Today I updated the NTP, Time Server Monitor, and Scorpion Software’s Firewall Dashboard. There wasn’t any particular problem with NTP or the Time Server Monitor except that the Time Server Monitor is still a beta so I decided to look for an update. I got both updates from Meinberg. The “0.9k” version of the Time Server monitor did not work for me so I went back to the “0.9j” version. The “k” version could not communicate with the NTP server so I updated it to 4.2.0b version. I did not think that was the source for the problem but it was worth a try. Running the NTP server on my W2K3 server has been an experiment. Microsoft includes adequate time server support with its software but I wanted a little more visibility of what was going on. Occasionally in the past IÂ found that the Microsoft version had stopped synching. The time server monitor provides a quick way to check on the time server status but you got to use the open source NTP server.
Finally I got the update key so I could download the latest Firewall Dashboard beta from Scorpion Software. For those of us running Microsoft’s ISA firewall this application gives us a nice summary of possible break-in attempts. The latest upgrade adds a summary of authorized activity. It’s pretty neat!
Month: January 2006
RE: Network install instructions for QB 2006
When using QuickBooks 2006 or QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 6.0 in a multi-user environment, *the one best thing to know is that the new QuickBooks database requires new installation procedures with all machines running on Release 3 or above.
To help you support your clients with QuickBooks 2006 in a multi-user environment, Intuit offers:
* White Paper on QuickBooks 2006 in Networked Environments
PDF file (313KB)
* Master Tip: Installing QuickBooks 2006 in a Networked Environment
* KBID on Troubleshooting Error (-6177,-0)
* Special for Users of Enterprise Solutions 6.0
See article below.*Caution.* Please do not attempt to Upgrade*QuickBooks, *Rebuild* a data file, or *Clean Up Company File** across a network. If you have clients in a networked environment, please work with them to make sure they avoid such actions.
The caution holds true * whenever the file is being accessed from a remote drive. QuickBooks never supported major file operations across a network in earlier versions and does not support them in QuickBooks 2006.
Our technical support center has recently seen a spike in calls generated by this problem. For background on the issue, and instructions on how to proceed, please read KBID 118556, “Rebuild, Update, or Condense Takes an Exceptionally Long Time or Does Not Complete
*Warnings to Be Added in Future Release of QuickBooks.* Intuit will be adding a warning message in a future release to help avoid the problem. Then, when the software senses that a major file operation is being attempted across a network, the user will be warned first. (The warning was in earlier versions of QuickBooks and was omitted from QuickBooks 2006 in error.)
** Condense vs. Clean Up Company File.* What was called “Condense” in QuickBooks 2005 and earlier is now “Clean Up Company File” in QuickBooks 2006. In 2006, QuickBooks is using a new database structure for improved operations; however, the overall size of the file does not reduce significantly during cleanup. While old data is removed, the overall structure retains much of the same footprint, and therefore the action was renamed.
Release 3 (R3) addresses several rare issues that could be troublesome should they occur. We recommend you confirm that your clients have upgraded their systems to R3.
Specific R3 modifications include:
* The “*Connection Has Been Lost [99937]*” error message related to
network installation has been updated. The occurrence of such
“Connection Lost” messages should be greatly reduced.
* *Error 1911 *(when desktop icons no longer work after an
unsuccessful attempt to install) *has been eliminated in the
current release*. This situation is triggered when an installation
of QuickBooks 2006 is attempted on top of a pre-existing
corruption in the user’s Windows system registry. While the
problem is not unique to QuickBooks, a fix in R3 removes the
potential that the error would arise in future installations.
*Note:* If you or a client should experience this issue with a
previous release, Intuit will help you resolve the issue.
* C=224 errors should no longer appear when making a backup.
* Icons listed in the Navigation portion of the Icon bar *can be
removed or edited*.For a complete list of the changes to QuickBooks included in the R3 update, see the release notes
*Note:* Release 4 (R4) is not meant for general use. R4 includes all issues addressed in R3 but makes an additional adjustment to work with one third-party application (ReportWiz). The vendor is separately alerting its customers on how to obtain R4. Other QuickBooks users on R3 don’t need R4.
