prometheus

2011 Plans

2011-01-04T14:47:00.001-08:00

Below are the list of things I plan to do within 2011, I am not saying I will achieve all but I will work towards achieving all.... Here you go:

Pursuit of happiness.
Revise Java and learn J2EE.
Learn Haskell and Haskell for web Programming.
Python
Perl
C Sharp
C/C++
Software Project Management skill sets.
Unix system administration.

So help me God.. Guys I will appreciate it if you know any good books around that i can benefit from or those working on certain projects that involve the list above, i do not mind giving a helping hand.

Unlocking iphone to work with Carriers in The Gambia

2009-01-07T10:31:00.000-08:00

After doing lot of research on how to making iphone work with any carrier not just AT&T, i gathered so much info regarding problems others faced while unlocking their iphones. Which steps they had right and which they did not? What went wrong during the unlocking process? Went through series of step by step guide on how to unlock iphone 2G and 3G on so many sites but the one i found most useful and easy to understand is: http://iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1880.

I went through the steps and "google" each step for failures, for example, the first step was to restore the iphone so i searched for "failed to restore the iphone" and i got so many suggestions on how to avoid that during the process. I did similar thing throughout the step by step guide while going through it.

Below is the summary of what i did to get the iphone unlocked:

download the latest itunes from apple.
install/upgrade itunes.
download the latest version of the iphone software. The current version is 2.2.
download QuickPwn2.2 , BL3.9 and BL4.6 .
Place all downloads on one folder that is easily accessible.
restore iphone using the iphone restore software downloaded.
unzip QuickPwn2.2 to the same directory and and run it.
Select the same file you used during restoration.
select unlock iphone.
select the bl3.9 and bl4.6 repectively.
Follow the remaining of the instructions diplay on the screen as the process goes on.
wait for few minutes to allow your iphone to flash and jalibreak the OS.
thats all.. Now your iphone can work with any carrier. You can follow the screenshots from this link.

Thanks

Uninstalling application Using the rigistry key value

2008-10-13T05:05:00.000-07:00

Sometimes uninstalling program files can be real pain especially if the installed application cannot be found on the Add/Remove Programs located at the control panel. But you can uninstall application using windows registry key. Below are the steps on how to uninstall using windows registry:

Start --> Run and type regedit, click ok , and then locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall
Look for the name of the program to be uninstalled, Click on it and on the right side of the window double click on UninstallString and copy the value.
Open the command prompt and paste the value there. Then hit enter. A warning message will be displayed asking you whether you want to uninstall the application. click ok.
That's all.. :) Restarting your machine.

Be careful. Playing with the registry can crash your operating system!!!!!!

Windows Remote Procedure Call (RPC) services

2008-09-20T10:21:00.000-07:00

Remote procedure call (RPC) is an Inter-process communication technology that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network) without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction. That is, the programmer would write essentially the same code whether the subroutine is local to the executing program, or remote. When the software in question is written using object-oriented principles, RPC may be referred to as remote invocation or remote method invocation

. That is the definition from wikipedia. Microsoft windows OS have this as a service and so many of its services depends on this to run. But what happens when this service is disabled or value being changed?
This is what happened to me, i stupidly changed the log on from default to another account and restarted the machine. When the machine started almost all the services couldn't start nor can i start them manually. I was unable to access shared forlders, tried pinging other machines but it was failing. Ran services.msc from the run command hoping that will help me fixed the problem if i can take it back to its original value, but to my disappointment I couldn't even access the property window to change its value to what it was. I went to google, read so many articles on RPC hoping one of them will tell me how to solve the problem i have. Fortunately i saw this download the changes the registry value from 1 to 2 of the start property of the RPC. Below is the expected result of the tool.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RpcSs]
"Start"=dword:00000002

Reading more about the start property i realized that this is not what i want to do. So instead of running the tool i decided to go to the registry, risky though but i had no choice. I did the follow:

run regedit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->SYSTEM->CurrentControlSet->Services->RpcSs
Double clicked ObjectName and changed its value to the default "NT Authority\NetworkService".
Clicked ok and restarted the server.

Everything was normal again.

Installing Exchange Server 2007

2008-09-18T16:57:00.001-07:00

Thursday evening usually means less work do to. Most of the time all i have to do is go home and get some sleep but not this Thursday evening. Around 12pm when i got to work i met a sys Ad struggling with getting back an exchange server online that crashed. He needed this working so urgently because the boss will be at the office the following morning from Nigeria and will be expecting everything to be running smoothly on his network especially the exchange server where he does most of his transactions. So i decided to help.

Dang!! We tried so hard to restore the exchange server but to no avail. We later realized that the server running the exchange server has three roles of the FSMO:

PDC (primary Domain Controller )
Infrastructure Master
Schema master

We had to seize all these roles of the FSMO and distributed them to different servers by following the steps we got from this link

After transferring the FSMO we were still seeing the offline DC (Domain Controller) on the Active Directory and it has to be deleted. Got the instructions from this link as well.

Finally we decided to install exchange server 2007 but it was giving us this error

Error:
One or more servers in the existing organization is running Exchange Server 2003 without Service Pack 2 (or later). Installation cannot proceed until existing Exchange Server 2003 computers are upgraded to Service Pack 2.

We had no exchange installed at this point. All exchange servers were uninstalled from the network. We went through almost all the servers on the networking hoping to find somewhere an exchange server we forgot to uninstall but none was found. Pretty confused we decided to take a 5 minutes break, ate some food and drank some apple juice and got back to work. This is how we solved the error:

went run and type adsiedit.msc
went to configuration-> services and deleted the exchange folder
went to and deleted the exchange folder
restarted server

Everything was normal. We updated the .Net Framework and followed the installation instructions

So far so good.
I will tell you more about the configuration part of the exchange server later.

About this Blog...

2008-09-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

I will be posting problems i do have at work and how i got them solved on this blog. Most of the problems will be networking stuff. And i might as well post links to interesting stuff.