Recently in Work Category

I logged a ticket with Symantec today as I needed to download Maintenance Release 7 for their corporate edition 10.1 yet their fileconnect website only gave me version 11 (which is so unstable we refuse to install it). 2 hours later I got an email from their support site that started "We have been trying to reach you in the last few days to assist you with the issue regarding Symantec Antivirus but unfortunately we have not been able to do so."
I guess they've invented a time machine in order to try and beat their really long wait times on hold for support.....either that or I forgot that I logged a ticket several days ago and they've finally got round to dealing with it!
Anyway, they've given me a new serial number to log into the website with so I can download the older version. I'm not sure if it's an inplace upgrade (I hope so) rather than a removal and reinstall again - if its the removal and reinstall that means *another* 3 or 4 hours to remove, reboot, install and then fix the issues of the client software breaking other software again.
I guess I *really* need to get some time to investigate nod32 network deployments - anyone had any experience with this?

I took the 70-297 test this afternoon. It's a lot different and a lot harder than the other tests due to the amount of information that you need to digest and analyze (and in some cases assume). I passed with a score of 781. It could have been higher, but the main thing is that I passed and I now obtain my MCSE accreditation. This month has been very busy trying to study most nights for these tests - this was my third one this month and so for the next week or so I'm not going to be doing any overtime - I'm looking forward to being able to relax, watch some films and play rockband. Hopefully I'll also be able to post some more stuff to the blogs now too.

You can now access sysinternals tools direct from the command line (great for scripts) by accessing \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\toolname.exe for example \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\autoruns.exe This is great for running the command directly from a dos prompt or in a script or even just copying the file(s) directly to a server automatically without having to download each file from a web browser. Thanks to Ed Bott for the tip off and extra thanks to sysinternals for doing this
You can also download most of the tools in one go with tips on creating start menu icons for all the files in the zip file
Alternatively you can just "copy \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\*.exe ." to copy them to your drive.

It was quite disappointing to come out of the exam having not scored higher than 900. I was pretty convinced I had a higher score, but 873 is still a respectable score as 700 is the passmark. I won't be taking any more tests at this test center though - the room was hot and right by reception and the front door so all I could clearly hear the (long) conversations as people had their smoke breaks, came back from lunch etc. It made it pretty hard to concentrate and in this exam you really have to concentrate on precisely which user in which OU needs access to which resource in which domain Almost every question had an exhibit button that needed to be pressed and the screens are at such a low resolution you need to scroll all the time (although this seems to be a standard resolution for the Microsoft exams - they really should give you the abilty to change them on the fly)
So I now have only one more exam to go and then I get my MCSE qualification - I hope to take this one next Thursday - I've not decided whether to do 70-297 - Designing a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory and Network Infrastructure or 70-298 - Designing Security for a Windows Server 2003 Network. 297 sounds easier as it builds on the skills in the other exams (and we have the mspress book in the office) but 298 would be more interesting but possibly harder and we don't have the book.

As I found out that the 2nd chance exam offer runs out at the end of this month (for the initial exam - you have until the end of June to take the retake) I've decided to try and get my MCSE by the end of the month so I'm swotting really hard. I've finished the first half of the Microsoft Press book for 70-293 tonight - I started it on Sunday night and last night we were out for a couple of hours so it's not bad going. I've scheduled the exam for Friday afternoon and after that I'll only have 2 more to go.
I've also pushed the guys at the office to take advantage of the offer, so far I know at least 2 of them have booked exams and if the others are reading this - then just do it! With this offer I really don't think there is any excuse for someone not to be an MCP at a minimum, especially when the exam fee is reimbursed on passing and the 2nd chance removes a lot of the pressure.

Ricoh copiers can save scans and incoming faxes to a network share as pdf's and tif files. However if a previous company used the administrator username and password and you come and change the administrator password then this functionality breaks - to the tune of about 500 pieces of paper all over the floor of the office!
It took me a while to find this information out, but the user name and passwords for accessing the network shares are stored in the address book on the copier - they are not stored in the many other option pages of the copier, this functionality can be found in the management web interface, so an onsite visit is not needed (the default use name and password for the web console is admin and no password). At the same time I would strongly recommend changing the username to a service account that is not the administrator account on the network!

I downloaded an evaluation copy of Windows2003 for my MCSE training tonight from Microsoft. The cd image is in an img file that of course can not be read by Hyper-V! Now I could burn the file to a cd and then capture the image within Hyper-V but that was too much work and I'd have to hunt for a blank cd. I knew that VirtualCloneDrive wouldn't work in Windows2008 as I had already tried this for something else earlier on, but I did find MagicISO - a package I had also used on XP - it said it would work on 64Vista and as Windows2008 seems to have a lot of similarities with Vista I thought I'd give it a go....I ran the install of MagicISO and then mounted the img file with it and explorer recognised the drive. I closed down the Hyper-V console, re-opened it and was able to capture my new drive for my new Windows 2003 installation. It's working very well - highly recommended.
Hopefully this will come in handy for others as I couldn't find any useful information on mounting a virtual iso img or cd image in Windows 2008

5 if you include the couple of Dell partitions! The Dell pc comes with two hidden partitions - one is the diagnostics partition and the other is the system restore partition so you can get back to factory image if you ever need to. After I had installed Vista on the machine I then attempted to install Windows2008 but the installation process wouldn't let me proceed as it couldn't make a new partition due to the limit of 4 primary partitions on a hard disk. I therefore booted back into XP, blew away the Vista partition, created a new extended partition and within that created two drives - one for Vista and one for 2008. A quick reboot off the dvd and Vista was soon installed, then a repeat of the process, this time with Windows2008 and that was installed quickly too - I think Windows 2008 took about 20 minutes.