*Changes to Install Process: Read before You Install. *Because of the new database across QuickBooks 2006 and Enterprise Solutions 6.0, the install process in a multi-user environment will differ from previous installations. These issues are especially important when dealing with QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 6.0.
Bottom line… need to mess with that data file? Drag it to a local drive for maintenance…fun huh?
Top QuickBooks Support Issues – Restricted Access to Windows User Account
Top QuickBooks Support Issues – Restricted Access to Windows User Account
Your user account for Windows was created with Restricted access to system resources. This will prevent QuickBooks from operating properly. Please contact your system administrator and ask him or her to grant you Standard user rights.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to go into computer management on the local computer at the workstation or by using computer management on another computer with administrative priveleges and using the connect to another computer feature under Action and add the person(domain\username) to Power User group. I decided to post this so I can find this info quickly.
RE: In case you wanted to get a command line thrill today….
Useful RUN CommandsTo Access…. – Run Command
Accessibility Controls – access.cpl
Add Hardware Wizard – hdwwiz.cpl
Add/Remove Programs – appwiz.cpl
Administrative Tools – control admintools
Automatic Updates – wuaucpl.cpl
Bluetooth Transfer Wizard – fsquirt
Calculator – calc
Certificate Manager – certmgr.msc
Character Map – charmap
Check Disk Utility – chkdsk
Clipboard Viewer – clipbrd
Command Prompt – cmd
Component Services – dcomcnfg
Computer Management – compmgmt.msc
Date and Time Properties – timedate.cpl
DDE Shares – ddeshare
Device Manager – devmgmt.msc
Direct X Control Panel (If Installed)* – directx.cpl
Direct X Troubleshooter – dxdiag
Disk Cleanup Utility – cleanmgr
Disk Defragment – dfrg.msc
Disk Management – diskmgmt.msc
Disk Partition Manager – diskpart
Display Properties – control desktop
Display Properties – desk.cpl
Display Properties (w/Appearance Tab Preselected) – control color
Dr. Watson System Troubleshooting Utility – drwtsn32
Driver Verifier Utility – verifier
Event Viewer – eventvwr.msc
File Signature Verification Tool – sigverif
Findfast – findfast.cpl
Folders Properties – control folders
Fonts – control fonts
Fonts Folder – fonts
Free Cell Card Game – freecell
Game Controllers – joy.cpl
Group Policy Editor (XP Prof) – gpedit.msc
Hearts Card Game – mshearts
Iexpress Wizard – iexpress
Indexing Service – ciadv.msc
Internet Properties – inetcpl.cpl
IP Configuration (Display Connection Configuration) – ipconfig /all
IP Configuration (Display DNS Cache Contents) – ipconfig /displaydns
IP Configuration (Delete DNS Cache Contents) – ipconfig /flushdns
IP Configuration (Release All Connections) – ipconfig /release
IP Configuration (Renew All Connections) – ipconfig /renew
IP Configuration (Refreshes DHCP & Re – Registers DNS) – ipconfig /registerdns
IP Configuration (Display DHCP Class ID) – ipconfig /showclassid
IP Configuration (Modifies DHCP Class ID) – ipconfig /setclassid
Java Control Panel (If Installed) – jpicpl32.cpl
Java Control Panel (If Installed) – javaws
Keyboard Properties – control keyboard
Local Security Settings – secpol.msc
Local Users and Groups – lusrmgr.msc
Logs You Out Of Windows – logoff
Microsoft Chat – winchat
Minesweeper Game – winmine
Mouse Properties – control mouse
Mouse Properties – main.cpl
Network Connections – control netconnections
Network Connections – ncpa.cpl
Network Setup Wizard – netsetup.cpl
Notepad – notepad
Nview Desktop Manager (If Installed) – nvtuicpl.cpl
Object Packager – packager
ODBC Data Source Administrator – odbccp32.cpl
On Screen Keyboard – osk
Opens AC3 Filter (If Installed) – ac3filter.cpl
Password Properties – password.cpl
Performance Monitor – perfmon.msc
Performance Monitor – perfmon
Phone and Modem Options – telephon.cpl
Power Configuration – powercfg.cpl
Printers and Faxes – control printers
Printers Folder – printers
Private Character Editor – eudcedit
Quicktime (If Installed) – QuickTime.cpl
