How to create and setup a VPN connection on Microsoft Windows XP

Most companies have the ability for their staff to connect to their network while they are not physically in the office. Usually this is done via a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

To create a VPN connection on Windows XP you will need to do the following :

Open and view your network connections

The first step is to open your network connections and there are several ways of doing this :

Method 1

Locate the network icon in the lower right corner of the screen (System Tray)

Right click on the icon and go to ‘Open Network Connections’.

Method 2

Go to Start > Run or press ‘Win key + R to open a run dialogue window.

In the run window field type in ‘Control netconnections’.

Method 3

1. Go to Start > Control Panel > network connections (if in classic view)

or

2.Go to Start > Control Panel > Network and Internet Connections > Network Connections (if in category view)

All of the above methods will take you to the following window :

Creating the connection

Click on the ‘Create a new connection’ (See above) and the ‘New connection Wizard’ will be displayed.

Complete as shown

Click Next

Select ‘Connect to the network at my workplace’.

Select ‘Virtual Private Network connection’ and click Next.

Enter the name for the connection. This doesn’t need to be the server address as this will come on the next page of the wizard.

Enter the IP address or server name for your VPN. You will be given this by your network administrator.

Complete as above unless multiple people use your machine and will also use the VPN.

Your VPN connection has now been configured.

Change the gateway setting

By default this connection will route all of your traffic via your VPN. If you want only the traffic required for the VPN to be transmitted over the VPN and all other traffic/connections to be unaffected, you will need to alter a setting on the adapter.

Open your network connections (See method 1,2 or 3 above).

Right click your VPN connection and go to Properties

Go to the networking tab

On the networking tab highlight the internet protocol (TCP/IP) and click properties.

Click advanced on the properties window.

Untick the ‘Use default gateway on remote network’ option on the general tab and click OK.

Connecting the VPN

Open your network connections (See method 1,2 or 3 above).

Right click your VPN icon and select ‘Connect’.

This will open a login window.

Enter your username and password and click connect. It will verify your username and password.

A new connection will now show in your system tray.

The network connection in your Network connections window will now show as connected.

Your VPN is now active and ready to use.

How to upgrade and add larger drives to a Buffalo Terastation

For some time I had wanted to upgrade my Terastation from a 1TB capacity to 3TB. This wasn’t really a pressing issue until one of the drives failed, leaving me with the dilemma of paying for a new 1TB disk or biting the bullet and going for two new 3TB drives. I chose the latter.

After a couple of hours of googling and reading forums of people trying to decide whether it was possible or not to perform the upgrade I called Terasation to ask them directly to which they responded “We don’t support it, it is best if you just buy a bigger unit” (For hundreds of pounds is the part they left out).

As I couldn’t find a clear step by step guide on how to do the upgrade I decided to jump in, work it out and then create an article for other people to use. So here’s how it’s done.

1. Take screenshots of your existing Terastation setup so you have something to refer back to later.
2. Backup your data to another location – VERY IMPORTANT.
3. Shutdown the Terastation, open the front panel and slide out the old disks.
4. Unscrew the old drives from the hard drive cages.
5. Screw cages to new disks.
6. Slide new drives into the Terasation.
7. Install Nas Navigator from disk onto your PC if you don’t already have it installed. (The disk would have come with the unit when it was purchased).
8. Power on the Terastation and run the Nas Navigator.
9. Error on first nas navigator screen.

10. When you hover over the icon of your Terastation an error appears saying “The EM mode was detected. Update firmware or contact your local technical support”. You will now need to update your firmware.
11. Go to http://www.buffalo-technology.com/en/support/downloads/
12. Put the model of your Terasation in and download firmware .zip.
13. Extract zip and Run TSupdater.

