December 2008 ~ pimp-my-rig reloaded

FAQ: Disable Port 137, 138 and 139

"There’s No Such Thing As A Silly Question" -- does the cliche sound familiar? In this part of pimp-my-rig reloaded, technical questions are answered. Mail them to me and I will post the answers here. If you have a better answer, by all means share it with us.

In one of our FAQ entries, the disabling of port 135 was outlined. And it successfully shutdown port TCP/135. Now one of the questions asked was how to disable netbios ports UDP/137 (netbios-ns), UCP/138 (netbios-dgm) and TCP/139 (netbios-ssn). This procedure disables all three ports and the procedure is as follows.

[1] Right-click "My Network Places" and select "Properties" from the ensuing menu that opens.

[2] Executing the previous step opens a window showing the available network connections in the machine. Right-click on "Local Area Connection" and select "Properties". This step is almost similar to the previous.

[3] Scroll down to "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)". Select it (to highlight it) and click "Properties". You will be opening another window similar to the one below.

[4] From the "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties" Window, click on "Advanced.." (toward the lower right). Then go to the "WINS" tab (like the screenshot below).

[5] Under "NetBIOS setting", tick "Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP" and click OK to accept the change. Click OK to the other windows previously opened prior to this properties window.

The ports 137, 138 and 139 will have closed on the machine. If the machine has multiple network interface connections (or NICs), repeat the above for every connection.

Closing down the above ports for a Windows XP Pro machine has so far not impacted any application on my end. If it should impact an application you are running, please let me know so I can post them here for the information of others.

HOW-TO: Resolve Slow CD/DVD Burning Speed

I have had a unique experience today (or at least unique is what I thought it was). I booted my Dell Latitude D630 with the secondary bay battery in. When I tried to swap the secondary bay battery with the NEC 6500A DVD-RW drive to burn a DVD, I noticed that the DVD burning was painfully slow. It used to take about 15minutes to complete, but now it estimates an hour. Something was terribly wrong.

Before doing anything, I documented this event and I know it would be interesting to post in Pimp-My-Rig after resolution of the problem. To give you a baseline, my D630 is running the latest SP3 of Windows XP Pro up-to-date with the November 2008 patches and has the recently released A14 BIOS installed.

The first area I checked was if the DVD-RW was working in DMA mode. And this was where the problem was -- the drive was working in PIO mode, as seen from the screenshot below.

I then tried to unplug the drive and re-insert it on the bay but then the PIO mode was persistent. Even when the IDE driver itself was re-installed, it didn't solve anything.

Before doing a reboot, I tried looking for answers from the internet and this site had the exact answer. It involves modifications to the registry, so in replicating the same procedures in your computer be sure to have a backup.

[1] Open Registry Editor. Start --> Run.. --> regedit.

[2] Locate the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000

[3] Edit --> New --> DWORD Value. Add the entry "EnableUDMA66" and give it a value of "1".

[4] Quit the registry editor and restart the computer.

After reboot, the NEC 6500A DVD-RW was now working in Ultra DMA Mode 2 and burning speed was back to normal.