Solving computer problems is a lot of fun and a big challenge

I tell people that I love doing my job because I like solving problems. After 20 years of working in Information Technology I have been able to learn a lot of things about how computers work. One of the nice things about Information Technology is that every day is a different day. There are always new problems to solve and new things to learn.

In the last two weeks I worked with one of the network admins in our network operation center to upgrade all of our servers and workstations to the latest version of Anti Virus and Anti Spyware software. Most of the updates happened automagically via the updates being pushed to our workstations at night. I had to update all 7 of our servers manually and I had to touch almost half of the workstations when it was all said and done due to one type of failure or another.

I spend a lot of time making sure that all of our computers and servers are free of virus or ad ware , malware infections. I always tell people that I hate supporting windows. Then again I have a job because Microsoft Windows is such a huge target for all of the script kiddies and those that have nothing better to do than wreak havoc with the Windows Operation System.

One of the draw backs to inheriting a position as an I.T. Manager is that I inherit the mess that the last I.T. Person left on their way out. In my particular situation I had to start this position with no training on the existing systems and there was little to no documentation to refer back to. Not only that but the main file server that runs our vacation rental management software blew up 4 weeks before I got there and a new server was put in place.

I have been in discovery zone for the last 9+ months and thanks to a lot of hard work I have been able to get a good grasp on our LAN and how it is put together. Slowly and methodically I have been able to gather the information that was there and I am working on documenting the network. I have also realized that over the years there have been several people before me who had their own unique interpretations of computer support and how it should be done.



When you support 66 people in three geographical locations you find yourself very being very busy. You also find that your predecessors in an effort to handle the computer problems onslaught fell into the bad habit of just applying band-aids everywhere they could vs troubleshooting the root problem and solving it.

Two weeks later I have spent some time looking at our workstations and troubleshooting the reasons why the AV/AS upgrades are not working properly. I have noticed the multiple profiles and how most of those profiles have been infested with all sorts of ad-ware, spy-ware, malware etc. The problem with these types of infections is that they are usually very time consuming to mitigate. Once your computer gets fully infested with this garbage it is sometimes faster to just pop in the system restore disk and wipe the hard disk clean and do factory restore.

If you are a home user you need to keep your OS and application restore CD that you get from your hardware manufacturer. Some manufacturers are not giving out media but putting everything on a utility partition. That means you have two choices of restoring your computer. One is by rebooting your system to a system restore disk OR by booting the computer and then hitting F10 or F12 to get to the utility partition. The utility partition also can contain any hardware diagnostics software specifically for that brand of computer.

In a corporate environment you typically find yourself using the same model of computer. Mostly in our shop we use Dell computers. We have five or six different models of Dell so it presents a unique challenge with regards to how fast I can restore a computer should it experience a catastrophic failure. Hard drives , ram, monitors, peripherals are all easy to replace however when a motherboard goes south you are forced to replace the machine and start over.

The fastest and most efficient way of restoring a computer is to use an application such as Symantec Ghost. In a perfect world I would have a ghost image of every model of Dell in our shop. The only problem with that is I am merely one mortal doing the job of two people and I have not had the time to get all of the images necessary. I have been able to use Ghost Enterprise edition on one of my servers to make an image back up of several critical upper management computers. Should one of those die a horrible death I can restore either the entire hard disk or just the data depending on whether we replace the dead hardware with brand new hardware or an older box that is the same model.

In an effort to reduce the amount of computer problems we lock down the workstation and we do not give administrator rights to just anyone. In years past the Internet was not something that everyone in the enterprise could access. Only selected management or users that had to have access as part of their job description were given access to the Internet. Fast forward to 2009 and having Internet access is fully expected and realized. Employers want people to leverage the power of the Internet as a research and search tool to do their jobs. The downside of this access is that people are tempted to download freeware that is chuck full of adware and viruses and install it to their workstations and thereby causing a support call to the help desk.