14. Press update.
15. You may receive this error.

16. If you do, click ok and then quit the tsupdater screen. Find the TSupdater.ini file and open it in notepad and find the following entries :

[Flags]
VersionCheck = 1
NoFormatting = 1
17. Change the “NoFormatting=1” to “Noformatting=0” and save.
18. Double click the TSupdate.exe and click the update button.
19. This time you will get a different message :

20. Click Yes

21. It will start formatting and will then transfer and install the firmware.
22. A message will appear saying the terastation needs to be restarted. Restart it and don’t touch it. When it comes up it will finish installing the latest firmware. It reboots itself and then comes back and shows the latest firmware version on the led.
23. When the terastation comes back up – access the web interface you may see that it is now in Japanese. Don’t worry – Log into the interface using ”Admin” & “Password” (which are the default login details for a Buffalo Terastation).

24. You wont be able to read the text (unless you’re Japenese or can read the language) so below is a screenshot of where to find it i.e. 4^th item along on the main menu > first item next menu, third box down and click button.

25. Once you select English from the drop down the Terastation will update itself to the correct language.
26. You’re upgrade is complete you now have a larger capacity Buffalo Terastation.

A word of caution : By default, the Terastation will configure itself as Raid 0 which will not provide any resiliency if a drive fails. Therefore, you should change to RAID 1 which mirrors the disks.
For instructions on how to do this, please see my last post entitled ‘Recreating a disk array – change from RAID 0 to RAID 1’ on Buffalo Terastation.

Recreating a disk array – change from RAID 0 to RAID 1 on Buffalo Terastation

The factory configuration for a Buffalo Terastation is RAID 0 i.e. if the unit contains two disks they will be set up to act as one large disk. This is OK but it does mean that if one of the drive fails all data will be lost.

A better configuration is RAID 1 which will make the disks mirror each other i.e. if one drive fails the data is safe because an exact copy still exists on the other drive.

I recently upgraded my Buffalo Terastation from 1TB to 3TB which involved reformatting the drives and restoring back to factory settings i.e. RAID 0. As I wanted to change it to RAID 1 I searched around and stumbled upon this great video that explains how to do it in detail.

I have summarised the video at the end of the post for those that want the text version.

Video notes

1. Log into your Terastation device using the web admin user interface.
2. Go to system option and select the storage tab. This will bring up all your disk and raid information.
3. The first step is to delete the existing RAID array (RAID 0) by going to the Raid  array area of the interface.
4. Click on the option to delete the RAID array. Deleting the RAID array will delete all of the data on the disks.
5. Type in the confirmation number to confirm you want to delete the array and data.
6. It will then delete the RAID array which should take a couple of minutes.
7. By going back to the default folder area you will see there are no shares present anymore.
8. The next step is to create the new RAID array (RAID 1) by going into the system tab > storage. In the RAID array box click ‘Array 1’ and it will scan for all of your disk.
9. Use the drop down menu to toggle which RAID mode you need > Select RAID 1.
10. Select all disks to be included in the array and select ‘Create RAID array’.
11. Click OK and enter the confirmation number.
12. Once the Raid has been created go to the Folder setup and create a folder share.
13. Under storage the RAID array status will show as ‘Checking’ as the Terastation is checking the integrity of the array but you can continue to use the Terastation as normal while this happens. When it is complete the yellow light which may be blinking on the front the Terastation will stop.

Citrix logon page in Internet Explorer browser shows blank/black screen

When using a Citrix Access Gateway you will use a web address (URL) to access the logon screen. You will then enter your username and password and begin your Citrix session.

However, I recently encountered a problem whereby when I went to the web page I received a complete blank/black screen with no logon options.
If you are encountering the same problem you are in luck as I have found two ways of solving the issue.

Method 1 : Compatibility settings

Go to the Gear (or Cog) icon in Internet explorer and select compatibility view settings.


You will be presented with the following screen

You will see that your current URL will be in ‘Add the website’ field > Click Add

You will see that it is now added and will always use compatibility view in the future.
Untick ‘Display intranet sites in Compatibility View’.
Click Close

Your logon screen will now appear.
In addition, to these settings make sure that the following setting is un-ticked in your internet options.

If this is ticked it will wipe out your compatibility settings every time you close your browser, resulting in you having to repeat the above steps every time you wish to access the Citrix logon page.
Method 2 : Emulation and Document Mode

1. Access the Citrix Access Gateway website
2. Press F12 whilst in your browser
3. Under Emulation, select the Document mode to be 8, the Browser profile to be Desktop and the User agent string to be Internet Explorer 8.

