Hiding the Executioner Follow Up

I noticed that one of my kids' PCs was on in the morning.  It's usually at a WoW login screen so I decided to double check my shutdown settings.  I found a missing "/f" to force the shutdown.  All corrected.  It also occurred to me that Windows 7 didn't have the keys I told you to modify.  For Windows 7 you simply create the appropriate keys and DWORD entries and it will hide your account.  Here's a sample registry file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon \ SpecialAccounts \ UserList]
"executioner"=dword:00000000  


Just make sure you change "executioner" to the username you selected to run your jobs.  Also, a space was inserted between each \ for readability.  Do a CTRL-H in notepad and replace " \ " with "\".

Hiding The Executioner (job.user)

It's a flurry of posts today.  Once you created the user to run your jobs you may have noticed you now get a Welcome Screen in XP (or maybe you already did), but Executioner shows up in the list.  There is a way to hide him/her ...

You need to modify the registry.  Run regedit and navigate to the following Key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon \ SpecialAccounts \ UserList

Under this key you simply create a new DWORD value – the name matches the users name exactly, and the value is one of the following (Decimal format)

0 – Hides the user just from the welcome screen
1 – The user is shown

 Now when you reboot things will be back to normal.  This is also a good way to use a regular privs user account but give yourself the CTRL-ALT-DEL hidden option of entering a Bill Admin username and password if required.

What's Greener Than S3? Shutdown.

I have a friend that started a Facebook group called, "Green is just a color."  This isn't a political blog so I won't venture into Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth here, but I will tell you that in the coldest Winter Cincinnati has suffered in a very long time, my combined gas & electric bill last month was only $95.  My motivation was green as in dollars.  I'm not so concerned about the Alaskan caribou and if you're a tree-huggin' Darwinist then you can appreciate that the caribou had as much a chance at evolving opposable thumbs as we did and they might well be drilling for oil in our grazing lands.  :)  That's a joke.  Settle down Cameron Diaz.

Many years ago I got divorced.  Now, what I'm about to tell you is not my ex's fault, but I have taken control of the things around me.  With regards to PCs, electricity consumption and this blog: I have unplugged my toaster, coffee maker, unused radios and I even turn off the surge protectors for unused equipment when I walk past them.

How does that relate to my PC?  It is a fact that PCs consume far less power today than they used to when in their low-power modes.  But what about the no-power modes?  Once upon a time it was deemed a far greater risk to turn a PC off every day than it was worth in the electricity to keep it on.  I guess with the amount of electricity they use in a mostly powered off mode that argument is still kind of valid.  I, however, enjoy the complete silence a room experiences only when everything is turned off.  We all know you can't rely on your kids to turn things off when they're done and as I've previously noted with my To Do list we're all very busy.  Who wants to remember to turn off the PC at night?  The PC wants to remember!  (If you tell it to.)

I have a scheduled shutdown of my PC that runs every day!  It's not just a brute force, turn everything off by God!  I've only been blogging for 17 days, but I think you can gather from my previous posts that I look for the graceful solutions when possible.

Schedule a shutdown in the same way you schedule your reboot before, but schedule this one to run nightly at 9:00 PM.  Your command will look a little different:

c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /s /t 60 /f

The /s tells the system to shutdown (not reboot.)  The /t 60 gives the user 60 seconds to override the command, but that's just a fail safe.  You'll see why.  The /f forces the shutdown.

The fail safe is just that, a fail safe.  When you create the nightly schedule for your task you need to set some advanced options.  We're going to start the job at 9:00 PM, but we're only going to let it execute after 60 minutes of inactivity!  That means the earliest the system would shutdown would be 10:00 PM.  In the advanced properties you also tell it to retry for 8 hours.  That's more than enough time to cover the weekend nights when the kids are up late playing World of Warcraft and by scheduling it daily I don't have to make exceptions for President's Day ;)  Unless the kids pull an all-nighter and make it to 5:00 AM I will wake up to a completely powered down, quiet house.

Special Consideration:  If you do this there are other jobs on your PC that may need adjusting.  Windows Update is scheduled to run at 3:00 AM.  You need to move that to 9:00 PM.  No worries though as "inactivity" means human activity (interactivity).  Windows Update can run and finish before 10 and your PC can still shutdown.

Automating Maintenance

Now that we have our job user, what else can we do?  How many times do you hear, "Hey, my PC is running really slow.  Can you look at it?"  We all run through the simple things first, right?  So, you run defrag just to see how bad it is.  Upon realizing defrag hasn't been run since the day the machine was purchased you decide it's also prudent to do a chkdsk.  For the life of me I can't understand why these things aren't configured to run automatically.  I guess I should credit Windows 7 because it is scheduled to run every Wednesday at 1:00 AM on my laptop and I had nothing to do with it.  That said, my laptop is never on at 1:00 AM Wednesday ;)

Most of the PCs I support are still running Windows XP.  Try as I may people just don't have the money to upgrade.  So, as I get these requests for repair I always drop a couple of maintenance jobs on them.