Do you remember the days of using Netscape Navigator and the old fashioned HTML code to create websites? I even remember when inserting tables into a website was considered as advanced. Those were the same days when the only time you had to worry about catching a computer virus was when someone would introduce removable media to your computer. Now all you have to do is visit a bad website and your computer automatically downloads nasty little applications to your hard drive which are capable of scanning for network drives , infecting the enterprise and stealing corporate data and sending the data to a remote zombie machine somewhere on the Internet.

Due to the complexities of many websites today your typical web browser has to have plugin applications that provide support for different types of media. One of those plugin applications is Adobe Flash Player. Several of my users requested to have Adobe Flash installed so they can view web pages that require it. Adobe Flash player is up to version 10 and unfortunately Adobe has seen fit to force workstation users to have administrative rights to their workstations in order to use the Flash Player plugin. One of the work arounds that I found was to install Adobe Flash Player as the administrator. I was then able to rename the users profile to profilename.old and then have the user log on and create a new profile. In several situations this has worked and allowed Adobe Flash Player to work. One of the computers I am working on is so hosed up now that I need to just rebuild it. Once I put a fresh OS load on that one it should work just fine.

Safe computing

In the last two months I have been priveleged (cursed) to endure the task of cleaning bugs off of an XP computer. The first machine was infected by several trojans via e-mail transmission and the second machine which I am still working on is so infected with trojans, spyware, malware etc that it has taken me several days to finally get control over it. It has taken me several days because I have been working on this workstation in between other tasks.

How do I know that this workstation is infested? The user told me that one of her nieces or nephews downloaded a lot of junk off the Internet and gummed up her computer. By the time she noticed this the computer was completely useless. At boot up I noticed several Internet Explorer pages that started up and went to some sort of advertisement web site. The problem really manifested itself when I tried to install a new version of Norton Anti Virus and then plugged in a network cable into the NIC.

Just as soon as the pc obtained an IP address IE fired up about 20 web pages and then a server busy dialog box popped up. There were so many web pages loading on this computer that it completely locked up the system. All available cpu cycles were being taken up because of multiple requests to open a web broswer and the RAM on the system was quickily overwhelmed which made the computer all the more slower.

The number one symptom of a problem on this computer was the fact that Norton Anti Virus was sending notifications in the system tray telling us that the program was not longer active with current virus definition files. That means that this particular computer was wide open and unprotected. Trojans, viruses, spyware, malware, hijackers etc all have several things in common.

A. they eat up all available resources on the infected machine
B. some of them try to take control of your computer
C. hijackers take control over your web browser and redirects you to other infected web sites
D. they can destroy your valuable data
E. they can use network shares to infect other data on servers
F. They can steal your valuable personal information and send it over the Internet to a website for collection.

The list goes on and on folks. It is imperative that you keep a registered and up to date Anti Virus software and spyware protection on your computer. Having a firewall that alerts you to applications that attempt to make connections to the Internet can be very useful as well.

Too focused

How many times have we heard of end users stories? Silly stories about the folks that we support making silly mistakes. Well, this time the joke is on me. I decided to go for a walk around 2:15 pm and clear my head and get some exercise. I had not had lunch break yet so this was my opportunity to get out of my office for a spell. I walked down to a different building to clock out for lunch because I forgot to use the web based client on my pc before I left. I get to the building that I am going to and noticed the time clock pc was off due to power blinking on and off earlier. I am booting the pc back on when I hear the noise of a ups going off. I decided to kill two birds with one stone so I walk to the cubicle where the noise was coming from and I stop the noise which in turn killed the power to the phone and pc. DOH

It never occurred to me that I had just turned off the power to the UPS and that this person would come back to her desk and have no phone or LAN connection. I go on my walk and I had not been sitting down for more than 45 seconds when this ladies supervisor calls me and asks me if I had been around this ladies cubicle. We all hada good chuckle when I discovered what I had done. I ran down there with a batrery relpalcement for the UPS and popped it in and got the user back online within 5 minutes.

Do more with less

It has been a while since I have blathered about technology. That is not because there is a shortage of things to blather about but rather I have been very busy as of late. I guess you could say that I am a one man circus where I work juggling this and that.