This evening I was preparing for an adminstrator password change that I need to do tomorrow on a Windows 2000 box so to check everything worked ok I created a new virtual machine in 2008, loaded the Windows 2000 cd and 26 minutes later I had installed Windows 2000 in a vm, rebooted, changed the password using the Offline NT Password cd and rebooted back into Windows 2000 and was able to log back in again. I suspect on old hardware it will take that long just to boot the machine up and change the password and log back in again!

I also really wanted the ability to select the Operating System that the machine would boot into after it was rebooted. The default installation of any OS is going to prompt you for the installation but that isn't much use when the reboot is happening remotely.  I remember some software I used back in the NT4/2000 days that would do this but couldn't remember what it was called. That wouldn't actually help though as the boot structure in Vista and Windows2008 is radically different requiring the use of BCDEdit......  Alternatively EasyBCD could be used to edit the boot configuration. This is well worth downloading as it makes editing the boot configuration much nicer. I was able to use this utility to remove the extra Vista configuration as a result of the dual installations of Vista. What is even better is their iReboot software. Install this on all the OS's and then you can select which OS to boot with from a Task Notifier icon and restart the machine - just what I needed. (Note this does require .net framework so I had to install this on the new xp installation as it didn't have it already! Also note that the first result for .net framework 2 comes up with a page can't be found on Microsoft's site and the second hit is for the beta version! Use this link instead and don't forget to check Windows Updates afterwards)

Thanks to a tip off from Ed Bott, I have ordered a nice Dell Dimension 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU (Intel Q6600), 3GB of RAM, and a 500GB drive, for $499 although I paid an extra $20 to get Windows XP Pro. I wanted to get the 64 bit version but Dell won't sell it to me so I'd have buy the media which is going to be expensive or put my Vista or Windows2008 server software on to host my vm's. Hopefully this machine will have enough processor and memory to allow me to run at least a couple of vm's at the same time so I can get more experience in W2k8. At this price it was very tempting to buy a few of these machines but I restrained myself to just one. This is going to be used purely for work and training purposes so I should be able to deduct it in my taxes next year too which is an added bonus.

I needed to do a restore of some voicemails on a server and the calculations on how long it was going to take were slightly off as you can see from this screenshot - it actually got as far as 150 days before it reached the data on the file and started the restore off. Typically I have to do this when the voicemail server crashes (due to a power outage when it wasn't on a reliable UPS). Everytime the server crashes I would have to restore 2 peoples voicemails (out of about 70 voicemail boxes). They are the only two who have their voicemail wiped and Avaya don't care about the problem. What is weird is that this time the server had a controlled shutdown and not a sudden crash.
I sent the user this screenshot and told them it might take me a while but I'm working on it - they replied saying they didn't think they had *that* many voicemails!

The migration from NT4 and Exchange 5.5 to Exchange2007 and Windows 2003 is almost done. This weekend was the installation of Exchange 2007 and the move of mailboxes. Unfortunately it did not go to plan. Upromote worked great on the first server that needed the software and after two or three reboots it was acting as a member server. The second server however did not go well. Instead the server bluescreened in the middle of the process and I was left with a server that was neither in a domain or in a workgroup.  The logon box did not include the domain option but the local SAM was corrupted and wouldn't let me login. As the machine was out of the domain I couldn't connect to it remotely apart from ping activity. After struggling for a long time with a multitude of recovery tools we ended up with a parallel installation of NT4 on the machine so that we could access the data on the drives. This was not without hassles - the RAID controller drivers would not recognise the disk in NT4 - you would have thought that downloading the drivers for the raid controller that appears in the BIOS boot would work but nope - we had to use different drivers!  I tried to access the machine using Microsoft's Dart Tool - the rebranded ERD commander, but this tool doesn't support NT - in the end I had to go back to ERD Commander 2002 to get a version that worked with NT4 (although it didn't actually help). The parallel installation of NT also needed SQL 7 reinstalling but this needed ie4 installed (and where do you get *that* from?)  Fortunately it would also accept IE6 too.

Installing the Exchange2007 sp1 was not a fun experience either - the process stopped half way through with an error saying that a file was in use and that I needed to reboot the server to continue. When I did so, the installation would not continue as all of the Exchange services and several other essential windows services had been set to disabled by the previous installation and the upgrade needs the Information Store to be running. As the other services were stopped the machine acted like it was behind a firewall - you were not able to ping out or into it. Setting all the services to automatic and then starting them got through this problem - I had to boot up my Virtual Exchange 2007 server to see which disabled services should normally be running though. I actually had to try the upgrade about 3 times before I got through with no errors but the whole experience made SQL2005 look stable.

Now I am having major trouble getting the remote outlook clients to connect through to the exchange 2007 server using RPC over HTTPS - it worked great with the Exchange 2003 server but just will not work with Exchange 2007 - if you have any bright ideas then let me know - tomorrow I'll be logging a call with Microsoft for some assistance.

At the end of the weekend I felt like I had installed every piece of Microsoft software just to get Exchange migrated onto new servers. I have got some great ideas for future migrations and I know that I don't want to repeat the process sometime soon!

Then to top it all off, the advert shown in this blog post arrived stuck to the front cover of my Technet magazine today - talk about bad timing.  Having said that, I have received the white paper and I don't think we'd use their services as it sounds expensive. The advice was pretty basic but did include the steps of removing old mailboxes and cleaning up the database. One REALLY annoying thing to see when you are moving mailboxes on a weekend without pay is a lot of "moving 1 of 3654 spam messages" and "moving 3 of 12876 deleted items".  I had told the users to delete these items before the upgrade but this hadn't been done.  I think next time I will include a step of telling the users to delete their spam, junk and deleted items BEFORE the upgrade as it will be done as part of the upgrade "automatically" (and if anyone has a tool that will walk through a message store deleting items in the spam, junk and deleted items then let me know)

This weekend was meant to be the second stage in a NT4 and Exchange 5.5 migration to Windows 2003, Exchange 2007. This process has been a big nightmare so far - this weekend wasn't helped by the cd being unreadable by any of the machines (although you could see *some* files the setup program wouldn't completely launch.)
Trying to think of an alternative solution I wondered if the trial version of Exchange that is downloadable from Microsoft would work. However, although Microsoft say you can actually use a purchased key on the trial version, the only trial version available is 32bit and the only supported version of exchange is 64bit. The other problem is that the 64bit version is a 5.5GB DVD so not something you can easily download on a T1 connection :-)
Eventually we managed to get a copy of the DVD from another branch of the company and I started the install process. Unfortunately it was then that I discovered that you can only install Exchange 2007 into a Native mode AD. Initially I thought it just had to be higher than 2000. Unfortunately as I'm doing an upgrade from Windows NT domain to Active Directory I still had NT4 domain controllers from the original installation and these are not machines that the client is willing to remove. So I'm now stuck with a half finished migration.
Currently my two solutions are to split the nt4 domain controllers into their own separate LAN and then remove the records for the W2k3 servers and delete the NT4 servers from the AD LAn - this should work as the 2 domain controllers are just serving as standalone machines now so don't really need clients to connect to them but their services are needed.
The other solution (which might be more graceful) is to use upromote to demote the nt4 servers to member servers only. At $99 per server this will be more cost efficient and graceful than splitting the network into 2 lans.

I must say that this whole 5.5 to Exchange 2007 is not an easy migration by any stretch of the imagination and I would certainly not recommend that you try and do it over two consecutive windows - especially if your original NT servers provide extra services to your existing network.

As mentioned in a previous post, we have several Dell servers that have Open Manage Server Administrator (OMSA) setup and one of the features of this software is the ability to setup alerts whenever an issue is detected by the built in monitoring system.  In the new version, 5.3, even more alerts have been enabled - mainly in the area of storage management.  To edit this setup you typically go to the website hosting the Server Administrator, log in and then set up all the alerts. Each alert is setup individually and takes several mouse clicks. One to open up the alert, one to select the alert process's, another to click apply and then another to click the Go Back to Alert Settings.  This is really inefficient and obviously takes a very long time to set this up on multiple servers. The process described in the extended entry below describes how you can set this up, quickly and efficiently by importing the same settings to your servers each time they are set up. Little customization needs to be done on each server but full instructions are provided.

If you have several Dell servers (or even just one server) then I would highly recommend downloading the Systems Management Dell DVD. Inserting this DVD in the server drive will then show you a list of all the firmware, drivers and software that needs to be updated on the server. This is a great tool for ensuring that your Dell server is up to date and you don't need to download all the patches each time on the server or even worry about where they are located on the Dell website. I find it really difficult to work out which files are needed and this DVD is really helpful. Included on the DVD is the OpenManage 5.3 suite of software that came out fairly recently. Note that if you install it then you will want to go back to the alerts page as there maybe new alert categories.

I know IBM do a similar service as I used to use it when installing Netfinity servers and I assume HP does too.

Incidentally I found out about this by subscribing to the Dell Technical Update Subscriptions

My passing score was 928 (pass was 700) so I passed comfortably - which is a very nice feeling and something I've maintained in all the exams I've taken with Microsoft so far. I now have 1 more to go and then I get my MCSA exam. This exam was quite different to the ones I've done before - there were 45 questions and about 10 (or more) were simulation exams. Personally I like these questions as it's a lot easier to recognise the process needed to go through as opposed to the previous "drag and drop to put in order" box questions where you have to remember the exact wording on the dialog boxes that in real life you pay little attention to as you use them every day.
After 20 questions the screen froze, for ever, and ever and ever. Eventually I went out to see the receptionist but when I came back the machine was waiting for the next question - it takes a long time to load some of the simulation questions. I was really nervous at this point as the first 20 questions were easy and I was confident I had about 19 of them correct. I really didn't want to start again.
After this scare the questions seemed to get harder but a lot of them were similar to the questions in the official MS press books and there were some questions I had seen that were identical to various test prep software solutions although I didn't use the MeasureUp software for this exam which I have used in the past. Now it's onto 70-291....

