Windows 10 update not installing KB3081424

Cumulative Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3081424) FAILED and took forever to uninstall?

Downloads, reboot to install.
Gets to 30% and reboots.
Gets yo 59% and reboots.
Gets to 59% again and then states something went wrong so uninstalling the update.
Wait a few minutes and reboot.
Back to login screen.



Here an unofficial fix, use at your own risk and backup the registry keys before removing!
Only do this if you know what your doing:


Basic guide (detailed right down the bottom of this page)
  • Create system restore point and export/backup any keys deleted
  • Remove SID's for users (not system accounts) that no longer exist in the registry
  • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
  • Check which users don't exist by checking computer management/local users and groups/users.

Direct links for the update:

x86
http://download.windowsupdate.com/d/msdownload/update/software/crup/2015/08/windows10.0-kb3081424-x86_74cacb95454c2b7160e4652fc3816d5bb57023e8.msu
x64
http://download.windowsupdate.com/d/msdownload/update/software/crup/2015/08/windows10.0-kb3081424-x64_166daaea0dfeb06b34f39d7aebf03ff93a7bf99e.msu



DETAILED INSTRUCTIONS


Do this at your own risk, editing the registry can stop your pc from working altogether

Be aware that there are almost bound to be some exceptions where these instructions don't work

Open regedit

Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

Double click the key/folder icon to see the contents.
You should see at least 5 keys with the names:
S-1-5-18
S-1-5-19
S-1-5-20
S-1-5-21-(massive long number here)
S-1-5-21-(different massive long number here)

If you don't have at least two entries that begin S-1-5-21- then close the registry editor and look elsewhere for a solution to your problem.

If you have more than one entry beginning S-1-5-21 then open each one in turn at look at the data for the key ProfileImagePath, It should say something like 'C:\Users\fred'

Open File Explorer and navigate to the C:\Users folder (assuming C is the drive letter in the ProfileImagePath data). You will see several folders there but you should see one called 'fred'

Keep doing this until you find an S-1-5-21-(something) key for which there is no corresponding actual folder .

Before you do anything else, type System Restore into the search box.  You should see 'Create a restore point Control panel'.  Click that and a System Properties window should open at the System Protection tab.  Click create and enter a name in the box (I entered 'manual') then click create.  After a while you should get a message 'A restore point has been created successfully'.

Now take the life of your computer in your hands
Go back to Registry editor, Right click the S-1-5-21-(something) key for which there is no corresponding actual folder

(Left) click delete from the drop-down menu

Get this wrong and your computer might not start or one of the user accounts you wanted will be lost. If it goes wrong, your best hope is to run System Restore and try to go back to the restore point you created.


But if it works there is a good chance the update will now install!

How To Find the WiFi Password on Mac OS X


#1: Display the WiFi Password on Mac OS X Using CLI

You can use the security command. It is a command line interface to keychains and Security framework which stores your WiFI password and other information. Open the Terminal app and type the following command:

security find-generic-password -ga YOUR-ACCOUNT-NAME
security find-generic-password -ga SSID-HERE
security find-generic-password -ga YOUR-WiFi-Access-Point-Name-Here

In this example, find the Wifi password for Iphone4s access point (SSID):

security find-generic-password -ga Iphone4s | grep -i password


security find-generic-password -ga Iphone4s

#2: Not a Fan of Command Line Tools? 

The System Keychain is a utility which securely stores all passwords and user IDs for a user and lets that user unlock them all with a single master password.
System Keychain Location
◾Open Spotlight to start a search by pressing Command (⌘)-Space bar
◾In the search field type: keychain access


Try this for Linux / Ubuntu

cat /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ | grep psk



How to Kill a Desktop Application or Background Process on Linux

Source URL Howtogeek


Windows has Ctrl+Alt+Delete and Macs have Command+Option+Escape to force frozen applications to close. Linux has its own ways of “killing” those misbehaving processes, whether they’re graphical windows or background processes.
The exact graphical tools you can use will depend on your desktop environment, as eachdesktop environment brings different tools to the table. But most of them are pretty similar.