Right before Christmas at work our network latency went through the roof. When I say network latency I mean that our connectivity to the Internet was very slow. It was as if someone had poured peanut butter into the ethernet cables and gummed up the network so badly that everything ground to a halt. This happened the last two weeks of December of 2008 and by the time I got around to hollering for help the folks at the NOC in Florida were already headed out the door for Christmas vacation.

Sometime between the week before Christmas and January 5th our network nodes all went back to green and now we are surfing the Net at speeds we are accustomed to. We have a Data T1 and a Voice T1 that handles all of our needs. We have 60 people who share the T1 at two remote sites and the main office. What that means is that there is not a lot of wiggle room for chattering network devices. During the two weeks while everyone else were on Christmas vacation I wandered around spot checking workstations and running a port checker on them. The port checker runs and identifies what TCP ports are either being listened to or transmitting through. In other words the applications on your computer communicate to other hosts through the Internet through these ports.

How do Denial of Service attacks happen? Zombie computers which have been hacked send out a flood of data packets to a target network and computer(s) with such frequency that it makes the network so busy it can no longer keep up with the data requests and therefore becomes unable to communicate. The general consensus was that this might have been happening on the network at the office except that something on my network was plugging up communications to the outside world by hammering the network with a constant stream of data. When I spot checked different machines in different buildings on the main complex I was unable to find a machine that the port monitoring software was able to identify as the offender.

We still have sporadic network latency so sometime next week after normal business hours I am going to work with the network engineers and systematically remove all the workstations from the picture as well as switches in each building until we find the offending device.

In the mean time I am working with computers purchased four or five years ago that only had 256 to 384 mb of ram installed with XP Pro. I am assuming the thought process was this. The main application that is used to book reservations runs on the server so there was no need to load up the workstations with lots of ram so lets just put the minimal amount to run Windows. I have spent the last 8 weeks ordering ram upgrades for as many machines as I was allowed to order for so that I can upgrade them to a minimum of 512 mb of ram. The more RAM you give Windows the faster it will run.

Backupexec 12.5 update

I am sitting here updating Backupexec 12.1 to 12.5 and that process started around 4 pm today. I upgraded the backupexec media server first and then began to do a remote install to all of my servers for the remote agent. The remote agent allows the backupexec media server to connect to the server and process a scheduled backup job. I believe that the 12.1 version of the remote agent would have probably worked but I decided it would be best to keep all the version at the same level just to be safe. One of my servers decided that it did not want to allow a remote installation caused me some problems. I had to copy the entire install cd over the network to that server and then did a local install from there. Problem solved!!!

Now, all I have to do is confirm the backup job for tonight and make sure everything is selected correctly and I can go home for the night. Sweet....

Should I plug it in or not?

I provide technical support for a local office for a resort company on the East Coast . I manage the five servers, network printers, switches and approximately 50 end user computers. I have been in this position now for about 98 days and though I am not anywhere near in Maytag Repairman mode I have come a long way towards that goal.

Just recently during my daily routine I was reminded of something that we take for granted. That thing is electricity and how much electricity we really have available to us. In an office setting whether it be in a hard walled office or a cubicle you will find an electrical outlet or two. You will also find that people like to install power strips and surge protectors into the receptacle and you will also find that people like to daisy chain a bunch of those power strips together in order to maximize how much stuff they can plug in.

Most of the time when you plug stuff in the electricity is there and everything magically works. Just as soon as the circuit is over loaded the breaker will engage and all electricity to that circuit will cease to exist. I was reminded of that the other day when a space heater was plugged in and did just that . Shortly after the power outtage occurred and the breaker was flipped back on I got a phone call because some of the computers were not getting onto the network properly. Computers and electronic gizmos in general are very dependent on electricity to perform and they are very sensitive to fluctuations in power or in this case power being terminated suddenly.

The moral of this story is this. Just because you have an available electrical outlet to plug into does not mean that the circuit your outlet is on will not overload when you plug that gizmo in. Talk to someone that is in the know such as the maintenance department or your systems administrator and see what they think. Taking the extra time to be safe will keep others from being inconvenienced when the power goes down unexpectedly not to mention the possible data loss when the computers go down suddenly.