Regional Settings – intl.cpl
Registry Editor – regedit
Registry Editor – regedt32
Remote Desktop – mstsc
Removable Storage – ntmsmgr.msc
Removable Storage Operator Requests – ntmsoprq.msc
Resultant Set of Policy (XP Prof) – rsop.msc
Scanners and Cameras – sticpl.cpl
Scheduled Tasks – control schedtasks
Security Center – wscui.cpl
Services – services.msc
Shared Folders – fsmgmt.msc
Shuts Down Windows – shutdown
Sounds and Audio – mmsys.cpl
Spider Solitare Card Game – spider
SQL Client Configuration – cliconfg
System Configuration Editor – sysedit
System Configuration Utility – msconfig
System File Checker Utility (Scan Immediately) – sfc /scannow
System File Checker Utility (Scan Once At Next Boot) – sfc /scanonce
System File Checker Utility (Scan On Every Boot) – sfc /scanboot
System File Checker Utility (Return to Default Setting) – sfc /revert
System File Checker Utility (Purge File Cache) – sfc /purgecache
System File Checker Utility (Set Cache Size to size x) – sfc /cachesize=x
System Properties – sysdm.cpl
Task Manager – taskmgr
Telnet Client – telnet
User Account Management – nusrmgr.cpl
Utility Manager – utilman
Windows Firewall – firewall.cpl
Windows Magnifier – magnify
Windows Management Infrastructure – wmimgmt.msc
Windows System Security Tool – syskey
Windows Update Launches – wupdmgr
Windows XP Tour Wizard – tourstart
Wordpad – write
microsoft sharepoint server tutorials: using [today] in a calculated formula (birthday lists)
microsoft sharepoint server tutorials: using [today] in a calculated formula (birthday lists)
TODAY – Returns the serial number of the current date. The serial number is the date-time code used for date and time calculations. Note You can only use the TODAY function as a default value; you cannot use it in a calculated column.
Here is a tip that makes sharepoint lists more useful. I have a site that sells horses and one of the key pieces of information we are alwasy asked is the horse’s age. This tip makes calculating a horse’s current age in a Sharepoint list possible and easy. I went to this effort since by convention all horses change age on January 1 rather than their actual birth date. That meant that I had a bunch of ages to update or I could come up with a formula that would always be up to date. I chose the formula method.
Fixing more PC problems
I use son’s old PC(AMD 900 circa 2000) as a test box. It is set up to dual boot W2K server and Fedora 4. Over the Christmas holidays both systems crashed on me and I assumed I had a hardware failure. Since I had recently fixed my son’s new PC and my mind was in a PC troubleshooting mode, I decided to give the old PC some attention. The W2K side was showing a BSOD with a registry file failure. Switching to the last known good configuration did not help. The Fedora side would not run Firefox. Nothing happened. Now I could not logon to my mere mortal account. The message it showed said “gdm could not write authorization file”.
My first guess was that something was wrong with the disk drives. It was odd that both disk drives would show errors if that truly was the source of failure. So I decided to run Ubuntu Live and test the other components. This was easy. Just put the CD-ROM in the drive and boot. Everything came up fine and Firefox ran perfectly. So then I ran a search on the gdm message. The replies indicated most people thought this was a disk full indicator. Hmmm….I know I was playing around with downloading ISO’s using Fedora. So I booted into Fedora and deleted the ISO’s using the administrative account. Yea, I remembered to empty the trash. Fedora works fine.
Fixing the W2K registry problem was more complex. I went into the Recovery Console and restored the initial registry created during the installation. I rebooted and started the update process(e.g. applying the service pack and patches). Somewhere after applying the service pack and before switching over to Microsoft Update, the system took a trip to Neverland. Microsoft Update got caught in a loop trying to update components. Windows Update sent me to Microsoft Update. My “Add or Remove Programs” panel would not come up. It was time to go Plan B.
