The other day I found myself needing to both stop and disable a bunch of services in windows XP on multiple machines. After doing this manually through the Windows GUI on a few machines, I decided to figure out how to do it using the command line.

• First, you’ll need to find the name of the service that you’d like to modify. Click Start > Run, type “services.msc” and click OK.
• The MMC will pop up and list every service on the machine along with its “Current Status” and “Startup Type”. Every service is either in the “Started” or “Stopped” state, and is set to run based on the value in “Startup Type” (Maunal, Automatic, or Disabled).
• Find the service you would like to modify using your batch script. For this example we will use DHCP Client. Double-click the service and a properties window will appear showing you the details of the selected service. The information you’ll need from this window is the Service Name. For the DHCP Client, the service name is “Dhcp”.
• Modifying services via the command line or via batch is done by using the command sc (Service Controller). For this example, I’ll discuss stopping and disabling the service, but you can see all that is possible by typing sc /? at a command prompt.
• To stop a service, type sc stop [service name] at the command prompt. For this example, the command would be sc stop Dhcp
• To disable a service, type sc config [service name] start= disabled at the command prompt. For this example, the command would be sc config Dhcp start= disabled (yes you need the space after the equals sign)

That’s it! You could then compile as many of these commands into one batch file for easy and/or remote execution. For details on creating Windows batch files, click here.

Using group policy I am able to prevent a user group from browsing the hard drive of my Windows XP clients. However, I noticed that using the “file://” protocol within firefox, you can bypass this security and download files from the hard drive via hyperlinks. Preventing this would very useful in a lab setting or for a kiosk. Here is how you do it. (Note in step 3 that multiple protocols are blocked)

1. Make sure you have Java and the Java bin in your PATH variable and unjar the comm.jar in /mozilla/chrome with jar -xf browser.jar
2. This will give you a directory called “content”; open “/content/browser/browser.js” in an editor.
3. Search for the function declaration “function BrowserLoadURL(aTriggeringEvent)” and insert the following lines of code into the position specified below (Approx line 1980).
   if (url.match(/^file:/) || url.match(/^\//) || url.match(/^resource:/) || url.match(/^about:/))
{
alert("Access to this protocol has been disabled!");
exit
}
   Where to insert the code:
   function BrowserLoadURL(aTriggeringEvent)
{
var url = gURLBar.value;
   (**** INSERT CODE HERE *****)
   if (url.match(/^view-source:/)) {
4. Save navigator.js and create a new browser.jar with jar -cf browser.jar content
5. Replace the original browser.jar with the new browser.jar.
6. Fire up mozilla and test it out.

The user can however still type “c:\” an access the hard drive contents. There must be some other function that translates “c:” to “file:///c:/”, which works and bypasses this rule. If anyone finds an easy solution to this let me know.

I needed to open two ports on a large number of machines. Using the Windows GUI is just too time consuming. So I found out how to open the ports via command line, and then added those commands into a batch file that opened the ports, appended to the hosts file, and initiated an installer. This saved me a lot of time, and the less I deal with the XP GUI, the better.

netsh firewall add portopening type number name enable subnet

• type – TCP or UDP
• number – port number (e.g. 80)
• name – name to identify this exception in the firewall

For example, to open up port 80 on the subnet, you could run the command:

netsh firewall add portopening TCP 80 HTTP enable subnet

I’m sure this will come in handy again.

Good stuff.  This cartoon captures both Jobs’ “too hip to be a nerd” and Gates’ “too nerdy to be hip” images.  Guest appearance by Commodore 64!  Pic links to YouTube video.

One of my favorite tech sites, Real Tech News, just put up a great post on windows XP tips. A couple of gems I want to remember:

• XP hides some system software you might want to remove, such as Windows Messenger, but you can make it show everything. Using Notepad or Edit, edit the text file /windows/inf/sysoc.inf, search for the word ‘hide’ and remove it. You can then go to the Add or Remove Programs in the Control Panel, select Add/Remove Windows Components and there will be the software and you can now uninstall it.
• Windows XP can be very insistent about you checking for auto updates, registering a Passport, using Windows Messenger and so on. After a while, the nagging goes away, but if you feel you might go insane before that point, run Regedit, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/Advanced and create a DWORD value called EnableBalloonTips with a value of 0.
• The Start Menu can be leisurely when it decides to appear, but you can speed things along by changing the registry entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Control Panel/Desktop/MenuShowDelay from the default 400 to something a little snappier. Like 0.