The Occasional Tech

How To Recover Your Lost SoulseekNS Password (Windows)

Have you forgotten your Soulseek password?

If so, and you still have access to the PC you had Soulseek installed on, then you're in luck. The password is stored in plain text in the Windows registry.

You can find it here:

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Soulseek2\config

in a key called login.

Just double-click on the key and you will see your password.

Now if you've forgotten your username, then I think you're hosed!

Note, these instructions are for SoulseekNS, which is no longer under development. Not sure how you reset/find a lost password for the new version: SoulseekQT.

See you in the Dark Ambient channel!

Resetting a network adapter with Powershell

I recently moved to a new PC and there's something wrong with the network configuration. The hardware seems OK but every few hours Windows reports that there is no Internet connection. I haven't spent much time troubleshooting but it looks like the PC loses its IP lease and does not renew it, but that's mostly just a guess at this stage.

The Windows 7 Troubleshooter reports:

The Network Diagnostics Framework has completed the diagnosis phase of operation. The following repair option was offered:



Helper Class Name: AddressAcquisition



Root Cause: "Local Area Connection" doesn't have a valid IP configuration



Root Cause Guid: {245a9d66-ae9c-4518-a5b4-655752b0a5bd}



Repair option: Investigate router or broadband modem issues

If you're connected to a hotspot or domain network, contact the network administrator. Otherwise:

    1.  Unplug or turn off the device.

    2.  After all the lights on the device are off, wait at least 10 seconds.

    3.  Turn the device on or plug it back into the power outlet.

To restart a router or modem that has a built-in battery, press and quickly release the Reset button.



RepairGuid: {9513cc1c-4a26-4cb8-bf89-0a82129bd105}



Seconds required for repair: 63



Security context required for repair: 0



Interface: Local Area Connection ({419b3c06-e283-4a99-adaa-b66439dd064d})

Running the Troubleshooter does fix the issue. It appears that this tool resets the network adapter which forces a new IP to be allocated to the interface.

I've never had this type of issue with Ethernet on Windows before, although I have experienced unstable 802.11 connections on certain laptops.

I've also updated the Intel NIC driver to see if this would help - it didn't. Others do seem to have this issue also. Most people use the workaround of assigning a static IP to the adapter - this isn't an option for me in this environment.

Anyway, I need to remote into this PC so I can't have it sitting there with a non-working network connection!

So to get around this problem, I wrote a script in Powershell which I've scheduled in Task Scheduler to run every 10 minutes. The script will check if the network connection has Internet connectivity and, if not, will reset the network adapter. So the longest I'll have to wait to get on to the PC will be 10 minutes.

Here it is:

# Set up event log source
# redirect stderr to null since there's no simple way to check if the source already exists
(new-eventlog -logname Application -Source "Reset Network Adapter") 2> $null

$pingResponse = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_PingStatus -Filter "Address='www.google.com.au'" -ComputerName . | Select-Object -Property Address,ResponseTime,StatusCode

if ($pingResponse.ResponseTime -eq $null) {
    Write-Host Network connection down. Resetting adapter.
    write-eventlog Application -source "Reset Network Adapter" -eventid 1 -message "Network connection down. Resetting adapter."

    # Assumes you have only one ethernet device in your PC. If you have more, use something like: '-and $_.Name like "*Intel*"'
    $adapter = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_networkadapter | Where-Object { $_.AdapterType -eq "Ethernet 802.3" }
    $adapter.disable()
    $adapter.enable()
} else {
    Write-Host Network connection seems OK
    write-eventlog Application -source "Reset Network Adapter" -eventid 2 -message "Network connection seems OK"
}

Hope that helps someone!

Scheduling the Task

This is quite simple but I recommend creating a new user on your system to run the task. For the above script they need to be in the Local Admin group in order to create the event log.

Add an action with:

command: powershell

and

arguments: -file path_to\reset-adapter.ps1

An Exercise for the Reader

You can trigger a Windows scheduled task based on an event. When the network fails there are a bunch of events that are generated by applications and the System. You could pick one that reliably represents this network issue and set up your scheduled task to only run when this event is detected. This is a nicer approach that polling every 10 minutes.

Some hints for finding appropriate events in the System Log:

Source: Time-Service, DNS Client Events

Resources

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-Server-2008-Powershell-perform-common-network-commands.html

SSH login error: "server refused public key signature despite accepting our key"

Just a quick one today...

If you are receiving the error above, make sure of these things before regenerating the key:

Your account is not locked on the server
You are using the right private key!
You have added your public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the server
You added the wrong format of public key to authorized_keys file (e.g. added the Putty format instead of the OpenSSH format)

This error means that the public key generated by your SSH client was successfully transferred to the server but did not match the one stored on the server. In some cases, as mentioned above, this is misleading.

If your account is disabled then you will also get this error on some systems, even if the key you are sending is correct.

Testing exit code of Windows Batch file

Even though PowerShell is awesome, the old DOS Batch file is still a useful and commonly used tool. You will find Batch files powering crucial automated processes all over the globe.

Commonly you will run a sequence of commands and check each of them for successful completion. The usual way to do this is to check the errorlevel variable like so:

c:\mycommand.exe

if errorlevel 1 exit 1

(NOTE, you need to clear any environment variables called errorlevel because the Batch interpreter will return these instead of the built in variable if they are defined. Do this just like this: set errorlevel=)

Anyway, once you have checked each of your commands for errors, you will usually print out error messages and return your own error codes so that external programs calling your batch file will know what went wrong. You do this like so:

exit 2

Where 2 is an error code that means something specific to your script.

Testing these initially seems difficult because when you run the script it exits and you cannot check which error code was returned. There is a way to test these! Here it is:

cmd /k myscript.bat

echo %errorlevel%

Hope that helps - send me questions/comments below!

Giving a Windows directory a drive letter

Sometimes you need to test a program/script on your local machine that is expecting a certain drive, let's say X: drive. Your local machine may only have a C: drive, so what do you do?

You could reconfigure the script to use your C: drive but this is an unnecessary extra step. Instead you can create drive letters that map to Windows directories (folders) using the SUBST command.

It's easy, at your command line, type:

subst DRIVE_LETTER: PATH

For example:

subst X: C:\temp\testdata

You must not add a trailing slash to the directory or it will not work.

Once you're done, just add /D to the command plus drive letter, e.g.

subst X: /D

Hope this makes your life easier!

[Via Lifehacker -> via Codejacked]