From Cork to Toronto

UPDATE: I was recently unable to get past this screen with 23.7.303.0 firmware and A29 driver, but was able to with DDPA 2.3.3, the 23.7.405.0 firmware (installed before the updated driver) and 2.3.415.120 driver (even though the driver popped an "upgrade firmware" notice on completion) We use OPAL self encrypting drives on our laptops which used to be managed by DDPA, a Wave product that Dell rebadged. There is a security vulnerability in DDPA which Dell and Wave have decided they won't fix, since the current product is Dell Data Protection | Security Tools (DDPST). Unfortunately, there is no direct upgrade path, so it's necessary to run a reset within DDPA, uninstall, install DDPST and re-encrypt. I've come across a couple of instances where opening DDPA to run a reset results in a message indicating that the USH firmware is out of date, and the user should go to dell.com to get a newer version. As best I can tell, this is because of poor version detectio...

Something popped up today we haven't seen in a while, but like some of my other posts the solution isn't necessarily something you hit in the first few google results. An Outlook 2007 user suddenly had their iManage add-in not load. This precluded attaching document management system content to emails in the usual way. Help, Disabled Items didn't show the add-in, and manually searching the registry keys for the add-in didn't show any changing in LoadBehavior. Enabling the VSTO_SUPPRESSDISPLAYALERTS = 0 environment variable did not result in any crash warnings. I wandered over to the bench where the laptop was sitting and asked the person then working on it to bring Tools, Add-ins brought up one more time. That's when I noticed this checkbox: The "apply macro security settings to installed add-ins" box, cleared in the example above, was checked . This issue has turned up in products like  GFI Archiver Outlook Connector ,  Condeco Room Scheduler , S...

Dell seem to have introduced a feature which would have been very handy to have had 18 months ago . Just download the firmware executable to a USB stick's root directory, power on the laptop and press F12 for a boot menu. There you should see (at least at the A07 revision) a BIOS upgrade option. After entering the BIOS admin password you are passed to a basic update screen which allows you to browse the file systems the BIOS can see (the stick I used was NTFS and the local HDD was non functional at the time) then select the executable and run it. On a side note, the E6440 (in our config) runs an mSATA mounted on a 7mm frame to fit the SATA HDD bay. While this keeps things nice and light, this did cause me to run into an issue that does come up now and then, which is that the SATA connectors don't line up correctly and the disk is not detected. In this case, the laptop had been disassembled to deal with the effects of a fall and on reassembly the BIOS would not detect the driv...

I'm going through a process of scoping hardware for a new project which is sized a little larger than usual for us. We are still relatively new to virtualization both in inclination but also in respect of vendor willingness to support it, but have used VMWare Essentials to get ourselves started. With this project I expected a step up but that Essentials Plus or at least vSphere Standard+vCenter might be as far as was needed. First I discovered that "full vCenter" cannot manage Essentials hosts which is grating. Then in reading around editions I discovered the presence of a vCPU (Virtual SMP) limit on guests, but we need to provision one at 24 vCores, which would put it at Enterprise for 5.1. I pinged our hardware vendor who also acts as our VMware vendor and said "figure it out for me" and the initial answer I got was Enterprise Plus, but after pressing the matter the rep said "I'll double check" Fortunately, while waiting for the reply, I foun...

We don't normally use OWA but every so often a situation calls for it. Since our last Exchange 2007 Rollup Update , the OWA logon theme on our CAS host has been borked with broken images. It turns out that there's a known and long standing issue and a script which can be run manually to fix it . Best four seconds I spent today :)

Came across an issue today where, after a firmware update, a HP LaserJet P4015 decided to send paper from the Letterhead tray through the duplexer. I knew I had seen it before but couldn't recall how it was resolved, but eventually I stumbled across discussions of the same issue. Most refer to the use of an "All_ALM_types_OFF.prn" file which when sent through the printer resolved the issue. It turned out I had a copy of said file lurking in my "I must organise this one of these days" folder. Here's how the PRN file looks in Notepad++, since Notepad and web forums don't render the escape codes correctly: However, this can also be dealt with from the printer's web console. If you want to read about what Alternative Letterhead Mode does when it's on, try this HP page . If you want to know why, years after this issue was first flagged, HP are still shipping firmware which can trip this setting on various models then I have no wisdom for you...

This is a short one but apparently in the variety of awful Bluetooth support that car manufacturers provide, at least one requires the MAC address to be entered for successful connection. This is reasonably easy to find for wifi but you have to dig a bit for Bluetooth. Blackberry's convention appears to be that they are the same except for the last hex digit. Click the Options icon. Click Networks and Connections. Click Bluetooth Connections. The screen should now say:             Bluetooth ON             Discoverable NO             Paired Devices At this point, click the Menu button (to the left of the touchpad) and select Options. You will see:             Device Name             Allow Outgoing Calls             Contacts Transfer            ...