Drag & drop defrag.exe on to the Task Scheduler and change the user to my job user a.k.a. Executioner.  In reality it's named something much more bland: job.user.  For real.  I set the schedule to run on Tue, Thr, Sat & Sun at 7:00 PM.  More on that in a moment.  You'll have to modify the command to include C: and -f (C-drive and force the defrag.)

c:\windows\system32\defrag.exe C: /f

I also schedule chkntfs.exe in the same way.  I only do this weekly on Sat & Sun at 11:00 AM.  chkntfs needs the parameters C: and /C to tell it which drive and to scan upon reboot.  That is quickly followed by a scheduled reboot (shutdown.exe) at 11:05 AM on the same days.  Shutdown needs /r /t 0 /f (reboot, wait 0 seconds and force).

c:\windows\system32\chkntfs.exe C: /C

c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /r /t 0 /f

I typically use Sat & Sun in my schedules because the systems can be off through the week depending on kids' functions, happy hour, etc. :P

Why early evening and weekend mornings?  In my next blog post, "What's Greener Than S3?" you'll find out.  Until then suffice it to say it's a good choice.  Of course, that's what I use for my PCs.  You can still use middle of the night times for family, friends and neighbors.

Tip: I have even scheduled the defrags of our servers disks in the middle of the night.  Servers need luvin' too ...

Who can run what, when?!

I am a big fan of encapsulation.  I like it in OO code and I like it in my operating system and applications where I can implement it.  What do I mean?  I mean I always run SQL Server and Agent under a user account rather than the 'Local Administrator' account.  I do this for IIS' application pools and I do it for scheduled jobs on the system.  Previously I posted a cleanup script and talked about how it was scheduled to run every Monday morning.  I pretty much left it at that, but it recently occurred to me that there was some struggle around making that happen without having administrative privileges on the server.

In our domain, or locally on a machine (as required), I create a standard non-privileged user account to run scheduled jobs under.  For the sake of this post we'll call that user "executioner."  Go create your executioner account now and open Scheduled Tasks.

If you created your own .vbs file to do cleanup work as I did you'll quickly learn that it works as described.  But who wants to run that script when they login every Monday morning?  Or what if it needs to run at 1:00 AM every night?  I don't know about you, but I want to be snugly in bed at 1:00 AM.  You can create the stub of a scheduled job simply by dragging your .vbs file onto the schedule tasks window.

Double click your newly scheduled task in the Scheduled Tasks window.  Change the username field from to "[{machine name}|{domain name}]\{account name}.  You did use Executioner, right?! ;)  If I created a local account mine would read:

nofear\Executioner

And if I created a domain account it would read:

kulai.local\Executioner

Change your schedule and click "OK."  You'll be prompted to enter "Executioner's" password.

All set?  Right click on your job and choose "Run."  It should fail.  :(  I guess that's no so bad.  It's what we want actually.

If you examine the filesystem  using filemon.exe from http://live.sysinternals.com you'll notice that Executioner is failing when trying to open cmd.exe.

Grant Read & Execute permissions to Executioner and try again.  Viola!  Now you have a mostly-non-privileged user account to run your local jobs.

More Reading

Redlight - Greenlight

There were a couple of tweaks that were missing from yesterday's post.  One of the things I've worked hard to do in my work environment is create visual queues throughout our servers that should raise red flags about the role of the machine you're currently working on plays.

One of the ways is to put a background image on every desktop, including the RDP login screens that identify the common name for the server color coded to it's role in Development (green), Test (yellow) or Production (red).

Props to FlamingText.com for their service.  It's there that I make all my images.  HERE is a link to their site with the fields pre-populated to create a yellow on black image with the white drop shadow.  Just change the text and submit your image for creation (http://goo.gl/mKqE).

In addition to that I color the command prompt text to match with the following .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"DefaultColor"=dword:0000000c
# 0c = Red = Production
# 0e = Yellow = Test
# 0a = Green = Dev
# 0b = Blue = DRP

You probably also noticed that each machine "common name" is descriptive.  If you work like I do you have at least 2 monitors full of stuff, multiple RDP sessions open and a stream of people meandering by your desk.  So, when I switch back to a RDP window that I opened hours ago, the desktop is covered and I open a command prompt with RED text I am reminded that I am on a Production server.  Time to slow down and double check what I'm doing.

