Tag Archives: Windows

When did my Windows 10 last boot up?

October 15, 2021 Torleif Leave a comment

Sometimes curious about this, usually because I forgot to note what time I arrived at the office, and I keep forgetting how to check. So, here’s some commands I found on SuperUser which seem to do the trick:

> systeminfo | find /i "Boot Time"
System Boot Time: 15.10.2021, 08:37:29
> wmic os get lastbootuptime
LastBootUpTime
20211015083729.500000+120
> net statistics workstation | find /i "Statistics since"
Statistics since 15.10.2021 08:37:45

Also discovered this one, which will create a more thorough report, which can be interesting to look at:

> powercfg /sleepstudy /output report.html && start report.html

Technology

How to find my actual login events in the Windows Event Viewer

July 16, 2020 Torleif 4 Comments

I have an Excel sheet where I not down the time I arrive at work and the time I leave. It tends to vary a bit, and on a regular basis I forget noting down the time I arrived. At my previous job I used a simple tool called TurnedOnTimesView for this, but because the laptops here are managed differently, it isn’t as reliable as it was. So, I figured I could try to enter the scary world of the Event Viewer.

In the Event Viewer you can create custom filtered views, and I first thought it would be as simple as looking for “Logon” events… but that filter gave me a mountain of logon events, most of which seemed to be various system events, and even IWA events from browsers logging on to company websites. Basically, there was a lot of noise.

Eventually though, digging out some old XPath skills, and identifying some key identifiers (EventID=4648 and ProcessName=lsass), I managed to come up with a query that actually seem to be quite accurate:

<QueryList>
<Query Id="0" Path="Security">
<Select Path="Security">
*[
System[
(TimeCreated[timediff(@SystemTime) <= 604800000]) and
(Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Security-Auditing']) and
(EventID=4648)
] and
EventData[
(Data[@Name='ProcessName'] = 'C:\Windows\System32\lsass.exe') and
(Data[@Name='TargetDomainName'] = 'YOUR DOMAIN') and
(Data[@Name='TargetUserName'] = 'YOUR USERNAME')
]
]
</Select>
</Query>
</QueryList>

This, unless I have misunderstood something, should list all actual login events, by you, within the last week. I.e. not various services, HTTP stuff, etc., etc.

Technology

How to add certificates to the Windows certificate store

April 8, 2019 Torleif Leave a comment

There’s a command-line tool called certutil one can use to add (among other things) certificates to the certificate store in windows.

Some examples:

REM Add pfx-file to Personal
certutil -ent -p pfxpassword -importpfx my some.pfx

REM Add pfx-file to Trusted Root Certification Authorities
certutil -ent -p pfxpassword -importpfx root some.pfx

REM Add cer-file to Trusted Root Certification Authorities
certutil -ent -addstore root some.cer

Technology

Windows startup location

April 2, 2019 Torleif Leave a comment

Win + r
shell:startup
Enter

Source: winhelponline.com

Technology

What’s running on port 80 in Windows?

December 6, 2017 Torleif 1 Comment

Trying to set up Apache on a server, something is hogging port 80, but very “helpfully” the Resource Monitor just reports “System” with PID 4…

However, some commands found in a StackOverflow answer and its comments were helpful:

netsh http show urlacl
netsh http show servicestate
net stop http

Note: Do not just run these commands blindly and turn off services (in particular you should probably answer N when the last one asks…), but use them to identify what service(s) might be to blame. Then do an intelligent decision on whether the service is needed or not, before you potentially stop it and disable it…

Software Development

Using SSH keys with GitHub / BitBucket / Azure DevOps on Windows

December 6, 2017 Torleif Leave a comment

Couldn’t get this to work, but now it does, so… time for another “note to self”. ðŸ™‚

Prerequisites

Git, obviously…
PuTTY, with puttygen, plink and pageant, to be exact…

Setup

Open puttygen.
Either Load an existing private key, or Generate a new one.
Copy the public key (“Public key for pasting …”) and add it to the git provider settings:
- https://github.com/settings/keys
- https://bitbucket.org/account/user/[username]/ssh-keys/
- https://dev.azure.com/[organization]/_usersSettings/keys
Open pageant.
Load your private key.
Check that the key authentication works with plink:

plink -v git@github.com
plink -v git@bitbucket.org
plink -v git@ssh.dev.azure.com
Set the GIT_SSH environment variable to C:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe.

^^ This is the detail that so many StackOverflow answers and blog/forum posts didn’t mention. Without this, plink worked fine, but git commands still failed with authentication errors.
(optional) Add a shortcut to the private key file to your startup folder. This way pageant will be automatically started, with your key, ready to go, whenever Windows boots up.

start shell:startup

Usage

Now, as long as pageant is running with your private key loaded, it should work to clone, pull, push, etc., both to and from, both private and public git repositories. E.g. like this:

git clone git@github.com:example/some-private-repo.git

Note: If you’re asked to accept/store/cache a key, but pressing y doesn’t work, connect using putty first, which should give you a dialog with the same question which does work. Putty will complain/crash because there’s not actually an ssh shell to connect to, but that’s fine. After the key has been saved by putty, git should work fine. E.g. like this:

putty -ssh git@github.com

Sources: makandracards.com, vladmihalcea.com