Joe's Tech Blog » Win2008

How to disable the BEEP sound in Terminal Services

Aaron — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:01:04 +0000

In the following scenario:

Using Microsoft Terminal Services (Windows 2003 or 2008).
Sound redirection disabled at the server or turned off at the client

Certain system events will still cause the system to ‘beep’ out of the system speaker. Turning off Windows Sound Schemes doesn’t stop the notification beep. Note this is sound is NOT out of the normal soundcard/external speakers but will be out of the internal speaker on the motherboard. If you’re having this problem, you’ll know how incredibly annoying it is. After hours of digging online and trying different scenarios, I stumbled across a fix and have documented it here.

On the terminal server, open Regedit and navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server

Right-click on the ‘Terminal Server’ key on the left, select “New”, then “DWORD Value”. Name the value ‘DisableBeep’, press ‘Enter’ and double-click on it to change the ‘Data’ field. Enter ‘1′ as the ‘Value Data’ and click OK. Close the registry editor and restart the server. You will now have a non-beeping Terminal Server!

DisableBeep Registry Entry

How to select which IP version to ping

Aaron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:28:25 +0000

If you’re trying to ping something by hostname but only want to ping the IPv4 IP address, you’ll sometimes need to specify this when executing the PING command. Example on Win2008 & Vista (pinging the IP server.domain.com)

To ping and IPv4 IP:

 ping server.domain.com -4

To ping an IPv6 IP:

 ping server.domain.com -6

Disable IPv6 on Win2008

Aaron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:25:22 +0000

Ever tried to remove IPv6 from Windows 2008? It can’t be done through Network Connections. You can uncheck/unbind it from your NIC but to completely disable IPv6 functionality, you’ll need to set this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6Parameters\

Create DWORD32: DisabledComponent

Value: FFFFFFFF

Win2008/IIS7 + PHP5 FastCGI = 404 Error Messages

Aaron — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:42:26 +0000

Hopefully this saves someone some time. I spent hours working on a resolution before I came across it.

Background: Installed Win2008 + IIS7 + PHP 5.3 using the FastCGI method (used the Windows installer to configure IIS7).

Symptoms: PHP worked fine in my Default Site but when attempting to execute any scripts in Virtual Sites or Virtual Directories, every single PHP file would yield a 404 error message.

Solution: The problem ended up being that the ‘open_basedir’ config variable from the php config file is applied to ANYWHERE that PHP is run…regardless of what the actual home folder should be for a site (PHP picks up the basedir during installation and statically enters it in your php.ini file). The default ‘basedir’ will be whatever the root of your ‘Default Web Site’ in IIS is (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\). If you comment out this line (enter a semicolon before the line) and restart IIS, it will solve the problem. If you’re running PHP as a FastCGI module, you’ll actually have to rename (or copy) the php.ini file to a file named ‘php-cgi-fcgi.ini’ in the same folder as your php-cgi.exe executable. Be sure to restart IIS!