Fixed! One of my servers has been failing to backup with the error "0xe00084af The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed. Final error category: Job Errors. For additional information refer to link V-79-57344-33967" I spent ages troubleshooting the errors and trying to work out what was going on and found that it would fail to backup any file on the local hard disk of the machine.
I posted a note in the symantec forums and didn't hear anything back, but did find a post that upgrading to 10d might fix it (not a current solution as this would mean purchasing an upgrade of the software for the exchange agent and the exchange agent is currently working)
The other solution was to stop SQL servers on the box. This server was the WSUS box and I had also recently upgraded it to version 3 of WSUS. This created (at least) two new services - SQL Server VSS Writer and Windows Internal Database (Microsoft ##SSEE). Through trial and error I discovered that stopping the SQL Server VSS Writer service meant the backup would work, which is weird as why this should affect me backing up something like c:\jobs\fred.bat which has nothing to do with SQLI don't know.
I'm hoping that my forum posting about the problem will get a better solution but for now I'm just pleased to be able to backup my file server.

We had a customer who had a new installation of Sema4 (accounting and timesheets package) installed on a new pc and the performance of the software was abysmal in some cases. It was reported to me that if they opened the package and selected timesheets and then selected the employee drop down list, there would be a long wait for the dropdown box to appear and the program would appear to hang. I timed it and it took 7 minutes (for about 50 users) for the dropdown box to appear after it was clicked when the timesheet screen was first loaded.
The very strange solution is posted in the extended entry....

United States Technical Support - Phone: 800 342 0652 or 407 357 7600. Be prepared for a long wait

We got Blackberry 8703e leashes at work on Friday afternoon so I've spent quite a bit of time over the weekend playing around with the functionality and working out how to do things. It's a shame that their legal department spends more time writing a HUGE software licence and warranty booklet - 133 pages in all the different languages yet the getting started manual is only 51 pages, 10 of those are the terms and conditions. Strangely enough there is no mention of how long to keep the blackberry charged before using it or any instructions as to the various lights on the device, normally there are warnings of dire consequences and doom if batteries are not charged for 18 hours OR MORE!

I've been doing a lot of research,reading and studying in improving my productivity and time management recently. This morning I came across the Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes document which really strikes me as an oxymoron. Notes seems to be the most counterproductive piece of software out there and it is not helping me in my productivity. So maybe I'll get this document to see how it should be done.
One of the things that I picked up from one of the books was to use 1 calendar for everything which is ok if you are single and don't have a spouse that also needs to see your calendar but they don't work for your company and have access. As we both have google accounts, I thought that syncing the Notes calendar to google calendar would work as then my wife can see the google calendar and we could both use the calendars to ensure we didn't doublebook events. I did find the Companion Link for Google Calendar software but it doesn't work very well.
The synchronization takes forever (when it does work) and I've ended up with duplicate entries in google but with different times - 1 hour apart I could understand due to some funky dst issues, but these are a couple of hours apart. Recurring appointments are not supported (although recurring appointments that have been canceled appeared in gmail but active recurring appointments didn't)
Still, at least I now have a base copy in Google calendar which I will hopefully be able to keep up to date.

Verizon software can be dowloaded from vzam.net for the pcmcia card - useful to know as it doesn't seem to be easily found on the main Verizon website

I've posed a puzzler at Friends In Tech about an issue I had when upgrading a NT4 domain to Small Business Server 2003. It will be interesting to see if anyone comes up with the correct answer but also to get some responses from other techs and hopefully it will encourage conversations on the website and forums.

If you get the message "Another program is accessing your timeslips database in a way that prevents you from accessing it" then (in my case) the solution is as follows.

On the machine that is not having the problem, click on start/all programs/time slips/Station Administrator. Click on Help/About and make a note of the *install folder*. In my opinion this should really be named the config folder!
On the pc that is having the problem, do the same thing and you will find that the install folder is different (possibly c:\program files\timeslips).
Click on Options menu and then Change Database location - browse to the folder that was on the working pc and select the timeslips.cfg file.
Click ok (or done) and restart timeslips. You may be prompted to upgrade/update the timeslips data and then your timeslips data will be accessible again.

The menu names above are taken from memory but should be sufficient to get you working again. PS Sage's phone support is 800 555 2542 but you will need a support contract.

Sorry this is late but I hope everyone had a great Christmas and have a wonderful new year....
I came down with a cold on the Wednesday before Christmas after working 12 hours in a cold airconditioned room and catching it from Kristen on the Monday previous. The annoying thing was that my throat was sore for 2 days and I knew the cold was on it's way but it took ages before it started to hit in earnest. I was off sick on Thursday and Friday (but still got calls from work) and Saturday and Sunday I was still coughing and sneezing a little (and still got calls from work). Sunday I felt much better and we had 2 christmas services which were nice although the evening service was not very well attended - I think most people had either settled in for the evening or had gone to visit family and friends. (We had to drive back from some friends after spending a wonderful afternoon laughing at "my little ghetto pony" - a pony made from a plastic toy box upended with a pompom tail, cucumber neck and a lambs head - a very funny frankenstein contraption but the child loved it).
Monday was Christmas day, of course, and we opened presents at our house (well some of them- the order I placed with Shutterfly for Kristen's present didn't turn up until Boxing Day despite ordering it before the cutoff and paying for priority handling) and then headed over to her parents for Lunch - fondue and tea - Egg Rolls and English Apple Pie - hardly the traditional Christmas Meal. I enjoyed the meal but it did feel weird not having Roast Turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas Cake and Baked Alaska (the latter we had for Thanksgiving instead). Thankfully there were no calls from work.
Tuesday (yesterday) was meant to be a day off from work as the office was closed but started with pages from work as the monitoring system detected a customers box down - turns out that isp hosting their dns had both dns servers unavailable and there was no 24 hour support or phone number easily visible on the website and there was still an hour to go for the company to start work. Eventually one of the dns servers came back online so they were ok (although the customer was actually ok as their outgoing access was fine - just incoming mail and web hosting was unreachable by name). At the same time I had calls about the phone system from another company (this phone system has been in for 13 months and I am still debugging, supporting and fixing it on a daily basis) and several helpdesk tickets that needed answering to as they weren't taken care of whilst I was off sick.
Eventually I was able to unplug the laptop and go out to Microcenter to get a new computer, monitor and peripherals for us - more on that later.......
So today is Wednesday, I woke up early and I have no idea what is in store for me at the office today - should be interesting.....
Friday we are off to a wedding so a very short work week! (Thats the good great news)

