Redirection

Even if you only have a moderately sized VDI deployment chances are high you will face the problem of getting USB smart card readers to work on the virtual desktops. Given that this is such a basic requirement it is astonishingly hard to implement correctly. To save you the pain of having to start from scratch here is my description of how to do it.

Migrating a blog can be a very painful process, part of which stems from the fact that, if not done correctly, search engine valuation (aka PageRank) that took years to gain may be lost in days. Redirecting from the old blog to the new URL alleviates this problem at least, but not the way it is described on countless websites that recommend implementing JavaScript redirects search engines do not care about. Instead HTTP 301 redirects are needed which unfortunately required access to the .htaccess file on the web server hosting the old blog to set up. And you may have guessed already - Blogger.com does not grant that type of access.

[A German translation of this article is available at faq-o-matic.net.] The subtle differences between 32-bit and 64-bit Windows present so many intricacies and pitfalls that even Microsoft employees seem to have trouble getting it right. I just stumbled upon a KB article that describes how to reset the hosts file to its original state. The topic alone is funny enough - it is not as if the default hosts file contained great amounts of data. An entry for localhost (IPv4 and IPv6) is all you need, and on Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 not even that. But anyhow, there seem to be enough people asking MS support for this or they would not have troubled with creating a package (ResetHOSTSFileBackToDefaults.MSI) that basically empties the hosts file.

Although the architecture of Windows x64 is still relatively young, Microsoft already changes it in Windows 7 by removing registry reflection. Just in case you wonder what I might be talking about: read up on 64-bit Windows in my detailed 7-part series whose last article explains registry reflection.

Recently I got into a very interesting discussion with my colleague Nicholas Dille on various aspects of Windows x64. One question he brought up was especially intriguing: knowing about registry redirection, it is not astonishing to find that the 32-bit version of the registry key HKLM\Software\Classes (aka HKCR) gets to be HKLM\Software\Classes\Wow6432Node. But there is also HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Classes!? How can there be two different Wow6432Node 32-bit keys for one 64-bit key?

This is the seventh part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the last article I explained that mixed 32-/64-bit processes are not allowed and how that rule affects both administrators and script-writers. In this context I mentioned the strangely named directory SysWOW64. Today I am going to explain what it is used for by starting with redirection.