The other thing I want to stress about space heaters is this. Space heaters can be dangrous and we need to be extra careful where we leave them plugged in and not to leave them running when we are not near them. All it takes is one spark and all of that paper in your office immediately becomes tender for a fire.

Before you know it - it happens and the fun begins

Today started out as your typical sleepy "TGIF" Friday. I drive for an hour one way to get to work so by the time I get here I am happy to arrive. I sat down, checked my voice mail to see if anyone reported any problems and then I fired up IE beta 8 to view the work order queue to see if anything new had popped up over night. I noticed that the Intranet site tab was not connecting so I started to investigate. I soon discovered that not only was the website not coming up but I could not ping the server either. I went to the server room and the Compaq Presario server which sits on the floor was not showing any lights on the two ancient scsi drives. I rebooted the server and still could not get a ping response and I noticed that the server appeared to be in an endless reboot loop because of the beeps and the cd rom and floppy get getting pinged.

Since the server is so old and I doubt I would ever find parts for it I went to plan B which was to relocate all the Intranet files to one of my other Dell rackmount servers which are new and fully updated. Luckily for me there was no SQL or MyPHP or PHP databases to deal with and all the HTML files were all static files. All I had to do was install and configure IIS 6.0 on the server of choice and copy the files over to the wwwroot directory. I did have on hiccup in that I kept trying to point my web browser to the wrong IP address and could not figure out why I could not access the web site. I had a good friend of mine who used VPN to access my server and he started asking me what IP address I was pointing my browser to. When I told him the wrong one he laughed at me and set my feet (browser) on the correct path. Once I had that figured out we were good to go.

What should have taken all of one hour actually wound up taking me several hours. This reminded me that while I am in the habit of getting real deep with my troubleshooting skills it is always prudent to start out at square one and make sure the simple things are not ignored. Most of the time a computer problem is just a very simple thing and we I.T. professionals have a habit of making things too complicated.

Week 6 day 2

I hear this all the time folks. “It worked yesterday, why is it not working now?” As I hear this I want to whip out my magic 8 ball or some other type of magic crystal ball and shake it vigorously looking for an answer. The problem is there are no magical answers and while it may appear that I have a magic wand with magical fairy dust I really do not. Sometimes things happen in binary land that I really do not have any control over. For instance, if your e-mail is hosted at a remote site and your password becomes inoperative for whatever reasons I really do not have the ability to fix that at your local desktop. We really do have to call the remote site (ISP, helpdesk etc) and get them to reset your password. Resetting your computer continuously for the next hour is not going to magically reset the password. Also, when you ask for help please do not feel the need to use a high pitched whine when you do it. My purpose in life (at work at least) is to provide you with technical support and I promise that if you just tell me what the problem is I will do my best to fix it. Heck, saying good morning and calling me by my first name would start the conversation off very nicely and would make me want to do whatever I can to assist you. After all, I get satisfaction from knowing that I have solved your problem and that you can go back to doing your job efficiently.

Over the last five weeks I have gone from running around with my hair on fire wondering if I made the right decision to take on this new job to having things finally slow down a little bit. As I look around me I am able to see things more clearly and I do not feel as overwhelmed as I once did. When you are the only I.T. person at a company you are responsible for everything and there is nowhere to turn other than to your ability to get things done and external resources. Now that I have most of the user community at a point where they can work without calling me several times per day I can now start turning a portion of my attention towards the actual network infrastructure which includes the five servers that run our applications and provides us services. I have several clean up type projects that need to be addressed sooner than later. I need to get my ducks in a row, create a plan and then go to the boss and get his blessings for any external resources that I might need or the necessary funding to make this happen.

My on call responsibilities have not been too overwhelming thus far which I am glad of. I get two or three calls on the cell phone per week and most of the questions I can answer without having to remotely connect to the users workstation to fix something which is nice. The intense discovery zone routine that I have been going through in the last five weeks has helped out tremendously as well. I have a three ring binder that has different types of information that I might need and I carry that with me in my laptop bag. Being extremely organized and task oriented is very helpful when it comes to being in an I.T. role at a company.