I was having some trouble migrating one of my print servers (Windows 2008) to a stable 2008R2 file server. I intended to use the DNS name of the existing server as a CNAME alias on the new server, and didn't think it would cause much difficulty because the SMB shares are already advertised via a similarly migrated CNAME and the print queues worked fine when referenced by the server A record. Not so. It turns out the print spooler service needs to be allowed access the network in such circumstances, and failure to do so results in a 0x00000709 error. The situation is detailed here at TechNet Blogs. Even though it refers to a non-Microsoft DNS server I encountered the issue with a Windows 2003 R2 DNS instance. There is further reference to DNSonewire in this Knowledge Base article . Implementing the suggested reg key and restarting the spooler service resulted in a working connection to a CNAME referenced queue. Now I have to find the next cutover window...

We use a third party inventory and patch management system to roll out Microsoft updates silently. Unfortunately every once in a while a patch or patches will cause the icons for the updated applications to turn white on certain machines which wasn't noted during the test cycle. We've just seen that happen in our Windows 7 environment while rolling out the April Patch Tuesday patches, where Word and Outlook icons were borked on certain machines. I haven't confirmed this yet, but there were only a few packages pushed so it looks like KB 2863811 (Outlook) and KB 2878237 (Word) were involved. We did not see this on machines patched by WSUS or Microsoft Update. There are a lot of articles out there about fixing icons by deleting iconcache.db but that's of little help if the base icon is borked. The trick of repairing Microsoft Office Picture Manager within the application didn't help either. I isolated the issue to two shortcut sets: C:\Users\Public\Desktop and C:...

One of several things I'm working on at the moment is migrating people from Windows XP to Windows 7. There's various ways to go about this but we are in the main provisioning new PCs and manually bringing the data over - I'd rather not use Microsoft's tool to bring settings as we often take this sort of equipment change as an opportunity for a bit of a fresh start, with bookmarks and documents being re-imported later. One particular PC (Dell Latitude E6420, BIOS A08) decided on the very morning it was to be replaced to stop booting, even in Safe Mode/Command Prompt. Diagnostics and a chkdsk /R found nothing. There were longer than usual delays to bring up an F12 (choose boot device) menu. We had a backup of the data on it but it wasn't fresh because the user had been away from the office for a time. It seemed to me to be worth having a go at to get a better copy. Booting to XP Recovery Console to try and knock out some services or drivers was abandoned because...

Have been struggling this morning with a Windows XP PC which was in a reboot cycle displaying the following error: STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000135 (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down. God there's a load of crap on the internet - including in the Knowledge Base. "Do a chkdsk. Check the memory" which is all fine and well but it doesn't analyse the problem the computer is actually reporting (although Microsoft take 90% of the blame here for not properly publishing error codes.  More posts, including Microsoft, said "do a repair install" but that would have broken stuff I didn't want to break, and doing a re-image would have been inconvenient. Better to see if it could be fixed. Most STOP 21A errors point to issues in winlogon.exe and csrss.exe but the "status of 0xC0000135" was an important differentiator between those and t...

One of the most infuriating things about owning an Apple portable device is iTunes.  If I was to think of the single thing that would dissuade me most about owning a higher end device like an iPhone or an iPad, the thought of dealing with the catastrophic consequences of the most simple OS updates is it.   It's fashionable to dismiss RIM but while there are occasional hiccups their software update process works 99 per cent of the time, and does not REQUIRE the use of Desktop Manager to get it done - it can be done wirelessly via BES or wired via Internet Explorer.  Android phones can update by loading the patch onto a memory card.  Like removable batteries, Steve doesn't do such things as memory card slots so obviously that's out. As I have whined before, Apple's patch sizes are outrageously large .  At a time when Rogers is reducing bandwidth to its customers, should those customers have to upgrade to receive nearly 400Mb of firmware update to resolve a...

My Samsung 32" decided it didn't want to talk to my HDMI cable any more, and since I didn't have the option of kicking it back to Rogers I thought I'd try Component/YPbPr.  Problem is - when I plugged them in I got SD and pink to boot.   I googled around and found this comment : I tried resetting the box and a number of things, could not get the component to look right, it was all pink. Then, I figured it out. When trying to set up the STB, through component output, for HD (pushing Guide and Info on the box), the screen only gave me one option, "press A for SD mode". I was muttering to myself "I don't want SD Mode" and getting very frustrated, after a while, I just hit B anyway, and sure enough it started outputting HD no problem. I tried this myself and presto, I have properly coloured SD and 1080i HD. Now to get Rogers to turn on the basic HD channels like CBC (rather than the specialties like CNNHD and DiscoveryWorldHD which weirdly work ju...

