that in non tech terms, I accessed our secure file server without it knowing who the hell I was. I clicked through a few more folders, testing folders that were more and more secure, finally checking our super-duper-secure folder. I can get into them all. So, I spent just a couple of seconds completely freaking out.

If this laptop- which is just part of a default workgroup, not on the domain, hence, no permissions on the domain, it doesn't even exist as far as domain security is concerned- can access any folder on our file server.. maybe on our network? I remotely log onto our domain controller and start double checking security and share permissions. I start second guessing myself. "Well, I thought that security overrode share settings..".

I spend about 10 minutes in simmering panic mode, trying to figure out how the hell I can access all of this data - its not supposed to work this way. I'm even trying to figure out the likelihood of having been the victim of a worm or trojan that somehow botches network security.

Finally the brain cells start to really fire, and it occurs to me to check and see what account the domain controller is seeing, that is accessing the data. In other words, what credentials am I using to hit this data?

Administrator.

.......??? I'm not logged into the local machine as administrator.

Then it clicks.

I bet that while setting up this laptop, I hit the network and used the administrator credentials. But why is it caching them? Why am I not having to re authenticate? I even tried mapping a network drive with the salesperson's credentials, then unmapped it, and tried the data again - still administrator.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to uncache network logon info.

I start digging around on google. "clear network logon cache", nothing good. "clear share password network", nothing good. I start mixing and matching words, trying to get something. Anything.

And then:

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll, KRShowKeyMgr

It brings up a handy little screen that shows the stored logon info for network locations. I dig around a little more and find that on Windows Server 2003, its an icon in the control panel! Handy!

Whew.

Awesome.

I want one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner