runPCrun - IT Support for London blogs

VHD in Windows 7

Dan White — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:50:09 +0000

Given changes to Windows backup formats in Vista/7/2008 the following tools may be rather useful as W7 and 2008 become ever more common:

http://www.jmedved.com/default.aspx?page=vhdattach
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4

this 2nd one can even allegedly be used [with care] with Vista native VHD backups. or
http://www.winmount.com/mount_vhd.html

which allegedly also allows one to write to the VHD as well.

Alternatively, if you need quick access to VHD backups, you can mount them directly from the 7/2008 Disk Manager, but the mount doesn't survive a reboot.

Also VHDTool - command-line tool which provides useful VHD manipulation functions including instant creation of large fixed-size VHDs.

Help! My Screen is Upside Down! - Shortcut Keys to Fix

Sarah Bird — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:24:17 +0000

CLICK HERE FOR THIS ARTICLE UPSIDE-DOWN!

We occasionally get a call that begins 'Help! My screen is upside-down!', this is usually on a laptop, and it can be done inadvertently - it has even been done by cats on the keyboard according to one customer. However, there are simple shortcut key combinations that can put everything back to normal.

If the display has been rotated, it can normally be corrected by pushing the key combination <Ctrl> + <Alt>+ <Up Arrow>.

This capability to invert/rotate the display is a feature of some of the Intel® Extreme Graphics Chipset driver.

The following chipsets are affected:

Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GE
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GV
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845G
Intel® Extreme Graphics 845GL
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 865G
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 865GV
Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 855GM

Image rotation is enabled by default and is activated by the default key combination <Ctrl> + <Alt> + <F1>.

Once it is activated, you can rotate the display with the additional "Hot Keys":

<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Right Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Down Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Left Arrow>
<Ctrl> + <Alt> + <Up Arrow>

To disable this Hot Key Feature, remove the check from the Enable Hot Keys selection box in the Extended Graphics properties.

Windows SP3 installation - "The system cannot find the file specified."

Dan White — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:58:07 +0000

Trying to install Windows SP3 (Network Installation) on a client machine. It would not install, giving the error message "The system cannot find the file specified." and "The installation could not complete"

Thank you to DataOne on the softwaretipsandtricks.com forum which pointed me in the right direction.

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll
regsvr32 /s atl.dll
regsvr32 /s Softpub.dll
regsvr32 /s Wintrust.dll
regsvr32 /s Initpki.dll
regsvr32 /s Mssip32.dll

Sometimes you just have to love Microsoft

Dan White — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:03:29 +0000

Not sure what to say really. I got this error earlier this month and just stared blankly at the screen for a while.

And a Windows 7 error (March 2010)

Error 1327.Invalid Drive : when installing an Application

Chris Wolfe — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:29:41 +0000

I recently encountered a problem when attempting to install ACT! 2009 Premium on a clients computer. Every time I ran the installation program, the following message appeared on the screen.

error 1327.Invalid Drive: N:\

Then the installer would close itself.

The machine was running Vista Business and had a mapped drive to a NAS called N:\.

Early searches led me to think it was a problem with either a previous installation or the Installer program itself. This did not make sense as ACT! to my knowledge had never been installed before on the machine.

Disconnecting Drive N: did not make a difference nor did running the Sage ACT! special uninstaller program just in case.

A quick phone call to Sage was next, who denied the problem was with their product but with the installer service on the computer itself. However, they did give me some information in passing which eventually helped me fix the problem.

According to Sage, ACT! copies some demo databases to the My Documents folder on the PC which is hardcoded to be on Drive C. This PC had the My Documents folder mapped to the NAS drive for backup purposes. Once I remapped the My Documents back to the local drive, the ACT! installation was able to run and it installed without any further problems.

So if you are seeing this error then check that your system does not have any odd drive name allocations or remapped My Document folders.

The cost of the number 9

Dan White — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:23:01 +0000

Some customers are asking about downtime, so here is a quick summary of realistic expectations. The following excerpt is from a Slashdot comment 6 weeks back (thanks to mcrbids)