During the launch of Safari 5 from Apple, it emerged that their new feature, Reader, is based in part on a project by arc90 called "Readability" .  I hadn't stumbled across this before some of the reportage on Safari Reader but it basically uses a bookmark containing Javascript to reshape a webpage so that "excess" sidebars and formatting are stripped in favour of a clean block of text.  It does not do so automatically but only when you click the button, which may skirt around objections from content makers and advertisers who have invested much in this clutter. Printing of webpages has been an ongoing bugbear for both my colleagues and myself and while this does not preserve layout, that is not always the goal.  Readability has in fact already helped me to read badly laid-out text obscured by overflow into an adjacent column.  Have yet to find a showstopper, merely some occasional clashes with inline images and it renders home pages only with a prior caveat, ...

I subscribe to a bunch of Microsoft blogs and one of them revealed a gem in the past month.  RDCMan, a tool which allows an admin to group together remote desktops, preset their username/password combos and connect to those groups with a right-click option, has been invaluable in my work lately which involves quickly jumping from server to server or from servers to a group of workstations.  The gorgeous thing about it is not merely a gallery of thumbnails of the connected sessions, but the ability to interact with the thumbnails with sufficiently accurate mouse clicks.  Heartily recommended. Here's the original post: Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.2 (You had me at EHLO - the Microsoft Exchange Team blog)

We just got one of the new Blackberry 8530 EVDO touchpad devices from Bell Mobility, but returned the first one which we thought was defective.  When the second one went down at the same point in getting it set up (being added to our Blackberry Enterprise Server) this raised a flag.  It turns out the software currently posted on RIM's site has a bug which causes continuous reboots when policies such as memory cleaner are enabled. A customised loader to enable the OS to be patched to the point where the device resuscitates is available, but you need to talk to Bell Data Support for it.  The loader was a bit finicky and threw errors a couple of times but eventually declared no patch required (i.e. the patch had taken) and the device rebooted.  Happy days. UPDATE August 6th - the updated software (Package 5.0.0.1319, Applications 5.0.0.782, Platform 4.2.0.352) is available on blackberry.com for a conventional update, but I'm not sure you won't need to patch using th...

Been a bit quiet here lately, mostly because of some lengthy appearences in the comments sections of other blogs, notably Spacing Wire .  However, this was very interesting in the Register today, which referred to this blog post . While the described method of extracting streamed mp3s to a file is all very interesting (and dubious from a legal standpoint) it does point up the activity monitor as a very interesting aspect of Safari - and a new challenge for the maintainers of trailer and other sites which obfuscate content via Flash and other technologies.

Michelle Madigan, Associate Producer at NBC Dateline , was outed at the hacker conference Defcon having lied about her position as a member of the press, instead registering as an ordinary attendee. Signing for a press badge entails a code of conduct - i.e. don't try and entrap 13 years olds who are making claims they aren't close to being capable of, and don't endanger the identities of federal agents with ties to the security community. Hidden cameras are a no-no, but it is suspected she was utilising a pin-hole device. What she and Dateline forgot is that unlike your common or garden paedophile, that show's bread and butter, hackers are wary types and intrusion detection is their stock-in-trade. Some reports indicate Defcon were tipped off by their own source within Dateline. After being offered a press badge four times , Madigan was outed and chose to flee the conference despite an offer to remain - with a badge. Plainly upfront journalism isn't the kind...

The Register reports from the Black Hat Conference that even when surfing to an SSL-encrypted site using public wifi, if not all of the site enforces SSL, enough information can be intercepted to reveal Gmail and other personal websites: The hack caught our attention because it shatters a common assumption concerning secure surfing on public access points. Up until now, we felt relatively safe using hotspots to access email as long as we logged in with an SSL session. Yes, we knew that any subsequent pages that were not appended by "https" in the address bar were were susceptible to snooping, but intruders still had no way to access the account itself. Now we know better. Any session that isn't protected from start to finish by SSL is vulnerable to the hack. And because session IDs generated by most sites are valid for an indefinite period, that means intruders could silently access our accounts for years - even if we regularly change our passwords. The Register suggest...

I first saw this on Slashdot - on the first of August, British Columbia is to follow Alberta and Saskatchewan in introducing a surcharge on computer equipment and contracting Encorp to do the recycling. The problem is that there are recyclers and reusers in this sector already whose customers will say "why should I pay you when I've already paid the recycle tax". While I don't quite share the same hysteria over smelting the discarded equipment as this site, I completely agree with the quoted reusers who think they should get first crack at what is returned. It also seems likely that even if a computer is transferred out of the jurisdiction or alternatively disposed of, Encorp gets to keep the tax anyway, if the province follows their current contract for bottle recycling . Ontario is considering such a tax but should remember that reuse is above recycle in the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle hierarchy. That said I fully expect a similar cashgrab and corporate welfare ar...