Tech Juice

Let’s say you have a Windows computer with one network card. You are running VMWare on this computer, and you want to have network access from your Virtual Machine(s). There are many ways to accomplish this with VMWare, i.e. NAT, but for true separation you need another hardware network card.

This article explains how to create a setup where Windows uses one network card, and VMWare uses the other.

1: Install and Configure Second Network Card

1. Install the second network card and power on the Windows. Windows will automatically install the drivers and start using the second network adapter alongside the existing one – it will request an IP for both network adapters.
2. Configure Windows to not use the second network adapter [VMWare KB]:

To disassociate the network adapter from all protocols except the VMware Bridge protocol:

1. In the Windows host, open the network adapter settings within Control Panel.
2. • Windows XP – Click Start > Control Panel and open Network Connections.
   • Windows Vista or Windows 7 – Click Windows > Control Panel and open View network Status and Tasks > Change Adapter settings.
3. Right-click the network adapter and click Properties.
4. Deselect

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Say you have identified – through Wireshark or other means – that your computer is communicating with a certain IP. If you suspect this might be a rogue process or a virus ‘phoning home’ then you might want to dig a little deeper.

The oldest trick in the book is to use netstat. A post on Techrepublic describes this method in-depth, but I will describe the important elements here. With command below you get a list of all TCP and UDP sockets, and their associated process ID’s:

netstat -noa

The image below is courtescy of Techrepublic

Now you can use the process ID (PID) to find the name of the process. The default Windows task manager does not display them, but they are easily enabled through View -> Select Columns. Check the PID box, see the image below.

Of course if you are using Process Explorer (as you should) then the PID’s are at your disposal already. With other tools in the the brilliant Sysinternals suite you can make life even easier. The TCPView tool was specifically built for the problem we are trying to solve:

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and

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The “Folder in Use” error occurs when a network share on a remote computer is mounted as a disk in Windows Explorer on Windows 7. This post explains how to resolve it.

Problem:

You have mounted a remote network share on your computer, with write access. When moving folders around in the share you get the “Folder In Use” error.

Looking at the opened file handles on the server that hosted the share, you will probably see the ‘Thumbs.db’ files are being written to. This means Windows Explorer is generating Thumbs.db files in the share–which are thumbnail cache files used by Windows Explorer.

Solution:

Completely disabling the use of ‘Thumbs.db’ files will prevent the problem from occurring:

1. Open the Group Policy Editor (Start -Run -‘gpedit.msc’)
2. Set to Enabled:
   User Configuration Administrative Templates Windows Components Windows Explorer Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files
3. Reboot

A good thread about the same subject can be found here.…

I found a post at tech-recipes.com, which contains some very useful information. Sometimes you need to open a command prompt, i.e. when programming or doing some administrative tasks. This requires opening cmd.exe, then typing some commands to navigate to the directory of choice. There is a shortcut: a way to open the command prompt that opens up with a Windows Explorer directory as its current working directory.

Windows 7

On Windows 7 it is really simple: right-click anywhere in the Windows Explorer window while holding shift. This will add the option Open command window here to the context menu.

Windows XP

This requires some more work, check the original article for a detailed guide!…