So I went back and repaired the system files using the Server CD-ROM. Then I let Windows Update lead me through the process of updating the system, IE 6 rollup and then Service Pack 4. Microsoft Update kicked in after the Service Pack update and tried to install Installer 3.1. For some reason Installer 3.1 would not install via Microsoft Update so I installed it manually. It appears to be running fine and my reason to buy a new PC has diminished again. Darn!
iPod not charging and other tales
Last Saturday I went into my son’s room for some reason and my son mentioned that his iPod’s battery was almost dead despite having been connected to his computer for a long time. He thought our cat, Chewie, might have broken it. Chewie thought the iPod was a cat toy until we corrected him. I wasn’t convinced that the iPod was broken since everything else worked. I tried a few things on his computer and then connected the iPod to my computer. I charge my Blackberry and my Muvo without problems on my computer. In a few minutes the iPod showed a significant increase in the battery charge. After a little internet searching the Apple site said that some USB connections do not provide power. Since my son’s desktop computer has a much newer motherboard I was a little surprised. So I decided to see if I could get his USB connections to provide power.
Boy was that a mistake! I checked the MSI website but I did not find any info. The Bios was not current and the website said that the latest release improved USB connectivity. So I decided to upgrade the Bios. I downloaded the Bios, started the upgrade, and the first thing it wants is a floppy drive. I did not install a floppy drive on his computer. They wanted the floppy drive to boot from. The Bios flash updater runs under DOS so I decided to provide a CD-ROM alternative. The first bootable CD-ROM ISO with FreeDOS did not boot. So I got a second one, FreeDOS Lite. It is bilingual with a preference for German but it booted and I got my DOS prompt. Then I realized that I needed a FAT or FAT32 partition. So I went back created the partition and copied the Bios files over to it. I rebooted the machine back into FreeDOS again and the flashed the Bios without a problem.
When I got back into W2K it found some unknown hardware. That’s typically not good. I decided to upgrade the Nvidia drivers with WHQL drivers from Nivida. That’s when things went really bad! When I rebooted I got the blue screen of death. Another boot later it said I did not have a boot drive. I searched for info on the internet but finally gave up. I booted from the W2K installation CD-ROM and went into recovery console and ran chkdsk to fix any problems. That took a long time to run. Then I ran FIXMBR. It said I had a non-standard signature so I let it fix it. I rebooted and everything is fine including the Nvidia drivers. Whew, that was messy! I have had real good luck with Bios upgrades in the past so I am a little surprised. I think I don’t care if his iPod gets charged anymore.
RE: So what tools do you use?
So a bit back I asked what tools that SBSers should have on hand and here are some answers…
Besides www.Eventid.net and www.Experts-Exchange.com and the others mentioned by Susan I find having a Bart’s PE Builder CD on hand with recent antivirus and antispyware a real life saver. See http://nu2.nu/pebuilder/ . I also have on the CD GetDataBack and other utilities from http://www.runtime.org/ . The RunTime.org people have even provided the plugins for Bart PE. If you have ever lost a volume on a drive due to disk failure, this utility will amaze you with the data it can recover if the drive still spins.
From Peter
1. nslookup 2. telnet
3. eseutil
4. filemon
5. regmon
6. netmon
7. pokemon (cmon, all work and no play…)
8. netstat -aon | find “:portnumber”
9. tasklist /svc
10. adsiedit.msc <<– always install the support tools
11. www.sysinternals.com
12. www.hotmail.com <<– testing external mailflow
13. recovery console
14. exmerge
15. treesizeJim says…
Good start, but let’s not forget:
– pathping (built-in) – ldp (support tools & far better than adsiedit, IMHO)
– shutdown (resource kit)
– Duke Nukem (need you ask?)
