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Monthly Archives: September 2008

Replacing the Washer Reservoir on a 99 Durango

If you ever need to replace the tank or pump on your Durango, here’s how to disconnect and remove it.

Disconnect the negative lead from the battery.  You’ll need to remove the air filter housing.  It’s held on with 2 bolts, one on a bracket on the passenger-side fender, and another inside the housing in a rubber shroud.  The one in the housing is a captive bolt, and shouldn’t be removed.

This will let you access the bolts holding the tank in place.  First, disconnect the low fluid sensor from the side of the tank.  Next, remove the 2 bolts on the top of the tank (they may be hidden under a wire bundle), and the 1 bolt on the inside of the wheel well.

The pump is located at the back of the tank, and has a power/control lead, and a tube leading up to the sprayers.  Removing the tube will leak washer fluid, but not much.  Remove the power lead from the pump, and you can pull the entire tank free.

Drain the remaining washer fluid into a container to refill it later. To remove the pump, turn it 1/4 turn counterclockwise, and pull it out.  To reinstall the new pump and tank, reverse the process.

Using PrintUI.dll to Redirect a Printer

You can use PrintUI.dll from a command line to manage and change printer settings. The most common place I use it is in a scheduled task to redirect print jobs. 

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /Xs /n “Name” PortName “IP_192.168.3.1″

The /Xs tells it to set printer options, /n “Name” specifies the name of the printer as it appears in Windows, and PortName “IP_192.168.3.1″ is specifiying the new port for the printer to use.  Setting the printer back to normal is as easy as changing the PortName to the original port.  You can put these commands in a batch file and set it as a scheduled task to redirect a primary printer when some other application will have dedicated access to it.

There are many more options and settings you can adjust with PrintUI, and you can get all the documentation on it from Microsoft.

Looking at a Rootkit

Having an anti-virus device on the edge of your email network is important, but you can’t rely on it entirely. If you’ve got your AV doing hourly updates, that means you’ve got a 1 hour window for someone to exploit.  In my case, any executable files are forwarded to my account for manual review. Most of these are obvious phishing attempts or viruses.  This week, I caught one that looked real, and decided to dig into it a bit more.

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Unscheduling a Next-Boot chkdsk

Well, this could have caused some delays in the next reboot of the file server.  I scheduled a chkdsk on a 1.5TB array.  And unfortunately, Windows doesn’t provide any nice ‘Cancel Scheduled chkdsk’ button.  A quick search turned up the chkntfs /x f: command.  Upon further reading, this is not what you want to do.  chkntfs /x will flag that drive to never be scanned, even if it is ‘dirty’.

You’ll want to open up RegEdit, go to HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Session Manager, and look for the REG_MULTI_SZ named BootExecute.  Edit that key and remove all the lines except autocheck autochk *

This will set the system back to the default method of scanning a drive only if the NTFS dirty bit is flagged.

Using VMware Converter

So, you’re running VMware Server, and have made a few machines.  It runs great.  But you’ve got this old machine running an ancient OS or application, and you don’t have the install media anymore.  Or perhaps your software maintenance expired, and you can’t get the tech support you need to deactivate the license on one machine and move it to another.  That’s where VMware Converter comes in.  VMware Converter takes care of transitioning your physical machines to VM images, and updates the drivers on the system to use the virtual hardware (network, video, SCSI, etc).

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