What is the Network and Sharing Center in Windows?

In many of our tutorials about networking in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, you will see that we mention quite often the Network and Sharing Center. This panel is the entrance point to many networking tasks. Therefore, in this article I will show you what is the Network and Sharing Center, how to launch it and which are the main tasks that can be performed starting from here.

What is the Networking and Sharing Center?

Simply put, the Network and Sharing Center is the control panel from where most of networking settings and tasks can be launched in Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

Tasks which are Launched from Networking and Sharing Center

Let’s start with Windows 7: the Network and Sharing Center window is split in two. On the left side there is a column with shortcuts to tasks such as: managing your wireless networks, changing settings for all network adapters and changing network sharing settings. On the bottom left side there are shortcuts to the HomeGroup settings panel, to the Internet Optionspanel and to the Windows Firewall control panel.

On the right there is a big white area split in two parts. The upper-side shows you basic information about your current network connection: the name of the active network, access type and the HomeGroup to which your computer belongs. The lower-side contains links towards wizards which help you do the following: setup a new connection or network, connect to another network, change HomeGroup and sharing settings and troubleshoot problems.

In Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, the panel looks almost the same, with some minor differences. For example, the "Connect to a network" link is gone because its wizard is the same as "Set up a new connection or network".

The "Choose homegroup and sharing options" link is also gone, because the same Homegroupsettings can be accessed via the Homegroup link on the left column.

On the left column, you won’t find the "Manage wireless networks" link, not even on laptops or tablets. That's because the management of wireless networks connections is done differently in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. More details about it can be found in thes guides:

• How to Manage Wireless Network Connections & Profiles in Windows 8
• How to Delete or Forget Wireless Network Profiles in Windows 8.1

How to Start the Networking and Sharing Center?

The Network and Sharing Center can be launched using several methods. One way is to launch the Run window by pressing the Windows key + R, type "control.exe /name Microsoft.NetworkAndSharingCenter" and click OK. This works in all versions of Windows that include this feature.

A second alternative, that works only in Windows 7, is to click on the network icon on the right side of the taskbar and then on "Open Network and Sharing Center".

In Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 you must right-click the network icon, on the right side of the taskbar, then click on "Open Network and Sharing Center".

How to Reset Windows Password Without an Install CD

If you’ve forgotten your Windows password and you don’t have an install CD laying around, there’s no need to worry. Not only are there half a dozen complicated ways to reset the password, you can do it easily with the Offline Windows Password editor.

Of course, if you do have a Windows CD, you can reset your password the easy way with a simple trick.

Note: this should work on all versions of Windows, but if you are running Windows 8 or 8.1 andalso using a Microsoft Account to login to your computer, you’ll need to reset your Microsoft Account password using a web browser on their web site.

Create the Boot Disk.

You will need to create a boot disk using another PC. First, you’ll need to download the boot disk from here:

Download the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

Then download and launch ImgBurn, which is a really simple piece of software that helps you burn an ISO image to a disk.

 Note: if you have some other application for burning an ISO image, you can use that instead.

Choose the Source, click the burn button, and create the boot disk.

You could also create a bootable USB drive instead if you’d like, the instructions are on the Offline NT download site.

Resetting Your Windows Password.

Boot your PC from the boot disk (you might have to adjust the BIOS to allow booting from the CD). You’ll be prompted at a couple of screens, which you can generally just hit the Enter key at. For

Steps to Create a Self Signed Security (SSL) Certificate and Deploy it to Client Machines.

Developers and IT administrators have, no doubt, the need the deploy some website throughHTTPS using an SSL certificate. While this process is pretty straightforward for a production site, for the purposes of development and testing you may find the need to use an SSL certificate here as well.

As an alternate to purchasing and renewing a yearly certificate, you can leverage your WindowsServer’s ability to generate a self signed certificate which is convenient, easy and should meet these types of needs perfectly.

Creating a Self Signed Certificate on IIS

While there are several ways to accomplish the task of creating a self signed certificate, we will use the SelfSSL utility from Microsoft. Unfortunately, this doesn’t ship with IIS but it is freely available as part of the IIS 6.0 Resource Toolkit (link provided at the bottom of this article). Despite the name “IIS 6.0″ this utility works just fine in IIS 7.