I hope this was helpful.

Internet information server (IIS) HTTP 503 Error Server unavailable

Within my company we have a windows based client-server application which uses IIS at the backend.

For months (since we virtualised) we have randomly been experiencing a ‘503 server unavailable’ error which has stopped the application completely.

As we didn’t have a great deal of information on the problem and we had many users jumping up and down we resolved the issue temporarily by restarting IIS using the ‘IIS reset /noforce’ command. This would keep the issue at bay for a few days and then it would occur again. One day I had the problem 4 times in one day so I decided to get to the bottom of it.

I found that the problem was not being caused by an error but by a safety mechanism built into IIS application pools called Rapid Fail Protection. Here is an explanation I found as to why the default application pool was being disabled :

“Rapid-fail protection is unique in that it doesn't apply to recycles based on requests and resources. Instead, an application pool is placed into rapid-fail protection if the IIS 6.0 W3SVC fails to ping the worker process, if the worker process crashes, or if its startup or shutdown time limit is exceeded. This is a sign to the service that the worker process is no longer available and for health reasons should be shut down. When a pool is placed into rapid-fail protection, W3SVC actually stops the app pool, and HTTP.sys returns 503 responses to all queued requests and to all new requests to that pool.”

OK so this explains part of the problem :

1. Several worker processes encounter issues
2. W3SVC fails to get an adequate response.
3. W3SVC shuts the application pool down
4. Users get the ‘503 server unavailable’ error.

This is good as it explains what is happening but why has this started happening since we virtualised.

In our case it was a simple tick box. Before we virtualised we had the application running on a physical server which didn’t have a lot of RAM and we would often get ‘No system memory’ errors and our application would stop working.

When we virtualised one of our engineers tried to address the issue by limiting each worker process to a specified amount of RAM before it recycled itself.

Note : To access DefaultAppPool Properties – Open IIS on your server > expand Application Pools > Right click DefaultAppPool>Select properties> Recycling tab

As a result the worker processes would often use up their allocated memory and would terminate and not be contactable. In busy periods this would happen to several of the worker processes all at the same time which would cause Rapid Fail Protection to be triggered.

So the solution was to untick the ‘Maximum used memory’ setting and restart IIS. As we had virtualised and increased our memory we could afford to give the application free reign.

Mystery solved.

How to restart IIS without losing data

There may be a time where your webserver IIS (Internet Information Server) encounters a problem and you need to restart it.

If data is being written via a website or an application that uses IIS, a forced reboot on IIS may result in data loss.

To combat this there is a nifty command that can be used which will try and stop IIS but will wait until it has finished processing it's current task. In order to run this command do the following :

1. Open up a command prompt (Winkey + R and type cmd)
2. type in "iisreset /noforce"
3. You will see that it tries to stop IIS but fails. This is normal as it will wait for IIS to finish.
4. After 30 secs to a minute, try the command again and you will see that it stops the service and then restarts it without any data loss.

Windows 8.1 update – How to change the default keyboard language to UK (or any other)

Windows 8 has always been less than user friendly so with the 8.1 update I was expecting Microsoft to have thrown the users a life line. The ongoing theme of windows 8 seems to be “Where would the user expect this to be…”

“OK let’s move it from there !!”.

So it came as no surprise that shortly after I had installed the Windows 8.1 update (and the keyboard had defaulted to US English) I could not find a simple way to change it. On all other versions of Windows it was solved with a trip to the control panel >Languages >Input options and select from the keyboard options. However, this is how you do it in Windows 8.1.

1. Go to Control Panel.

2. Select Language

3. Click Options



4. Click ‘Add an input method’



5. Scroll down to keyboard layout you want to install, click Preview to check how it looks, click Addto add to the input methods.



6. Close the language window and Control Panel if it is no longer required and go back to the desktop.

7. In the notification area you will now see a language option appear. Select English (United Kingdom) and UK United Kingdom keyboard option.


Now your keyboard should be in the language of your choice.