How to solve EVENT ID 1202 SceCli 0x57 Parameter is incorrect

Customer is repeatedly getting this Event ID on all Servers and Clients, especially on the Domain Controllers being logged every 5 minute.

Searching for that Error gives thousands of results, most less helpful.The way I solved this problem was like this.

  1. On one of the servers having the problem, run RSOP.MSC
  2. Resultant Set of Policies showed a Warning on the Computer policies. Selecting properties there showed the same error as in our Event Log.
  3. Browsing the Tree showed that there were a problem in the Password Policy section, from the Default Domain Policy.
  4. Which were also visible in GPMC (Group Policy Management Console)
  5. By modifying the Default Domain Policy and fixing the bad entries (no clue how they got there). The Error message (and problem) is now gone.

 

 

 

 

 

Enable driver verifier for all none-microsoft drivers with powershell

I’ve been doing some debugging for a customer, who has multiple industrial Client PC’s who are rebooting regularly. And to get more information in the memory dumps I had a need to configure the system to do a complete memory dump but also to enable extra verification of all drivers in the system to find the cause of the bluescreens.

Window has a built in tool called “Verifier” where you can enable extra checks on calls done by specific drivers. You generally don’t want to enable it on all drivers as that will slow down the system notable. And truthfully, the number of times it’s a Microsoft device driver who’s causing the issue is so small, because they check and stress test their drivers so much better than all the other vendors. Thus, it’s always better to enable the extra checks for all drivers, except the ones from Microsoft to start with.

As I didn’t want to run around to all the Client PC’s and configure verifier, I’ve made a small powershell script that reads the name of all none-microsoft drivers from the system and enabled verification for just those drivers. Which can then be execute in any number of ways.

It’s using both the Get-VMIObject and Get-WindowsDrivers to get a complete list of thirdparty drivers in the system. And it will also configure the system for a Complete Memory Dump.

Just to be safe, I’ve added /bootmode resetonbootfail so it will reset the verifier settings in case the system is bluescreening during boot due to verifier notificing a bad driver in the boot process.

Reboot the PC, get a big cold Coke and wait for the bluescreen to happen.

Working with Virtual NIC’s in Windows

At times when I’m for example at a customer and need to connect my Laptop to different VLAN’s it’s really nice to add new virtual Network Cards (vNIC’s) on the fly, and be connected to multiple networks at the same time. vnics

By transforming the Network Cards in your computer, into a virtual switch, and then add Virtual Network Cards connected to that switch, it’s possible to do a bit of network magic.

Here is a part of the script that I run each time I reinstall my PC’s to create the vNIC’s that I need and use the most. The script is also installing the software I need and doing some other minor changes (always a work in progress).

Pre-Requisits: Hyper-V Role installed

Thanks to my friend and colleague Mikael Nyström who showed me this a few years ago.

 

MSTSC and RDCMAN Crashing?

For the last 3 days we have had issues connecting with RDP through our Remote Desktop Gateway. I’ve used both RDCMAN (Remote Desktop Connection Manager) and plain MSTSC where it’s crashing. It’s been happening quite regularly with the latest build (10041) of Windows 10 but also with a Windows 8.1 client.

In my case it’s sometimes been possible to connect to some of the servers but not others. And I’ve at times been able to stay connected for shorter periods (5-30 sec) before the client crashed.

I did a quick usermode debug of the crashing application and found out that in both cases it’s a DLL file for MSTSC that’s causing the problem and it’s related to UDP Traffic.

Disabling UDP in the Remote Desktop Gateway seems to solve the problem short term. I’ll have to look into it more in depth later on, but for now I’m at least able to keep on working.

RDP Connection Crashing

 

 

Bugcheck: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE (9f)

I experienced a Bluescreen of Death (BSOD) on my Windows 8 Laptop (HP EliteBook 8560w) this morning when it resumed from Hibernate.
I quickly launched WinDBG and opened the crashdump.

WinDBG managed to find the driver that caused this problem by itself this time. But IF WinDBG had not been able to show me the faulty driver, the next step would have been to use the Bugcheck info (0x0000009f) to dig further into this;

The last argument is the interesting one, and which we should look into further with the !irp command.

It will show something similar to this. And it’s the e1c63x64.sys driver that were active at the time of the bluescreen. Same info as !analyze -v managed to figure out by itself.

Hmm, so what driver is that?

intel_driver1Too bad that it were unable to provide more detailed information. But some oldschool properties of the \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\e1c63x64.sys file gave this;

And a quick search on Intel’s Support sites showed that there was a newer version available for my NIC;
Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection here.

Driver updated, and hopefully no more bluescreens due to this driver bug.

 

Can’t access a computer remotely without password?

I got a question the other day, “how can i access a computer remotely without a password?”

The reason that it’s by default is not possible to access a computer remotely with an account that does not have a password is because there is a new security policy/feature which states:

You can change that behavior by modifying the “Local Security Policy” here:

NoPassword

 

Just a thought. One could argue that it’s actually safer to have no password on the Local Admin account and leave this policy Enabled. Than have a weak password on the Admin account.

Because if there is no password, no malicious person or software could ever remotely access the computer as a local admin. While if you have a weak password, it would be possible for someone to brute force (try all possible combinations until you get in) the password.