Ages ago I wrote a feature on how to backup a cpanel account. Just recently one of my clients purchased a dedicated server that uses cpanel as the website hosting manager. I purchased cpanelAric's cpanel userguide and tutorial book to assist with learning some of the more obscure features and functions and as I was reading through the book I got to page 93 - and my site is quoted as a way to backup the system - how cool is that!
Naturally I now have to go back and make sure that the script still works and make any changes necessary.

Monday was my one year anniversary of working in the United States. A lot of things have happened since then and I now have the fun task of filling out a review. This blog should help me remember what I've been up to in the past year, after all there are 40 posts in the work category but only 17 in the past year. There are a lot more things that I'd have liked to have blogged about but due to confidentiality reasons (or that I just want to keep my job!) I've not been able to blog about them.

Slimtimer may be a great tool for those of you who need (or like) to keep a track of things that you are doing during the day. A web page app that keeps track of what you are doing automatically (as long as you click to stop or start a task) and gives you nice reports at the end of various time periods. I'm going to try using this for work for the next couple of days to see how it goes and see if it will help keep my time sheet uptodate. Currently I use a paper based system, but it only gives me details when I fill it in (not always by the computer) and this means I can run it from any computer that I have access to. Of course it doesn't solve the problem of tracking things that happen offline like lunch/travel/ etc but it should hopefully be a start. Thanks to Joe for the information on this one

Sysinternals have finally got back to me with details on their consulting licence for their tools - a while back Sysinternals changed their licencing terms for their software which meant that use by a consultant would require payment for a commercial licence. I heard back from them today that $200 per technician per year gives you the right to use the software on any computer - but you do need to remove it when you have finished with it. I don't think that price is unreasonable considering the power of the software, but it remains to be seen whether work will pay for it - or whether we'll have to use alternatives....

I've only had to do this once, but debugging memory dumps would have been a helpful guide.

I got an email on Friday from Microsoft with the following - "Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Solved Windows® licensing promotion. We've received your request for more information to help clarify Microsoft® Windows Desktop Licensing pre-loaded on the USB drive. Unfortunately, this Mystery Solved promotion was available in the U.S. only and while supplies last. Supply is depleted at this time, so we encourage you to please utilize the online alternative today.
Simply download* the Windows Desktop Licensing reference files directly at:www.microsoft.com/mysterysolved/corp. Oh well :-(

Two weeks ago I got the honour of being the employee of the quarter from work which I am pretty chuffed about ;-) Thankfully I didn't have to give an acceptance speech as there would have been too many people to thank. As a prize I was firstly awarded a Batbelt - complete with (nonworking GPS). This was because of the gps but mainly because of the fact that I always have a software tool to solve a computer problem and it's become the joke to ask if I have a tool on my batbelt for a particular problem. Needless to say, everyone thought it was funny so I proudly hooked it up to the top of my cubicle to be on display - this also means the little dart gun is close at hand in case I need to ward off a particular nasty case of job sloping.

I also received an avaya t-shirt - again a gag gift - as I have done so much work on the avaya phone system that support should really be doing, that everyone thinks I am an avaya employee now! (incidentally I got a compliment from the tech I was working with last night (on our third firmware upgrade to solve persistent phone problems) when he said it was nice to work with a customer who actually knew their way around a computer and could help in the diagnostic problems)

The third gift was two tickets for the North Market 10th annual Apron Gala which we went to on Saturday night. The event was really good fun with loads of posh food to try out. We didn't stay right to the end but did enjoy being there at the beginning when there wasn't too many people around. One of the most popular stalls was Bob the fish guy who had two huge containers of shrimp which were really nice - lots of people made several trips to that stall! The picture framing stall had a caricaturist doing pictures so Kristen and I got ours done as you can see on the left - click for a bigger picture. We also purchased two aprons as our donation towards the event - the pockets in the apron were great for keeping napkings, forks and a cup handy whilst walking around.

Kristen also got me a congratulations cookie biscuit (thanks Rob!) which we are now half way through - thanks luv!

My tip on passwords was published in redmond magazine the other week and is available online. Shouldn't be too hard to work out which tip I posted. Note to current employers - doesn't mean that I'm using this function now - especially as Symantec Antivirus is crazy enough to think that certain tools are virus's and deletes them!