The disconnect between humans and technology

My job helps me to remain humble. I say this because I know that while I might appear to be a genius with computers and technology in general I am surrounded with folks who are geniuses in their own respective fields. The humility comes in when I get silly questions or complaints that are seemingly easy for me to figure out. I have to remember that I have been doing this sort of thing for 20 years and that my experience makes those easy things easy. I am sure that 20 years ago when I started working in the I.T. industry that a lot of things were not easy and that I owe my knowledge and experience to many mentors along the way.

Now , with all of that said, I have to say something else. Computers today are not that difficult to operate. The key thing is that you can not be afraid of it. Fear of the unknown is normal but if you belly up to the beast so to speak and dive in you will find that running your pc is not all that difficult. Think of it this way if you will. How do you approach problems in your every day life or job? You probably have a logical thought process that you follow to deduce what you need in order to get through the day. Your computer is no different. You have to approach your computer with the attitude of " I can do it!!" As an I.T. professional I have no problem with someone coming to me and saying "I do not know how to do this" or "I do not understand what this means". That is my job, to help you through those moments and to explain to you what this or that means and then to fix it to where you can continue on with your day. The thing that I do not want to hear and makes my job difficult is "I do not understand why this thing is broken and futher more I do not care, just fix it".

Some folks have the attitude that technology should just work and they get angry when someone can not just wave a magical wand and make their lives stress free when it comes to their personal computer. That attitude in and of itself is the disconnect between humans and computers. In my mind my job is to fix those things (hardware) that you (the end user) should not have to be worried about and to train you on how to use the software that you use to get your job done. My encouragement to you is that if your attitude is positive and you want to learn how to use your computer then my job as the I.T. professional is so much easier. When you are happy then I am happy. I like solving problems and I love seeing folks like you who are happily sitting at your desk banging away at the keyboard and being productive. I like being able to come by your desk or office and say howdy and not have to always be talking about a computer problem.

Just the other day I went to one of our satellite offices with a list of pc issues to resolve which I did while I was doing Windows Updates. I got to one of the lists and this person had said that the pc speakers on the desk have not worked since the pc was installed. I think the pc was installed two or three years ago. I started to get under the desk to trace the speaker wire to make sure it was plugged into the green audio out plug when I noticed that the power light for the speakers was not on. I reached over and turned on the speakers and guess what? My magic wand was out and I sprinkled power dust on those speakers and they magically began to produce music. LOL

Currently I am the I.T. manager for a company that does resort rentals on the East Coast. I have one main office to support and two satellite offices. That averages out to about 45 people and 50 pc's and five servers. I stay very busy but I like my job. I am thankful that I have a full time job that provides me with a salary and benefits for me and my family. I can remember the days not too long ago where I was working two and three jobs just to put food on the table thanks to the I.T. industry taking a nose after the September 11th incident. There are plenty of folks out there who are not as fortunate as myself and I remember that on a daily basis.

Supporting the boardwalk

After spending two years doing server support at a local college campus I managed to locate a job which provided a raise in income and benefits. Both of those things were needed by my family in a big way.

Money and benefits are very important but they are only a portion of the big picture. Why do we do what we do for 8 or more hours per day? Is the ability to pay bills the only thing that keeps us going day in and day out? It has been said and even researched that we spend more time with our co workers than we do our immediate family. Maybe that is why we drag little nick knacks from the house such as pictures, stuffed animals or whatever to the work place so that it can remind us of our loved ones.

I have been in the I.T. industry since 1990 and I have worked in six different industries supporting computer users and the underlying computer networks that they use. I enjoy a certain satisfaction from learning how to use computer technology and helping others to use it.

Fast forward from 1990 to September 2008 where I am supporting approximately 85 users and a computer network with five servers and one network with three different subnets. This is my third week as the resident propellerhead and for the most part all of my coworkers are excited that I am there. That is because there are more problems to solve than I have time to fix. I am sure that in about 3 months from now I will be more acclimated to the environment and have the backlog of work orders under control. The biggest problem that I have is knowing how to prioritize my responsibilities between providing end user computer support and being an I.T. Manager/ network administrator. Doing all three of these is going to be a big challenge for me and I hope that I am up for it.