From a Graphical Desktop

Modern Linux desktops deal with this fairly well, and it can be surprisingly automatic. If an application isn’t responding, a desktop with a compositiong manager will often gray the entire window out to show it isn’t responding.
Click the X button on the window’s titlebar and the window manager will often inform you that the window isn’t responding. You can either give it some time to respond or click an option like “Force Quit” to foricbly close the application.
On Linux, the window manager that paints the title bars is separate from the application itself, so it usually responds even if the window won’t. Some windows do paint their own interfaces, though, so this may not always work.
The “xkill” application can help you quickly kill any graphical window on your desktop.
Depending on your desktop environment and its configuration, you may be able to activate this shortcut by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Esc. You could also just run the xkill command — you could open a Terminal window, type xkill without the quotes, and press Enter. Or, you could press a shortcut like Alt+F2, which opens the “Run Command” dialog on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop and many others. Type xkill into the dialog and press Enter.
Your cursor will change to an X. Click a window and the xkill utility will determine what process is associated with that window, and then immediately kill that process. The window will instantly vanish and close.
Your Linux desktop probably has a tool that works similarly to the Task Manager on Windows, too. On Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, GNOME, and other GNOME-based desktops, this is the System Monitor utility. Open the System Monitor utility to see a list of running proesses — including background ones. You can also forcibly kill processes from here if they’re misbehaving.

From the Terminal

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Let’s say you want to do this all from the terminal instead. We covered a lot of the utilities you can use for this when we looked at commands for managing processes on Linux.
Let’s say Firefox is running in the background and we want to kill it from the terminal. The standard kill command takes a process ID number, so you’ll need to find it first.
For example, you could run a command like:
ps aux | grep firefox
Which would list all processes and pipe that list to the grep command, which will filter it and print only lines containing Firefox. (The second line you’ll see is the grep process itself.) You can also get the process ID from the top command and many other places.
Take the process ID number from the Firefox process — just to the right of the username — and provide it to the kill command. That is, run the command like so:
kill ####
If the process is running as another user, you’ll need to become the root user first — or at least run the kill command with the sudo command, like so:
sudo kill ####
That’s a basic method, but it isn’t quite the fastest. The pgrep and pkill commands help streamline this. For example, run “pgrep firefox” to see the process ID of the running Firefox process. You could then feed that number to the kill command.
Or, skip all that and run “pkill firefox” to kill the Firefox process without knowing its number. pkill performs some basic pattern-matching — it’ll try to find processes with names containing firefox.
The killall command is like pkill, but a bit more precise. It’ll kill all running processes with a specific name. So running “killall firefox” will kill all running processes named “firefox,” but not any processes that just have firefox in their names.

These are far from the only commands included on Linux for managing processes. If you’re using some type of server administration software, it may also have helpful ways to kill and restart processes.
System services work different from processes — you’ll need to use specific commands to bring down, restart, or bring up services. Those specific commands can be different on different Linux distributions.
Image Credit: Lee on Flickr

VirtualBox Kernel driver error

Recently came across this error (VirtualBox Kernel driver error) and here's the fix:

To find out more information on what is causing the error with Oracle VirtualBox run the following on a Windows command prompt:

sc query vboxdrv

this reported back the kernel driver has stopped:
Service_name: vboxdrv
type 1 kernal_driver
state 1 stopped
win32_exit_code 0 0x2
service_exit_code 0 0x0
checkpoint 0x0
wait_hint 0x0

It seems two device drivers are not installed by the installation program during a virtualbox upgrade, to manually this missing components type the following command:

Go to
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\USB\filter
Select VBoxUSBMon.inf and click the right mouse button. Then pick Install.

Go to
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\drivers\vboxdrv
Select VBoxDrv.inf and click the right mouse button. Then pick install.


VirtualBox should now work again

Linux log file locations

The following are the 20 different log files that are located under /var/log/ directory. Some of these log files are distribution specific. For example, you’ll see dpkg.log on Debian based systems (for example, on Ubuntu).