All that is required is to extract the IIS6RT to get the selfssl.exe utility. From here you can copy it to your Windows directory or a network path/USB drive for future use on another machine (so you don’t have to download and extract the full IIS6RT).

Once you have the SelfSSL utility in place, run the following command (as the Administrator) replacing the values in <> as appropriate:

selfssl /N:CN=<your.domain.com> /V:<number of valid days>

The example below produces a self signed wildcard certificate against “mydomain.com” and sets it to be valid for 9,999 days. Additionally, by answering yes to the prompt, this certificate is automatically configured to bind to port 443 inside the Default Web Site of IIS.

While at this point the certificate is ready to use, it is stored only in the personal certificate store on the server. It is a best practice to also have this certificate set in the trusted root as well.

Import a Trusted Root Certification Authority In Windows 7/Vista/XP.

1. Start Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Tool

Click Start -> Run -> Enter 'MMC' and click 'OK'

 2. Click File -> Add/Remove Snap-In...

3. Add Certificate.

Select 'Certificates' in left panel and click 'Add' to move to right panel , Then Click 'OK'

4. Select 'Computer Account' option and click 'Next'

HOW TO RESTORE OFF A MOUNTED SLAVE DISK ON REDHAT + CPANEL (CRASH/HACK/BAD KERNEL)

How to Restore off a mounted slave disk on Redhat + Cpanel (crash/hack/bad kernel)

Warning: This is not to be done by the unexperienced admins bad things could happen. Hire someone.

Sometimes if you get hacked or boot with a bad kernel you need to have the datacenter mount your old drive, and install a new one with a fresh installation of redhat. First things first lets make sure you have an updated kernel, we will do it with up2date for ease of use:

up2date -f kernel

check the grub.conf /or lilo config to ensure the settings are right. (if using lilo run this command aswell /sbin/lilo -v -v and check for errors)

Now reboot the server

shutdown -r now
I. Mount the backup Drive

First check to see if there are any drives mounted.

df -h

You should get something simular to this if it isent mounted yet:

[root@localhost root]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 37G 1.4G 33G 4% /
/dev/hda1 101M 7.7M 88M 9% /boot
none 125M 0 125M 0% /dev/shm
[root@localhost root]#

if it is mounted you will see something like this:

-bash-2.05b# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 53G 31G 20G 62% /
/dev/hda1 99M 14M 80M 15% /boot
none 248M 0 248M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc3 53G 31G 20G 61% /mnt/old
-bash-2.05b#

HOW TO INSTALL CACTI ON LINUX

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool's data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices. For More information http://www.cacti.net/what_is_cacti.php

• first login as root to the server. please note this should have "yum" install already. my recommendation is to use standalone server or virtual server for monitoring . its depend on your network size.

# yum install mysql-server mysql php-mysql php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-cli php-snmp php-pear-Net-SMTP php-mysql httpd

• Configure MySQL server

# mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD

• Create cacti MySQL database

WHY READ-ONLY DOMAIN CONTROLLERS (RODC) ?

In enterprise level network its common to have HQ(Head Quarters)-Branch Office network. These branch offices may required  to connected with HQ resources for its operations. Most of the time this kind of setup uses WAN links to connect branch  Offices with HQ network. Let's assume we have company called ABC and its HQ is located in Canada Toronto. Due to the  Expansion its need branch office open in London, UK. So the requirement is more complicated as its 2 different countries.  

The users in London office still need to authenticate the company domain environment and access the resources. Let's Look in  
to some of the difficulties, challenges faces with typical this kind of setup.

Lack of Resources

To connect HQ with branch site its required secure, reliable connection. But these connections typically comes with high $$$$ cost. Even though its cost mostly these links will be with speed of 128kb, 256kb, 512kb etc. If users in branch site is authenticating company AD it will use WAN link for the all the authentication, resources access etc. if the number of  users increase in branch site the link utilization just for the AD activities will increased. Also since its between  different geographical locations, different ISP, many facts will affect the reliability of the link as well. what happen if  the WAN link went down on critical business day ? so solution is to deploy AD in branch site and it will be opening whole different range of concerns, problems.