In a meeting today I got asked if I knew what Sunday was - I had no idea until it was pointed out to me that it was my 6 month anniversary of working for the company. There is still some discussion over whether this is a bi-annual event or not (as noone can agree on whether biweekly means twice a week or every other week - personally I solve the problem by saying a fortnight but people have no idea what that means). Anyway, I've been there for 6 months so now have my review coming up. I must say it's been a very fast 6 months - I've learnt a lot, gained several qualifications, had a couple of late night pages, had some good laughs and been very productive. I wonder whats going to happen in the next 6 months........

I'm having a problem where ctrl-p doesn't work in a kiosk mode machine with group policy restrictions and wonder if anyone has a clue? I've posted this to google groups.

I have a group policy enabled for a particular user for a locked down, kiosk user interface in a public area. Currently in *some* web pages the ctrl-P shortcut key will work, but on other web pages nothing happens when ctrl-p is pressed. Other shortcut keys such as ctrl-h, ctrl-r, ctrl-w activate properly (in the case of ctrl-w this option complains that the user does not have access to close the window).
We are running internet explorer as the shell in kiosk mode, but removing the kiosk mode doesn't make any difference. Likewise, we have disabled the toolbar, but adding the toolbar back and enabling the print button also does not make any difference - the print dialog box never appears on certain web sites.

www.msn.com, http://travel.msn.com/default.aspx both work but http://travel.msn.com/New_York_City_New_York_State_list_entitylist_attractions_23164_2.aspx or http://www.helsby.net or http://absoblogginlutely.net doesn't. There are a lot more sites that do/don't work but these are just a couple of examples.

Anyone come across this problem before?
I've uploaded the resultant set of policies wizard output to http://absoblogginlutely.net/test/lock.htm - the only thing I've done is change the domain name for security reasons.

I got a new phone at work the other day - a Samsung SGH D357. I'm not that impressed with it so far. I do love the fact that when the headset is connected you hear an incoming call ring before it answers. On the previous motorola phone I had it would just autoanswer with no ringing - not a good idea when singing along to the radio in the car.

PrintConductor looks like a useful tool for printing multiple docs automatically - like all the manuals for Live Communication Server which incidentally I went live with some real users this afternoon. It's taken this long to get the software, user documentation written and the time to install it myself. Work has been incredibly busy with a couple of clients and this week seems to be no better even though we had a new guy start today.

This morning started off badly with all the remote sites complaining that they were getting a message saying that Windows Updates had finished installing and the computer needed restarting but the restart now, reboot later buttons were greyed out. I should have realised they were talking about the screen appearing in their terminal server window and they don't have permission to reboot the server! Instead I spent a while poking around in their event viewer trying to find out what the problem was. I'm not sure if the problem is me not being clear enough when I ask if they are using terminal services or whether its just too complicated a question.... Maybe I'll rename the TS icon on their main desktop to "IF YOU CLICK THIS YOU ARE USING TERMINAL SERVICES" and put a default background saying the same thing.

Microsoft released 2 more patches yesterday - the day after I manage to schedule a lot of reboots for my customers for the wmf patch. Thankfully it looks like the machines may not need rebooting judging on my xp desktop experience. Hopefully the same will hold true for the server.
I had one customer box not reboot overnight because the boot.ini had been mysteriously changed to boot to a (non-existent) windows 2000 installation. Fortunately the customer mentioned (when I rang them early this morning) that the problem of not finding ntkernel.exe is solved by selecting the other option in the boot sequence....I'm glad they told me this but it would have been better if they had mentioned the problem before so I wouldn't have had to get up early this morning in case I needed to make an emergency stop at their site.....so instead I'm catching up on some blogging.

I must be the only person in the world who wasn't pleased that Microsoft released the wmf patch early on Thursday last week. Everyone else seems to be so grateful that this happened but it was a nightmare for me. Thursday night I was doing a software audit on a lan and I left it scanning the machines overnight. I came in the next morning expecting to sit down and start analyzing only to find that the machine had downloaded the new patch and automatically rebooted - loosing all the scanning results so I had to start again - not so happy. Before you tell me that you can set automatic updates to not do the reboot - I know - this was on a machine outside of my control AND Microsoft had also previously announced that the patch would not be ready until Tuesday.

It was a long day in the office today with an upgrade of a windows 2000 server running exchange2000 to a windows2003 running exchange2003. We also upgraded a w2k server running sqlserver to w2k3 too. The sql server was the easiest upgrade with no hitches whatsoever - shame we couldn't say the same thing about the exchange server.

Build numbers and release dates for Exchange Server came in handy today although why they can't put the service pack details on the tab when you right click on a server and do properties I don't know.

The laptop keyboard has now been replaced so I can now type away again uninterrupted. It's amazing how often the k key is pressed in one day. (three times in this post already!) I also had a chat with the certification bod and they want me to get my MCSE next year and the first exam will be an elective and they have chosen the Small Business Server exam. My exposure to this software is fairly minimal as I've only used it in live environments so I'm looking forward to spending some decent time on the software to see how it really works. I've requested a copy of virtual pc and the software to put on the laptop so I can play without causing any damage to live servers. I'll probably need a bit more ram for the laptop to run it though. I've also got to come up with a way of generating an smtp feed of email so i can populate the exchange database - I'll probably just run some batch files to use blat to send emails to it or something.....
It is hard work getting up early in the morning though - I went to bed at 9.30 last night and I'm about ready to go to bed now!