/var/log/messages – Contains global system messages, including the messages that are logged during system startup. There are several things that are logged in /var/log/messages including mail, cron, daemon, kern, auth, etc.
/var/log/dmesg – Contains kernel ring buffer information. When the system boots up, it prints number of messages on the screen that displays information about the hardware devices that the kernel detects during boot process. These messages are available in kernel ring buffer and whenever the new message comes the old message gets overwritten. You can also view the content of this file using the dmesg command.
/var/log/auth.log – Contains system authorization information, including user logins and authentication machinsm that were used.
/var/log/boot.log – Contains information that are logged when the system boots
/var/log/daemon.log – Contains information logged by the various background daemons that runs on the system
/var/log/dpkg.log – Contains information that are logged when a package is installed or removed using dpkg command
/var/log/kern.log – Contains information logged by the kernel. Helpful for you to troubleshoot a custom-built kernel.
/var/log/lastlog – Displays the recent login information for all the users. This is not an ascii file. You should use lastlog command to view the content of this file.
/var/log/maillog /var/log/mail.log – Contains the log information from the mail server that is running on the system. For example, sendmail logs information about all the sent items to this file
/var/log/user.log – Contains information about all user level logs
/var/log/Xorg.x.log – Log messages from the X
/var/log/alternatives.log – Information by the update-alternatives are logged into this log file. On Ubuntu, update-alternatives maintains symbolic links determining default commands.
/var/log/btmp – This file contains information about failed login attemps. Use the last command to view the btmp file. For example, “last -f /var/log/btmp | more”
/var/log/cups – All printer and printing related log messages
/var/log/anaconda.log – When you install Linux, all installation related messages are stored in this log file
/var/log/yum.log – Contains information that are logged when a package is installed using yum
/var/log/cron – Whenever cron daemon (or anacron) starts a cron job, it logs the information about the cron job in this file
/var/log/secure – Contains information related to authentication and authorization privileges. For example, sshd logs all the messages here, including unsuccessful login.
/var/log/wtmp or /var/log/utmp – Contains login records. Using wtmp you can find out who is logged into the system. who command uses this file to display the information.
/var/log/faillog – Contains user failed login attemps. Use faillog command to display the content of this file.
Apart from the above log files, /var/log directory may also contain the following sub-directories depending on the application that is running on your system.

/var/log/httpd/ (or) /var/log/apache2 – Contains the apache web server access_log and error_log
/var/log/lighttpd/ – Contains light HTTPD access_log and error_log
/var/log/conman/ – Log files for ConMan client. conman connects remote consoles that are managed by conmand daemon.
/var/log/mail/ – This subdirectory contains additional logs from your mail server. For example, sendmail stores the collected mail statistics in /var/log/mail/statistics file
/var/log/prelink/ – prelink program modifies shared libraries and linked binaries to speed up the startup process. /var/log/prelink/prelink.log contains the information about the .so file that was modified by the prelink.
/var/log/audit/ – Contains logs information stored by the Linux audit daemon (auditd).
/var/log/setroubleshoot/ – SELinux uses setroubleshootd (SE Trouble Shoot Daemon) to notify about issues in the security context of files, and logs those information in this log file.
/var/log/samba/ – Contains log information stored by samba, which is used to connect Windows to Linux.
/var/log/sa/ – Contains the daily sar files that are collected by the sysstat package.
/var/log/sssd/ – Use by system security services daemon that manage access to remote directories and authentication mechanisms

Useful Linux Commands

System Info
date – Show the current date and time
cal – Show this month's calendar
uptime – Show current uptime
w – Display who is online
whoami – Who you are logged in as
finger user – Display information about user
uname -a – Show kernel information
cat /proc/cpuinfo – CPU information
cat /proc/meminfo – Memory information
df – Show disk usage
du – Show directory space usage
free – Show memory and swap usage

Keyboard Shortcuts
Enter – Run the command
Up Arrow – Show the previous command
Ctrl + R – Allows you to type a part of the command you're looking for and finds it
Ctrl + Z – Stops the current command, resume with fg in the foreground or bg in the background
Ctrl + C – Halts the current command, cancel the current operation and/or start with a fresh new line
Ctrl + L – Clear the screen
command | less – Allows the scrolling of the bash command window using Shift + Up Arrow and Shift + Down Arrow
!! – Repeats the last command
command  !$ – Repeats the last argument of the previous command
Esc + . (a period) – Insert the last argument of the previous command on the fly, which enables you to edit it before executing the command
Ctrl + A – Return to the start of the command you're typing
Ctrl + E – Go to the end of the command you're typing
Ctrl + U – Cut everything before the cursor to a special clipboard, erases the whole line
Ctrl + K – Cut everything after the cursor to a special clipboard
Ctrl + Y – Paste from the special clipboard that Ctrl + U and Ctrl + K save their data to
Ctrl + T – Swap the two characters before the cursor (you can actually use this to transport a character from the left to the right, try it!)
Ctrl + W – Delete the word / argument left of the cursor in the current line
Ctrl + D – Log out of current session, similar to exit

Learn the Commands
apropos subject – List manual pages for subject
man -k keyword – Display man pages containing keyword
man command – Show the manual for command
man -t man | ps2pdf - > man.pdf  – Make a pdf of a manual page
which command – Show full path name of command
time command – See how long a command takes
whereis app – Show possible locations of app
which app – Show which app will be run by default; it shows the full path

