Absoblogginlutely!

Links for 2009-07-01 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Links for 2009-06-30 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 PDT

iSCSI SAN Solution - StarWind Converter - Free - StarWind
free tool to convert between vmware and hyperv hard disk formats.
Quick Googlemaps tip - show alternative routes. | Friends in Tech

Firefox 3.5 is now out.

Andy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:52:01 +0000

I upgraded over lunchtime this afternoon and so far it seems ok. There were several extensions that claim to not be compatible but I’ll be forcing the ignore version check using the Mr Tech Toolkit Extension. To disable the version check, click Tools/Mr Tech Toolkit Settings, select the Miscellaneous tab, XPI Install Options and then uncheck “Enable Addons Compatability checking” and optionally enable “Disable XPI install time delay” so you don’t get bugged by the delay each time you want to install an addon.

The plugins that didn’t work were Better flickr 0.3, better gmail 2.0.8.1, Better greader 0.6.1, bit.ly preview 1.262, firebug 1.3.3 (upgrade was found to 1.4.0.3b), Microsoft Net Framework Assistant 1.0 and New Tab King 1.9.7.

Both Bit.ly, and New Tab King seem to work – I’ve not tried the others yet as I now have to get back to work.

Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Convert the Get-MailboxStatistics output from Bytes to MB or GB in Exchange 2007. | a Single Point of Contact

Links for 2009-06-27 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Franklin County, Ohio (OH) Live Police, Fire, and EMS Scanners on RadioReference.com

Lifestream not updating – fixed.

Andy — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:17:14 +0000

My lifestream plugin in WordPress that keeps track of most of my social networking sites suddenly stopped working a few days ago and I was not sure how to kick start it back into action again. It turns out that disabling the plugin and then re-enabling the plugin adds the relevant jobs back into the wpcron system. My Lifestream (that appears on Absoblogginlutely! – IRL is now being updated correctly (and also shows my geocaching finds now too).

Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Live Mesh won't install/uninstall - workaround

SuperGenPass support now available for the Blackberry

Andy — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:14:36 +0000

I have been using the SuperGenPass bookmarklet for a long time now to allow me to have unique passwords for each website that I need to log into but only one master password to remember but the drawback is that it only works for websites and you need the javascript bookmark (or a web page downloaded). I have the script saved in my gmail account to allow me to save it onto a new machine that is under my control and use, but for those times when you don’t really want to save the bookmarklet on the pc but have access to your blackberry, then you can now save this implementation of SuperGenPass for the blackberry thanks to Michael Gorven. The download page is http://mene.za.net/passgen/ and the script also gives you an option of using the PasswordComposer generation for passwords.

The blackberry is rapidly becoming my thirdparty authentication tool – the ability to run programs on it to generate secure passwords is very handy – I have another post on this coming up shortly.

Links for 2009-06-20 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Links for 2009-06-18 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Geocaching.com to Flickr greasemonkey script updated.

Andy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:18:33 +0000

I updated my Geocaching.com greasemonkey script to work with the new cache names. This script automatically links to the flickr photos tagged with the geocache name ie GC1NMKA
When I first wrote the script back in 2005 I knew very little about greasemonkey scripts and unfortunately not a lot has changed. However I realized that the script broke as it was looking for the characters GC followed by 4 uppercase alphanumeric characters. New caches now have 5 characters so I needed to fix this.

A quick change to the script now looks for GC followed by any number of uppercase alphanumeric characters and can be found by going to geocache2flickr with a greasemonkey enabled browser and installing the script. This will be the official location but will also be available on the userscripts.org website.

2.8 now installed.

Andy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:03:53 +0000

In common with a lot of bloggers today I upgraded my blogs to Wordpress 2.8. Thankfully I didnt have any problems upgrading any of them. So far in the few minutes that I’ve used WordPress I’ve not actually noticed anything new or drastically different.

Hospital tech.