The office had a tailgate party at the Columbus Crew game on Thursday night and it was a good idea to go and meet with the people I'm working with and their families. I had a great time with everyone and spent a lot of time reminiscing with one of the wives who had lived in England when she was a girl. The only down side to that was that I started missing some of the things we were talking about (mainly food items!). The funny thing was that she remembered half pennies and pound notes which have long been scrapped by the Bank of England.
Crew were winning until extra time when New England scored an equaliser but in that half the Crew goal was at the far end of the field, noone cheered and we didn't even realise a goal had been scored.
The ironic thing about the whole night was that the first time in my life I go to see a football (sorry but there is no way I'm going to start referring to it as soccer) game it is in America and not in England where I've lived for 33 years AND it is at the Crew Stadium when I used to work at Crewe.

It was a tough job getting up early yesterday morning for the first day at work. What was also weird was that I was out of the house just as everyone else was getting up - apparently I looked like a school kid on the first day of school as I left the house with a backpack on my back (You'll be glad to know that I wasn't wearing grey shorts though).
The funny thing when you start a new job is that the first thing you do is fill in the forms so you can have your wage packet reduced due to all the various types of taxes that will get deducted, so a nice encouraging start there!
After a run through of the company manual it was time to go see some clients. We only got to see two clients and I spent most of the time there filling out the server checklists which is a good way of getting used to all the customer sites.
Although it wasn't a stressful or difficult day I was really tired at the end of it and enjoyed the meal that Kristen and I had at the Old Bag of Nails pub. This is famous for its fish and chips so I was looking forward to a traditional english meal. The menu is full of jokes and funny sayings and worth reading in full before you order and we both ordered the fish and chips. It would have been nice to have had photos of the meal in the menu as we'd have realised to only order one portion between us as it came with loads of chips and two fish portions the size of a normal english portion! Although the fish and chips were nice, we did feel that the fish was rather dry inside the batter and although it was a good meal I don't think it lived up to its hyped reputation (although it was MUCH better than the harry ramsden's fish and chips I had from a mall in Wales one time)
Today we're off to about 3 more customer sites. No techie hints and tips (sorry Danny :-) yet but I do have a couple of puzzlers that I need to research. Out of Office setups on two sites are causing problems - one client has an individual who's ooo just doesn't work and another site where the mailbox cleanup agent removes all the ooo data when it runs. According to Microsoft this shouldn't happen but it does!

Well you heard it here first - as of Monday morning I will be employed again as I was offered a job yesterday after attending a lunch interview. It certainly is a great feeling and also comes on the same day that I accepted an offer on the house back in England so hopefully we can start to settle down for good.
I will be working for a consulting company in Dublin, Ohio covering the Columbus area and I am *really* looking forward to it. This should also mean that I get back to my usual technical blogging which some readers will enjoy and others won't.

I think I was misquoted in this article about server patching although we might have just gone through a load of security patches the previous week!

I've just handed in my resignation to work via email (what a chicken) this evening. Actually the reason it was done via email is that I've been out on a customer job today and just got back in and the last thing I want to do on a Friday night is talk work over the phone. Wonder how long it will take for the grapevine to work.....

Its a shame that services such as job vacancies are not available in rss feeds (although i wouldn't be using the new version of Intravnews reader on the laptop for 2 obvious reasons. However, I will be looking at and subscribing to public folders as rss feeds as we get a couple of mailing lists at work that this would work really well for. Speaking of Microsoft software, there is a Microsoft portal of bloggers which will make interesting reading - some day. It's starting to take me too long to read all my rss feeds, especially when I'm away for four days on the trot and have loads of emails, (20) caching entries and rss feeds to catch up on.
There's also been a whole load of microsoft updates published today - check out Fred Langa's article on the latest update client

After having several calls that were resolved/improved by upgrading firmware on the IBM servers, I've discovered that they have an IBM IBM Message Center that sends you critical information on fixes, alerts, hints, tips and upgrades etc. The software only works on w2k or xp and sits in your taskbar. Now this seems to be an ideal application for an RSS feed and then you could read it from any computer.

The company that I worked for completed a buyout to another company so as of Saturday night I now work for Azur Group.

Got a call from the library asking me what an XLR file was. The UK Technical Support page for file extensions beginning with X gave me the answer - a Microsoft Works file (which can be opened in Excel).

Found a good site with some tips on freelance working and ensuring that you get paid on time. This page, although primarily aimed at journalists has some good links on ensuring you get paid with a very handy interest and penalty calculator to determine how much you are currently owed. So far my bad debt that I am chasing owes £18 in interest, plus a £40 debt collection charge!

Got home late last night after leaving London at 4.30pm. Amazingly the M25 was clear and I made fairly good time. 30 minutes after arriving home it started snowing. Previous to that the drive had been fairly clear of traffic, no rain or snow in sight and for once no idiots tanking at 99.99999 mph on the motorway. Woke up this morning to probably 0.9999mm of snow - wonder just how much chaos that is going to cause?

One of the servers in a remote site failed to send its usual backup email messages over the christmas holiday. When the user rang me up they explained what was on the screen (a BSOD) and I told them to reboot it. Unfortunately on the reboot the hard disk was not detected by the server. At this point I decided to jump in the car and drive to their office. An hour later I got to their site and it sounded like a cuckoo clock (sans cuckoo) was ticking in the office. The tick was the sound of the heads in the hard disk making a racket. Needless to say an order for a new hard disk was swiftly placed. When it arrives I'll have my first live experience of doing an NT install and full restore using ntbackup. Will be interesting to see how well it goes.