 

 

Howto get NAP with Server and Domain Isolation to play together

If you are trying to get NAP (Network Access Protection) and SDI (Server & Domain Isolation) to play nice, you might not get the results you are expecting. I’m going to explain howto get NAP with Server and Domain Isolation to play together

There are plenty of Blogs and Guides out there, explaining how to get either NAP or Server and/or Domain Isolation to work. And that’s basically no problem so I won’t cover that here today.
But I’ve so far not found anyone who’s tried to combine both technologies.

Background

First of all, some background for my environment. I’m working on a project where we want to implement NAP to get the health check, but also Server and Domain Isolation to make sure that only trusted clients and users can talk to the systems they have access to. There was no doubt that we would use Certificates to validate the client health state.

NAP with Server and Domain Isolation PolicyTwo Windows Server 2008 R2 Servers with HRA/NAP Roles and the Stand-Alone CA Role were installed for redundancy. Clients are getting the Health Certificates and all is good. The SA (Security Associations) policy on the servers and clients is configured to “Require Inbound and Request Outbound Authentication”, with a requirement for a Health Certificate from the organizations CA Servers. So far, so good.

The clients can now access the server when they have a valid health state, and are unable to access the server if they don’t. Yay! NAP works.

And the nice thing is that since the HRA only serves Domain Joined clients. As the servers won’t talk to any client without a Health Certificate, and only Domain Joined client can get one, we have also got “Domain Isolation”. Ok, two out of three check boxes done.

Now, try to use Server Isolation and configure a Firewall Rule to only allow ClientA to talk to connect to ServerX via RDP. That does not work. Well, it does work to create the rule, but it will never allow the traffic.
The reason is that when you use a NAP Certificate to authenticate the connection, there is no mapping to the computer account. Which makes it impossible to use a Computer Based rule.

NAP with Server and Domain Isolation - Security Associations

Notice “No Authentication”.

Okay, so if you use the check box NAP with Server and Domain Isolation - Certificate Mapping“Enable certificate to account mapping”?

Sorry, that doesn’t work either. When you use the Health Certificate feature, no certificate mapping is done in the Windows Firewall. This has been verified in the Windows source code.

This blog post does state that it should be possible to use that check box and then use a Policy  “Access this computer from the network” where you can specify which computers are able to access the server over the network. But it’s still “All or nothing”. You can’t specify that ClientA should be able to access the SQL Server but nothing else.

Solution for NAP with Server and Domain Isolation

Luckily, there is a kind of workaround. To be honest, it’s not that common that you want to restrict so only ClientA, ClientB and ClientC can access the SQL Service on ServerX. I would dare to say its more common that you want to restrict which Users can access the service. Right?

I want to control so UserD, UserE and userF can access the RDP (Remote Desktop) Service, from any Health Domain Joined Client. It doesn’t really matter which client they connect from as long as it’s healthy and domain joined. Or I could control which clients they are able to logon to.

So by using a “Secondary Authentication” NAP with Server and Domain Isolation - Secondary Authenticationoption, where we Authenticate the User, like this.
Still the same options for the Computer Authentication. Just add a Secondary Authentication on the SA for User (Kerberos v5). It’s then possible to restrict which users are able to connect to a specific service.

In your firewall RDP Rule, configure it to Require a secure connection, and specify which users should be able to access the service. Now try to connect with two different users via RDP. You should see how the rule is applied and works.

I decided to create a Firewall Rule for RDP that only allowed “TestUser” to connect to the service.
In the screenshot below, the upper RDP is started with the TestUser Account, while the bottom RDP Client is started with “Runas Domain\Administrator” which according to the rule, should not be allowed to connect. And as you see, it’s not able to connect, which is expected.

NAP with Server and Domain Isolation - Proof that it works

Summary

To get NAP to work with Server Isolation, you have to enable “Second Authentication” for the User with Kerberos Authentication, so there is Authentication done when the connection is established. Which in turn makes it possible to create Firewall Rules that can be applied to User Object, unfortunately not to computer objects.

 

 

How to launch programs from the Windows Logon screen

It does happen from time to time, that I want to start some troubleshooting tools before a user logs on to the system. For example Sysinternals Process Monitor or xperf / wpr etc.

There are several ways to do it, as with most things with IT. You can either logon with another user, start the tools and then use Fast User Switching.
Or enable Boot Logging to get the full boot sequence + logon for a user.
Or use Psexec from a remote system, etc etc
Another way to do it, is to execute any tool of your choice from the Windows logon (winlogon) screen. The nice side effect is that you will be executing the tool as System, with full permissions.

I recently had to troubleshoot a “Password Reset” solution, which launches a browser from the Logon screen and it were unable to connect to the web-service. If you ran it from within windows as a normal user account, or system account, it worked. So I had to troubleshoot the problem as it was happening.

  1. Logon as a local administrator
  2. Make a copy of %windir%\system32\utilman.exe
  3. Take ownership of %windir%\system32\utilman.exe
  4. Grant yourself full control permission on the file.
  5. Replace utilman.exe with cmd.exe (or any other tool of your choise, though CMD is good as you can execute other tools from that one).
  6. At the windows logon screen press the “Accessibility icon” in the bottom left corner.
  7. Wahoo, you now have a command prompt with System Access

This works on Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

 

List computer certificates that will expire with Powershell

Just a small simple script that will list all Computer Cerificates that will expire in 90 days, to give you a heads up and time to renew them.

To list computer certificates that will expire in 90 days:

Just change “-lt 90” to some other value to adjust the expiry period.