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Ten Networking Hacks for Your Windows Registry By Eric Geier (NoWiresSecurity Founder & CEO) - originally published on EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.com
The Windows Registry is just one of
those things we learn to love, and learn to hate. It's a huge,
seemingly unorganized and highly sensitive mess of settings that
tell Windows how to behave. As you may know, you can tweak Windows,
its features, and other programs by making changes to the Windows
Registry.
If file and printer sharing is enabled
on a Windows computer, it by default sends announcements in the
background to all the other computers. This makes the computer show
up in Network or Network Neighborhood. However, with this registry
hack, you can hide your computer so others can't browse to it even
if you're sharing.
By default, the Network Connection
Status window shows the number of packets or bytes received and sent
via the network adapter. This can help when troubleshooting by
letting you know if any traffic is getting in or out. However, a
simple registry hack can give you another piece of information: the
number of errors. This can help alert you of network issues.
802.1X authentication helps better
protect wired and wireless networks, but it adds another step to the
connection process. This added step might have an adverse impact to
clients that roam between wireless access points. Fine-tuning the
Pairwise Master Key (PMK) and preauthentication settings, however,
might help. In Windows XP and Vista, you must configure these
settings via registry values.
4. Remove Cached 802.1X Login Credentials in XP
Windows XP by default saves the login
credentials for 802.1X authentication for later connections.
Unfortunately, you must modify the Windows Registry to delete this
cache in XP, unlike with Windows Vista and 7.
Some network adapters have an
integrated processor that can run some networking functions instead
of passing them on to the main processor. Ideally, this frees up
your main CPU for other tasks and increases overall performance.
However, this on-board processor capability is turned off by default
in Windows XP and requires a registry change to enable. 6. Change the IP Address of the Wireless Hosted Network
A new feature in Windows 7 and Windows
Server 2008 R2 lets you create a virtual Wi-Fi router, called a
Wireless Hosted Network. By default, Windows assigns this virtual
interface the IP address of 192.168.137.1. However, you can change
this address in Windows Registry.
If you don't use the Public folders
provided by Windows, you may want to remove the shortcuts in XP or
Vista. You find them on most open/save file dialogs and in the
Favorite Links section of Windows Explorer windows. A shortcut is
even on the main folder list, among the shortcuts to the user folder
and to the drives.
If you don't want users to use the
Shared Documents folder in Windows XP, you might want to hide the
shortcuts to it. Just create the "NoSharedDocuments" DWORD value and
set to "1" at the following location:
As you may know, Windows includes a
very useful feature called Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) that
lets you share your Internet connection. Windows gives the virtual
router the IP address of 192.168.0.1 and hands out addresses via
DHCP to computers. This however is the default IP of popular
off-the-shelf routers like D-Link. Therefore, you might want to
change the default to something else to avoid an IP conflict.
By default, Windows adds an image of a
hand to all the icons of shared folders and printers. This makes it
easy to distinguish resources that are being shared on the network.
Sometimes you might not want this. Luckily, there's a quick registry
hack to remove the hands.
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