– whois (resource kit)
– winsocktool (http://www.isatools.org/ )
– portqry http://support.microsoft.com/?id=832919
http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Mastering-PortQryexe-Part1.htmlhttp://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Mastering-PortQryexe-Part2.html
– netsh -diag (built-in)
– netstat -anob (built-in)
– netdiag /fix (support tools)
Fixing Smartsound
Yesterday I was trying to create a pdf using pdfcreator. Instead of giving me the standard pdfcreator screen I got a popup screen saying it was trying to install Smartsound. It looked like a standard program installation screen but it kept getting stuck when it could not find the installation executable. This was perplexing. Smartsound is installed as part of my Pinnacle Studio program and I do not install it directly. I had not changed anything with Studio since I installed the patch last year. My first thought was that I had somehow screwed up my recent upgrade of pdfcreator. So I uninstalled and reinstalled it. I got the same error. So I went over to Pinnacle site and it recommended installing the latest version of the Smartsound plug-in. This new version of Smartsound added support for Quicktime 7. I had recently upgraded to Quicktime 7 so maybe this was the source of the problem. Anyway… upgrading Smartsound solved the problem.
Backup Revisited
I must confess that I have not been backing up my workstation on a regular basis. Initially my problem was the lack of attached disk space. After reviewing what I would recommend to clients I decided that I should follow my own recommendations and start backing up my workstation on a daily basis. Now this is not as bad as it sounds. Almost all of my data resides on the server and it is backed up on a daily basis. In addition I have Volume Shadow copy enabled so I have access to previous versions for this data. I do not keep much data on my workstation. I think I would use this backup to help me recover from a workstation disk failure and really bad software installation failures.
Recently I have been playing with Cobian Backup 7 as a replacement for NTBackup. It is free and it runs as a service. I found it pretty easy to setup but pretty difficult for me to get my data out of the zipped archive. The problem is that the zip archive is about 5 GB and it gave me corruption errors with 7-zip even though 7-zip supports zip64. Explorer had more serious problems with the archive since it did not support zip64. So my next step would be to create an uncompressed archive and this puts me back into the disk space issue.
So I have now gone back to Ntbackup. I like that Ntbackup uses shadow copies on XP. After I get a full backup, I will see how long it will take me to compress the file.
I finally figured out how to send the latest backup log file as the message body in an email. I guess I am too lazy to open attachments. To keep the message body from displaying some funky characters from the log file, I used the “TYPE” command to display the file contents and piped this output directly into blat. I use the task scheduler to run this early in the morning so it will be waiting in my inbox as a scheduled task.
Upgrading to WordPress 2.0
I finished upgrading to 2.0 yesterday. My bookmarklets were not working properly. I did not know whether they had changed so I tried installing new bookmarklets from WordPress. Yes, they have changed and need to be upgraded.
SourceForge.net: KeePass 1.04 released
SourceForge.net: KeePass 1.04 released
Version 1.04 is mainly a feature release. The auto-type features have been enhanced (most notably there’s now an entry selection dialog displayed when multiple entries match), improved TAN handling (new display, support of indexed TANs, …) and the user interface has been improved.
I have been using this program for about a year since I have so many passwords to keep track of. This entry selection dialog is an improvement I can really use and appreciate. I have several entries for EFTPS and Ohio Business Gateway for which I previously could not use the auto-type feature. This feature saves me from a couple of copy and paste key strokes. It is not a big deal but it was annoying/inconvenient.
RE: WordPress 2
The WordPress community is very proud to present the next generation of WordPress to the world, our 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. We’ve been working long and hard to bring you this release, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as we’e enjoyed working on it. In this release we’ve focused a tremendous amount on what we believe to be the core of blogging — the writing interface. Before you upgrade from an earlier version, remember that this is a major release and thousands of lines of code have changed. Before upgrading it’s always good, just in case, to make a backup of your database and WordPress files. It only takes a few minutes and gives you a total safety net if for whatever reason things don’t work. It is also probably a good idea to turn off your plugins, and activate them one-by-one after you’ve upgraded. Without further ado, you can download WordPress 2 right now. Read on for more information about what we think you’ll love about Duke.
[Via WordPress Development Blog]
Okay, the official version is out. I did find any problems with the RC3 version so its time for me to start updating my blogs.