Providing end user computer support is the easiest of the three for me. I have been doing this for years in many different capacities. While I am learning the new environment and living through discovery zone being able to clear out some trouble tickets gives me the feeling of accomplishment which is nice. It also helps those that I support to be able to use their computers with more efficiency and get their jobs done.

Today I got a phone call that reminded me of a phone call that I received years ago. I was working at a law firm and one of the legal secretaries called me and said that her computer was making a horrible clicking noise. She held the phone handset close to her computer so I could hear it. For the life of me I could not figure out what this was so I told her that I would be right over. When I arrived at her desk I observed a large bundle of papers sitting on the corner of her keyboard which was depressing one of the keys. Today I got a phone call from one of my computer users and she told me that her computer screen was flipped sideways. Once again the user flopped a notebook on to the keyboard to write in it and somehow the right key combination was pressed and presto, the screen flipped onto its side.

I know that with tablet pc's you can flip the screen from portrait to landscape because it is an functionality of the software. How did I solve it you ask? Google search engine to the rescue. I searched for "flipped screen XP" and I found multiple hits about this problem. Apparently my users were not the first folks to cook this up. I learned that with a simple key stroke combination I was able to flip the screen back to where it had come from. I had several folks get up from their chairs to walk over to see how I was going to solve that problem. Hopefully what I did was allow them a good laugh and showed them that while I do not know everything I do have the ability to research the problem and figure it out.

For some folks their idea of having a computer support person to call is that this person will just fix all of their problems. Oh, I have a strange screen on my monitor I have never seen. Lets just call the IT guy or gal and just have them come fix it. In this picture the IT guy or gal comes and fixes whatever the problem is and leaves. The only problem with this picture is that the computer user remains clueless about the problem and when it happens again they will just pick up the phone again. It is a vicious cycle that does not need to continue. Support should not enable someone to be helpless. Support should facilitate fixing of the problem but also educating the computer user so that they can understand what has happened and how to respond in the future.

Yes, I like fixing problems and I love playing around with computers. I love hardware, software and networking. I love surfing the web and watching videos online. I love blogging, reading, playing Texas Holdem online. The only problem is that there is only one of me and I can only be stretched so far. My goal is to help you, the computer user, to take responsibility for the tool that the computer is so that you can do your job. I want you to take ownership of your computer just like you do your automobile. You do not drive your car on flat tires or with no water in the radiator or gas in the fuel tank. You know that you have to do certain things in order to drive your vehicle down the street and survive.

The same principle applies to your computer. You have to pull out the manual and figure out how to use this computer. The fuel in this case is knowledge for your mind. You have to train yourself how to use the tool and make it advantageous to use it.

Out with Vista back to XP Pro

I still use Vista Ultimate at work and at home however if anything goes wrong with either OS on either computer it will not be reinstalled at this time. I really do not see any compelling reason for people to stop using XP and go to this new OS from Microsoft. The major problem that I see with Vista is that the OS is just not supported with regards to hardware drivers and other ancillary software. I just received a new Dell laptop with Vista on it from work and when I found out that the Aventail VPN client was still in BETA and has not had all the bugs worked out I was a bit skeptical. Sure enough I could not connect to the work network via vpn client which created a problem for me. One option would have been to dual boot Vista with Linux Suse 10.3 and use a VPN client that I know works or I could have installed Vmware workstation and loaded an XP guest OS on vmware and configured that OS for my remote access needs. I figured that my best bet would be to stop struggling with Vista and all of its problems and just go back to the tried and true XP Professional and be done with it.

Just the other day when I took posession of the laptop I was working with one of the helpdesk techs at work and I told them that if someone who is an IT Professinal struggles with configuring and making the technology work then what do we think end users are going to put up with. The bottom line is that we use technology in order to get our every day tasks completed. We use technology to gather and manage data. When it becomes a huge hassle to use the technology it is easy for anyone to get frustrated and look for other answers.