Andy — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:45:14 +0000

Kristen woke up in the middle of the night with chronic stomach pains and so at 5am I was searching through the United Health Website trying to find the nearest Hospital/ER to where we are staying. The strange thing is that the hospital 11 miles away was not listed. However this doesn’t seem to mean it is not “in-network” as other hospitals were listed ok. Their 24hr careline is only open from 8am to 8pm which is not much use when trying to find out whether your hospital costs are going to be less than $3600 or up to $10,000
So, we ended up going to the hospital anyway as by that point Kristen was in too much pain. The hospital was pretty good with not a lot of waiting to see someone – thankfully Kristen has been ill early in the morning both times we’ve had to go to ER so we’ve not had to wait for too long. Whilst Kristen was being looked at I was reading my book (when the needles came out) and looking at the technology during other waiting periods.
The triage area was computer driven using citrix to connect to their health system. This seemed to be a little slow, but still faster than the triage nurse could type. Extensive use of lookups ensured that data was entered correctly into the database, but meant that “daily” was not recognised and therefore a lookup was provided with options such as WEEKLY or DAILY. You’d have thought that the nurses would have realised to push the caps lock button OR a UCASE function made to ensure that the text typed in was correctly matched. I must admit I was impressed at the medicine lookup – it must be pretty tough keeping all the medicines in the db up to date.
When we were moved into the ER Room itself, I was suprised to see a computer mounted high up on the wall with a flat screen monitor on a swing out arm. I was also surprised to see that they were running Novell for their network (and Mcafee antivirus). I wasn’t sure why the people would need icon’s on the desktop for “my computer” and network neighbourhood – with a locked down desktop I would have thought that the programs needed would already be on the start menu or the desktop.
One of the amusing conversations occurred when one of the nurses took a double take at the t-shirt I was wearing (shown in the picture) and then said that my t-shirt looked familiar. I really would hope that the Google logo is now familiar to most people!

The final analysis is that Kristen likely has a kidney stone on it’s way out, but as the CAT scan equipment is broken we won’t really know for sure (although all the signs are there that this is the case). For an amusing (PG rated) description of Kidney Stones, read this Blogography Kidney Stone metaphor posting.

Dynamics SL crashing on startup after installation of .net patches.

Andy — Wed, 20 May 2009 17:11:12 +0000

Overnight several of the .net patches were pushed out to workstations and now when Dynamics SL is run I get the following error. “Microsoft Dynamics SL has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience”

Looking in the event log or the details I see a .net Runtime 2.0 error, Event 5000. Description EventType clr20r3, P1 msdynamicssl.exe, P2 7.0.0.0, P3 4889f859, P4 solomon.kernel, P5 7.0.0.0, P6 4649b3d9,P7 1b4, P8 0, P9 system.accessviolationexception, P10 NIL

This is then followed by id 5001, Description “Bucket 300554837, bucket table 5, EventType clr20r3, P1 msdynamicssl.exe, P2 7.0.0.0, P3 4889f859, P4 solomon.kernel, P5 7.0.0.0, P6 4649b3d9,P7 1b4, P8 0, P9 system.accessviolationexception, P10 NIL

The cause of this was actually the installation of a .NET Framework 3 patch.

The sorry saga of trying to fix this solution is documented at the dynamics forum but this is a known issue and the patch is available through Customersource or PartnerSource if you have access to this. Alternatively call Microsoft hotfix line on 1 888 456 5570 and request the Dynamics SL hotfix 961802. There is no charge for this hotfix. Install on your workstation and you should be good to go.

However if you have tried to fix this issue by editing your .NET framework settings then I recommend totally removing .net from the computer, reinstalling v2 and the service pack. There is a really good tool for removing .NET framework from Aaron Stebner which works a treat.

Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem

Andy — Sat, 09 May 2009 02:18:44 +0000

I downloaded the Windows 7 upgrade advisor from Microsoft, that is currently in beta on both my work and my home pc to see what the differences were. The work laptop had some warnings but the software fails on the home pc. I get a very unhelpful message of “Windows 7 Upgrade advisor ran into a problem scanning your devices. Upgrade advisor needs to be able to scan your devices to determine if your computer is capable of running Windows 7. Please let us know about this problem.”

Unfortunately there is no UI to send the feedback to Microsoft and there is nothing on the download page either.

Symantec Enterprise Protection (SEP) firewall requirements for client checkin.

Andy — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:57:25 +0000

So I’ve spent ages troubleshooting and debugging Symantec’s Endpoint Protection (SEP) version 11, MR4 – the first version that actually has a hope of working on a 64bit platform. After spending far too long configuring the various policies and tweaking various settings I was finally able to get the software installed via group policy on a testlab machine but the client would not checkin with the management server. The virus definitions were 4 months old BUT the client console was saying everything was ok. Lots of troubleshooting later and I stumbled across the definitions for the Management server – a setting that I had originally wanted to change anyway. In there I saw that the management server was listening on port 8014 and a quick telnet check from the client showed I was unable to connect. Disabling windows firewall (temporarily – this is on a testlab so the infection risk is minimal) allowed the client to check in with the server, change some settings in the console and update the virus definition dates. Finally I re-enabled the firewall, added an exception for TCP port 8014 and it all looks good, but I’ll wait to see what happens overnight for definition updates on the client. For future reference the list of communications ports for version 11 can be found at Symantecs website here or posted below in the extended entry.

Solution:

Port Number	Port Type	Initiated by	Listening Process	Description
80, 8014	TCP	SEP Clients	svchost.exe (IIS)	Communication between the SEPM manager and SEP clients and Enforcers. (8014 in MR3 and later builds, 80 in older).
443	TCP	SEP Clients	svchost.exe (IIS)	Optional secured HTTPS communication between a SEPM manager and SEP clients and Enforcers.
1433	TCP	SEPM manager	sqlservr.exe	Communication between a SEPM manager and a Microsoft SQL Database Server if they reside on separate computers.
1812	UDP	Enforcer	w3wp.exe	RADIUS communication between a SEPM manager and Enforcers for authenticating unique ID information with the Enforcer.
2638	TCP	SEPM manager	dbsrv9.exe	Communication between the Embedded Database and the SEPM manager.
8443	TCP	Remote Java or web console	SemSvc.exe	HTTPS communication between a remote management console and the SEPM manager. All login information and administrative communication takes place using this secure port.
9090	TCP	Remote web console	SemSvc.exe	Initial HTTP communication between a remote management console and the SEPM manager (to display the login screen only).
8005	TCP	SEPM manager	SemSvc.exe	The SEPM manager listens on the Tomcat default port.
39999	UDP	Enforcer		Communication between the SEP Clients and the Enforcer. This is used to authenticate Clients by the Enforcer.
2967	TCP	SEP Clients	Smc.exe	The Group Update Provider (GUP) proxy functionality of SEP client listens on this port.

Installing 32 bit printer driver on Windows200864 server

Andy — Tue, 05 May 2009 16:12:32 +0000

Tried to install a 32 bit driver for the Dell 2330dn printer but the software kept asking me “please provide path to windows media (x86 processor)’”. Pointing the dialog box to the x86 directory or the i386 directory that came with the print driver didn’t help. Neither did pointing the dialog to a copy of the i386 directory from an xp cd. A reply posting on Microsoft’s technet site gave me a hint to get this working. By first installing and sharing the 64bit driver, it is then possible to install the printer by using the following steps.
On a 32 bit (in my case XP) workstation, navigate to \\servername and then double click on the printer that was previously shared.
When it asks for the driver location provide the location to the i386 directory of the extracted driver.
Verify once installed that the driver is now successfully listed as an option on the printer by clicking on the sharing tab and then the additional drivers button.