So it seems that one place I work had someone log in with remote software from corporate but without asking first. Sure enough – a little digging in the events viewer look for events with these id’s for Dameware. 105,108,111,112,109. Even better – you can add a filter and on the filter window – you choose “By Source” and choose dwmrcs. Then – lo and behold – someone did log into my computer while I was using it. If you look at the 111 connect log, it tells you what computer, the username and no – permission is not required. How did I know? Dameware has a telltale screen goes black and flickers like your display cards are not working- then I realized – hold on – this is the same flicker that happened when I got remote help from corporate. One can add tasks and popups to event ID’s. 111 is the id that is the connect ID. Too bad I cannot get charge and get paid to do this research – but that is the life of a contractor – I get to do really cool things though.

Other things you can do is go to the sys tray icon and look for a green&red icon and right click on it. Choose “Who Is Connected”.

Who was it? Well – you could TRY – copying the host name and the IP and using Outlook’s Rules to copy any emails with these in the header – but no one emailed me from the machine from which they connected sadly. Lots of cool hidden stuff right on your desktop.

So I had an odd situation where one company I was working at turned off ALL OUTGOING ports (yes – all including the web) for all employees. You needed special permission and they would enable this. So all remote access was removed for all of my other clients – so I hitch hiked free wifi from a neighbour, but long ago – I moved my “My Documents” to a network drive. To switch this back … one needs to know a few things. My VS 2013’s IIS Express 8.0 would not read or write to its IIS config location (because it was still pointing to a network location which was unavailable) on the My Documents sub-folder. Well, here are the keys to solving it – DO NOT UNINSTALL IT YET – try some things first.

There are TWO registry entries to change My Documents. Read the command line stuff in this article and sure enough this was the key

• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_SZ /d “C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Documents” /f
• reg add “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders” /v “Personal” /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d %%USERPROFILE%%”\Documents” /f

Note that the “Personal” key is the one that represents “My Documents” and on Windows 7 points the DOCUMENTS folder under your user profile. It is this 2nd one that was the clincher.

So, a lot of the ports I need at a client are getting shutdown to the point, where I cannot work at that location to get my work done. I have another client not too far that I can SOMETIMES pick up on their wireless signal. Hmmm, what if I had a directional antenna and can boost the signal strength and use their wifi? Well, I made a phone call tomy favourite Computer hardware shop – the Computer Rack here in Calgary to see if they gad an antenna and any ideas. He mentioned that I might consider an ASUS RT-N12 ($45 CDN) and put dd-wrt on it. Yes … I thought – that will do it … then, when I got home and got thinking about it, I had a old router that I put coova network on and … oh look another one – with nothing on it – a wrt54g v5. Lets try! Yes – I got it to work … Continue reading →