So we see the real issue isn't whether or not you can count on 100% uptime, but whether or not having downtime in your "100% available" costs all that much.
Are you serving personal pictures on a home DSL line? If so, 99% uptime is probably for you. What's the real cost of a few days of unavailability per year?
Are you serving data commercially? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.9% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 8 hours of downtime per year) Think about the freebie web server on your local ISP. If it's down for a couple of afternoons per year, is anybody going to complain much?
Are you serving financial records for a state government? If so, the cost of anything more than maybe 99.99% uptime may not be worth it. (That's just under 1 hour of downtime per year)
Are you serving cash Visa for nations? If so, anything more than 99.999% uptime may not be worth it. (That's about 5 minutes of downtime per year)
Each of these "nines" costs exponentially more. A home computer running the latest consumer grade O/S can generally maintain 2 nines without too much difficulty. A basic server running a server O/S (EG: Linux) can generally sustain close to 3 nines without difficulty. When there's a problem, you can drive to the local colo to reboot the server. Keeping a spare server handy and reliable backups means you can recover in less than 8 hours or so. It gets pretty spendy at 4 nines: 99.99% gives you just under an hour. That means you are hosting a fully redundant cluster, with lots of realtime "auto-recover" options. And 99.999% uptime is insanely expensive. Not only are you fully redundant, but you are actually watching each individual process to ensure that it completes, even if the hardware/process dedicated to it fails.
5 nines, along with high performance, can be ridiculously expensive.

So in order to assess how much money you should spend on uptime depends on how much downtime really costs you.

Slipstreaming, tweaking, wrangling and downloading

Dan White — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:23:06 +0000

Some useful information today.

Using symbolic links in Vista to fix iTunes library

Robin Kemp — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:31:47 +0000

Today I had a user call about a problem with iTunes not finding any music after migrating to Vista. The problem was that they'd not kept all their music in the "iTunes Music" directory and it was spread out all over the "My Documents" directory on the old machine, and the username was also different so the default link that Vista creates (from "Documents and Settings" to "Users") wouldn't work. So instead of recreating the iTunes library from scratch or relocating all the files I remembered that Vista now supports symbolic links, so all that was needed was to create a directory in users with the old username then use MKLINK to create a link from the old location (C:\Documents and Settings\oldusername\My Documents) to the new one (C:\Users\newusername\Documents) and all was well.

Using MKLINK is fairly easy, but you need to run the command prompt as administrator in order to do it. To create a symbolic link to a directory you use the /D switch like so :

mklink /d "c:\Documents and Settings\bob\my documents" "c:\users\Robin\Documents"

Which will link them so when you try to access the old location, it will look in the new path. Also you can remove a link by removing the directory, if you're unsure then DIR will show you if the directory is a real directory or a symbolic link.

Creating a low-cost, full feature dual WAN (load balance or fail-over) firewall.

Dan White — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:14:14 +0000

I'm in love...

I guess I should qualify that statement. I've been working on finding a firewall to deploy to our customers.

Gradually more and more of our customers want or need 2 ADSL lines for fail-over and/or VoIP traffic quality purposes. So the task was to find a robust router that importantly wasn't going to be deprecated or discontinued for a fair while so we could standardise on it. Our problem recently with low end ADSL routers is that we'd find a nice one, then after a few months we wouldn't be able to buy it anymore.

So low cost and sophisticated enough to do :-

Dual WAN failover - in both directions.
Ability to chose what traffic leaves which WAN interface. i.e. LAN to WAN/WAN2 control.
Standard firewall filtering
NAT and 1-1 NAT
Port forwarding and port mapping
Static routes

We bought a Netgear Dual WAN router to investigate the commercial dual WAN routers, as we have had good experiences with their equipment. However on testing it didn't quite do everything I wanted. Particularly be able to choose the exit route of different traffic on our network. It also left me worried that choosing a commercial solution would leave us open to having the product changed or upgraded.

We've been a fan of IPCop's for a long time as we've always found that standard firewall routers have either lacked features or been out of the range of the SME budget. For those customers that have needed a featured firewall we've always used IPCop's. Using an old PC or a new mini-ATX PC and putting IPCop on it has made our lives much nicer in the last 5 years. However IPCop doesn't support dual WAN and there was nothing on the roadmap to suggest it was going to be implemented. The other thing was that being hard drive based, IPCop's are always going to be more prone to failure than an embedded firewall due to the mechanical nature of hard drives. We'd considered putting IPCop on CF-cards, but figured that since they weren't optimised for flash based drives, that the OS would rapidly wear the drive out.

However there is the dual-WAN capable pfsense, and after checking out a virtual appliance and being suitable happy with it, I decided to buy an ALIX embedded PC. This company sells them with m0n0wall or pfsense pre-loaded so I bought 2 for testing and waited for it to arrive.

Attachment	Size
system_advanced.png	7.98 KB
firewall_rules.png	99.02 KB
firewall_aliases.png	76.77 KB
load_balancer_pool.png	68.47 KB
services_wol.png	80.14 KB

Antivirus 2008 XP removal leaves Display properties tabs missing

Dan White — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:13:06 +0000

After removing the fraudware Antivirus 2008 XP program, it can be found that you have some missing tabs in the Display Properties dialog box.

Lucky for us, Ramesh Srinivasan at windowsxp.mvps.org solved this issue in 2006 with a little vbs script which can be found on this page.

If you find you have an annoying picture on the logon page, you will need to remove the default wallpaper via the registry.