Searching
grep pattern files – Search for pattern in files
grep -r pattern dir – Search recursively for pattern in dir
command | grep pattern – Search for pattern in the output of command
locate file – Find all instances of file
find / -name filename – Starting with the root directory, look for the file called filename
find / -name ”*filename*” – Starting with the root directory, look for the file containing the stringfilename
locate filename – Find a file called filename using the locate command; this assumes you have already used the command updatedb (see next)
updatedb – Create or update the database of files on all file systems attached to the Linux root directory
which filename – Show the subdirectory containing the executable file  called filename
grep TextStringToFind /dir – Starting with the directory called dir, look for and list all files containingTextStringToFind

File Permissions
chmod octal file – Change the permissions of file to octal, which can be found separately for user, group, and world by adding: 4 – read (r), 2 – write (w), 1 – execute (x)
Examples:
chmod 777 – read, write, execute for all
chmod 755 – rwx for owner, rx for group and world
For more options, see man chmod.

File Commands
ls – Directory listing
ls -l – List files in current directory using long format
ls -laC – List all files in current directory in long format and display in columns
ls -F – List files in current directory and indicate the file type
ls -al – Formatted listing with hidden files
cd dir – Change directory to dir
cd – Change to home
mkdir dir – Create a directory dir
pwd – Show current directory
rm name – Remove a file or directory called name
rm -r dir – Delete directory dir
rm -f file – Force remove file
rm -rf dir – Force remove an entire directory dir and all it’s included files and subdirectories (use with extreme caution)
cp file1 file2 – Copy file1 to file2
cp -r dir1 dir2 – Copy dir1 to dir2; create dir2 if it doesn't exist
cp file /home/dirname – Copy the file called filename to the /home/dirname directory
mv file /home/dirname – Move the file called filename to the /home/dirname directory
mv file1 file2 – Rename or move file1 to file2; if file2 is an existing directory, moves file1 into directoryfile2
ln -s file link – Create symbolic link link to file
touch file – Create or update file
cat > file – Places standard input into file
cat file – Display the file called file
more file – Display the file called file one page at a time, proceed to next page using the spacebar
head file – Output the first 10 lines of file
head -20 file – Display the first 20 lines of the file called file
tail file – Output the last 10 lines of file
tail -20 file – Display the last 20 lines of the file called file
tail -f file – Output the contents of file as it grows, starting with the last 10 lines

Compression
tar cf file.tar files – Create a tar named file.tar containing files
tar xf file.tar – Extract the files from file.tar
tar czf file.tar.gz files – Create a tar with Gzip compression
tar xzf file.tar.gz – Extract a tar using Gzip
tar cjf file.tar.bz2 – Create a tar with Bzip2 compression
tar xjf file.tar.bz2 – Extract a tar using Bzip2
gzip file – Compresses file and renames it to file.gz
gzip -d file.gz – Decompresses file.gz back to file

Printing
/etc/rc.d/init.d/lpd start – Start the print daemon
/etc/rc.d/init.d/lpd stop – Stop the print daemon
/etc/rc.d/init.d/lpd status – Display status of the print daemon
lpq – Display jobs in print queue
lprm – Remove jobs from queue
lpr – Print a file
lpc – Printer control tool
man subject | lpr – Print the manual page called subject as plain text
man -t subject | lpr – Print the manual page called subject as Postscript output
printtool – Start X printer setup interface

Network
ifconfig – List IP addresses for all devices on the local machine
ping host – Ping host and output results
whois domain – Get whois information for domain
dig domain – Get DNS information for domain
dig -x host – Reverse lookup host
wget file – Download file
wget -c file – Continue a stopped download

SSH
ssh user@host – Connect to host as user
ssh -p port user@host – Connect to host on port port as user
ssh-copy-id user@host – Add your key to host for user to enable a keyed or passwordless login
User Administration
adduser accountname – Create a new user call accountname
passwd accountname – Give accountname a new password
su – Log in as superuser from current login
exit – Stop being superuser and revert to normal user

Process Management
ps – Display your currently active processes
top – Display all running processes
kill pid – Kill process id pid
killall proc – Kill all processes named proc (use with extreme caution)
bg – Lists stopped or background jobs; resume a stopped job in the background
fg – Brings the most recent job to foreground
fg n – Brings job n to the foreground

Installation from source
./configure
make
make install
dpkg -i pkg.deb – install a DEB package (Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint)
rpm -Uvh pkg.rpm – install a RPM package (Red Hat / Fedora)

Stopping & Starting
shutdown -h now – Shutdown the system now and do not reboot
halt – Stop all processes - same as above
shutdown -r 5 – Shutdown the system in 5 minutes and reboot
shutdown -r now – Shutdown the system now and reboot
reboot – Stop all processes and then reboot - same as above
startx – Start the X system