As mentioned in the previous post, I had to return my Toshiba laptop for repair yesterday. The mouse has been going haywire and after being told to install the mouse drivers from the Recovery CD (of all the weird places to put drivers - personally I would have put them on the Utility and Drivers CD) and not finding it on either of the supplied cd's I rang back up and was told they would come and collect it. Didn't bother telling me how long it would be before I'd get it back though (and I didn't want to depress myself by asking). Their website says that its a hardware fault so fortunately there was no arguing needed to persuade them to fix it. Shame there was no on-site warrenty purchased though.
Incidentally the nipple mouse is more politically referred to as an Accupoint mouse.

Matt Goyer had an interview with Microsoft and Amazon and has blogged about his experiences. Very interesting reading and quite daunting - especially if you are not a programmer!

With the upcoming change in law of using mobile phones whilst driving, the register has summed up the details fairly well in their document. Interesting to me is that companies that require or encourage people to use the phone whilst driving are breaking the law....wonder how that will go down with the boss! The interesting thing is that the use of two way radio's or cb's are not affected by this (as long as they also can't be used as a phone). I'm not quite sure on the logic of why this is the case unless the powers that be are frightened of offending hgv drivers, or for some weird reason they reckon hgv drivers are better drivers than the rest of us.

I totally sympathise with this report that mentions that 12 million european workers have asked for a cut in salary or work shorter hours due to the amount of stress they are suffering and the lack of a quality of life in their (permanently shrinking) personal life. Now I wouldn't have thought people would have been asking for a drop in salary OR shorter hours - I would have thought it would be both. At one point a couple of months back I was seriously considering reducing my hours by 10% by requesting to take every other friday off. That would mean a drop in pay and it would be really hard if I ever needed to go back to working 5 days a week again.

Sometimes I wish I had the guts to answer the phone like they do in this BOFH piece

I submitted my cv online this morning to a company that sounded like they had an interesting job and I wanted more information on it. By the end of the day I had 7 emails to the same address (with the email I used this morning) with the same subject "Personal details update link" from 7 different companys with 6 different email names (and 7 domains). All of them welcoming me to their company and asking me to update my details with a unique userid (all different) and telling me how my data is stored under the data protection act. I don't remember accepting to have my details passed on and I certainly didn't want that much spam! Say away from jobboard.com

I'm fed up with having my lap heat up every time I use it at home so I'm on the lookout for a decent laptop cooler. The ByteCC looks good and has had favourable reviews but it doesn't look like it would be any good on the lap, but good for a desktop holder. The Acrylic cooler looks a better choice and similar to the CyberCooler. The Laptop desk does not need any power as it doesn't actually use fans so I'm not sure how effective it would be. I really need to see/try one before I purchase it. I wonder if Argos do one? (no they don't)

ComputerWeekly.com have been touting their new career moves website although at a quick glance the service is pretty useless. They have a salary checker so you can tell if you are getting paid too much or not enough....I'd love to tell you but can't because "there is no information available" for that query. The only job that appears if I enter Crewe is actually one in Scotland - and that only appears because the address for sending the cv is Crewe Road! They do have a section called "Why am I finding it hard to get a job"....probably contains one page saying "because sites like ours are rubbish".

Tried to persuade IBM to come out to look at a faulty tape drive but they closed the call as we were not using recommended tape types (and the support person had never heard of imation tapes, despite them being listed on the list of approved tapes, albeit it for a different tape drive!). The list of approved tapes is online. I'm not sure just how legal it is to refuse to come out to a faulty tape drive (which spits out DDS3 tapes as soon as you insert them into the drive (as they replaced an original faulty dds3 drive with a dds2 one)) just because they are using non recommended tapes. After all recommendations are just that - its not compulsory. After all if Ford insisted that everyone filled up at a Shell Garage I think there would be a lot of drivers telling Ford (and Shell) to get stuffed. (Incidentally I picked those companies purely at random and I am not suggesting/implying or stating these companies do that!)

First time I tried to install Service Pack4 it complained it hadn't been able to do it and to either rollback or continue, rebooting into safe mode and recovering from the emergency repair disk.

Does exactly what it says on the tin.....For those of you not in the UK, ronseal make annoying adverts for quick drying paint and wood varnishes with the catch phrase "Does exactly what it says on the tin".
Anyway, I made this
when I got asked 'what does "System has Shutdown" mean'?

I'm staying at Jamie Oliver's parents pub this weekend. When I found that out I knew the food was going to be delicious. The first night I had swordfish steak - and that was massive! Really tasty too. Last night I decided to try ostrich as i've heard a lot about it, but never had a chance to eat it. It doesn't taste like chicken though! It is a very dark meat, hard to describe. The taste is very powerful though. Although I enjoyed the steak I don't think i'd have it again though. Tonight is the Sunday roast - mmmmmmm!

I went into Cambridge yesterday and did a bit of walking around the city. One of the colleges was graduating, so there were loads of people in gowns, and some in tophats! I just wish I had brought the camera with me, but I was expecting to be working the whole weekend so hadn't bothered :-( The college buildings are really impressive and looked really good, although I don't think I'd want to study there - too posh for me. The daft thing is that the Park and Ride that I took into the city centre stops at 6pm so I wasn't able to go to the cinema as the bus would have stopped before I got out the cinema :-(