Speaking of common names: make things easier for your users.  Who wants to remember LAX-VSI-X-WEB1 or LAX-VSI-X-DB2K8 (Los Angeles, Virtual Server Instance, DRP, Web1 or DB2k8) when DRPWEB or DRPDB can get you there?  Use CNAMES in your DNS servers to keep it as simple as possible.

Quick Registry Tweaks

I'm sure, if you're reading this blog you're probably the resident IT geek around your friends and family.  That means you've probably done your fair share of system rebuilds for one reason or another.  I had my very own mother "punch the monkey" not long ago and spent a fair amount of time cleaning her system until she noted, "you could just erase everything.  There's nothing on there I need."  *sigh*  Well, that repair could have taken me 1 hour instead of 4 hours + 1 hour ;)  C'est la vie.

One of the things I hate about system builds is getting all the settings back the way I like them.  That started a quest for me a few years ago to compile all those tweaks into 1 registry file that I can apply to any system and have all my preferences set the way I like them.  Since I build all the systems for my immediate friends and family I'll just assume they like them too because they've never known anything different!

Here are the things that the registry file does:

1. Adds an "Open with Notepad" option to the explorer context menu
2. Adds a "CMD Prompt from HERE" option to the explorer context menu
3. Adds "Copy To" and "Move To" options to the explorer context menu
4. Turns OFF XP's search assistant making it operate like Windows 9x/2k
5. It increases the maximum number of IE connections to 8.  Default is 2 or 3.
6. It unhides all hidden, system, very hidden files and shows all file extensions
7. It shows the full path in the window title and address bars
8. Turns on the "Status Bar" in explorer
9. It removes all the Windows XP visual affects (making the system faster)
10. Turns on Tree View by default in Explorer
11. Turns off the unused Desktop Icon notification

This is offered WITHOUT WARRANTY.  I have used it on every PC that I own.  I have used it on every PC at work.  It has worked perfectly for me.  Your mileage might vary.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
# General Security Tweak(s)
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentcontrolSet\Control\Lsa]
"RestrictAnonymous"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentcontrolSet\Control\SecurePipeServers\win reg]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers]

# Add Copy To and Move To to the Explorer Context Menu
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Copy To]
@="{C2FBB630-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Move To]
@="{C2FBB631-2971-11D1-A18C-00C04FD75D13}"

# Open Explorer in Folder List View
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder]
"EditFlags"=dword:000003d2
"BrowserFlags"=dword:00000008

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell]
@="explore"

# Add Open with Notepad to the Explorer Context Menu
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\opennotepad]
@="Open with Notepad"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\opennotepad\command]
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\NOTEPAD.EXE %1"

# Increase IE connections to 8
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000008

# Show the Status Bar
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"StatusBarOther"=dword:00000001

# Show Hidden, Very Hidden & Protected Operating System Files
# Show File Extensions
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"Hidden"=dword:00000001
"HideFileExt"=dword:00000000
"SuperHidden"=dword:00000000
"DisableThumbnailCache"=dword:00000001
"ShowSuperHidden"=dword:00000001
"WebViewBarricade"=dword:00000001

# Show the full path in the address and title bar
# Turn of Clippy the Search Assistant
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState]
"Settings"=hex:0c,00,02,00,1b,01,e7,77,60,00,00,00
"FullPath"=dword:00000001
"FullPathAddress"=dword:00000001
"Use Search Asst"="no"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CabinetState]
"Use Search Asst"="no"

# Turn off the unused icons on your desktop notification
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\CleanupWiz]
"NoRun"=dword:00000001

# Add CMD prompt from here to the Explorer context men
# Not friendly with Windows 7 -- will replace with update
# do not uncomment the following 2 key insertions
#[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\Command Prompt]
@="CMD prompt from here"

#[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell\Command Prompt\command]
@="Cmd.exe /k pushd %L"

# Enable Quick Edit in CMD windows
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console]
"QuickEdit"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Console]
"QuickEdit"=dword:00000001

# Turn off visual effects to improve performance
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects]
"VisualFXSetting"=dword:00000002

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\AnimateMinMax]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ComboBoxAnimation]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\CursorShadow]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\DragFullWindows]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\DropShadow]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\FontSmoothing]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ListBoxSmoothScrolling]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ListviewAlphaSelect]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ListviewShadow]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\ListviewWatermark]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\MenuAnimation]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\SelectionFade]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\TaskbarAnimations]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\Themes]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\TooltipAnimation]
"DefaultValue"=dword:00000001
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VisualEffects\WebView]
"DefaultApplied"=dword:00000001

Cut and paste the code above into a file with a .REG extension.  Then you can double-click the file to apply the changes.