Update on chkdsk wiping out permissions on folders

After spending considerable time with Microsoft on the phone and an ezassist session on the server in question this is what I found out. There are two hotfixes available. One for W23k servers with SP1 and one for W23k servers with SP2. You must apply these hot fixes and reboot the server BEFORE you run chkdsk on any volumes. There are no easy ways to replace the permissions on the user folders once the damage is done. Option A is the GUI routine where you right click on the user folder and readd the users or global groups and then select to push to all files and folders. Option 2 is to use a xcacls.vbs script to run lcacls.exe and associated commands to push the permissions out to each file and folder. If you need to apply global changes only to a group of folders you can go to the top root folder and make your changes and then select inheritance for all sub folders and files under the root. That will not work for individual folder security permission needs which is much more granular.

I dodged a bullet with regards to replacing the security permissions on my file server today. Since the office is closed and no one is accessing the server or making changes to data I was able to revert the E volume back to 12/26/07 at 5 am via the Volume Shadow Copy. It took some time for this to happen but once it was complete and I rebooted the server I spot checked several folders and everything was back to where it was before I ran chkdsk and accidentally stripped out the permissions. If this had been a normal work day and all the users had been making changes to their data or adding data to their user directories then I would have been forced to go the lcacls.vbs route or the manual point and click GUI routine to replace the permissions. I can not begin to tell you how much fun that is.

chkdsk disaster on W2k3 NTFS partition

In October of this year I ran Chkdsk on a volume on one of my W2k3 servers. I ran this utility because we had evidence of file or folder corruption on that particular user share. I was rewarded for my actions by chkdsk removing ALL the security permissions on every single folder. Needless to say I was a huge hit with the rest of the server support team who wound up helping me to replace all the security permissions on these folders so that folks could access their data. In four days we got this accomplished. We did our research and according to Microsoft knowledgebase articles this was something that happens to Windows 2000 servers. No where did we see where Windows 2003 servers with SP1 were supposed to be susceptible to this type of problem. We did find an obscure article that hinted that there was an NTFS related file that SP2 would update that would keep this from happening. Fast forward to December and this same server is now updated with SP2 and all of the Microsoft Updates that are available for Windows 2003 Standard Edition. We are in the midst of Christmas holidays and everyone other than us unlucky contractors are out doing other things than work. I figured this was a wonderful opportunity to let chkdsk do its magic and fix whatever data corruption that might be on the user share of this server. I run chkdsk with the /f switch so it dismounts the volume and off to the races it goes. The volume is close to 1.5 TB in size so it takes several hours to do. Phase 1 and 2 go along just fine with nothing being reported back to the screen as an error. Phase 3 checks the indexes and that is when I got the dreaded “replacing invalid security id with default security id for file (numbers). Needless to say I was not really excited about the prospect of having to manually replace the permissions on all these folders. I called my boss, told her the problem and she authorized me to call Microsoft and get paid support. I am hoping that they can identify the problem for us so that I can document it and make sure it never happens again on our hundreds of other servers and that they can provide me with a script from AD that will allow me to replace the permissions with the correct permissions from the command line. I will let you know what I find out when the dust settles and things are fixed.

Vista Problems

Microsoft responds to Vista network performance issue by ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes -- I have received a response to the Vista network performance issue from Microsoft.

I subscribe to the ItsVista newsletter/blog and when I saw this I could relate to the PAIN that some of these problems have caused all of us. I have been using Vista every since the first beta release and I must say that the OS is different and takes some getting used to. I am currently using Vista Ultimate in a networking environment at work. There are two things I dont like specificially about Vista in a LAN environment.

A. you cant launch a program with the RUN AS option

B. Copying data to and from a network share takes forever

In XP Pro you can launch an application by right clicking on the icon and selecting Run As which allows you to select a domain admin account or system account with administrative rights higher than the current credentials that you are logged on to the domain with. The only way I can do network administration from my Vista box is to use a program called Hyena which allows me to sign on to a server individually with whatever credentials that I want.

As for copying data this is just rediculous. I have a friend who has experienced a laptop crash which is partly hardware and partly software related. I plan on disecting the laptop so that I can visually inspect the motherboard and other things attached to it to see if I can find out why it is overheating. In the interim I decided that I would bring the hard drive to work with me and get the data off of it.

I utilized a nifty little USB hard drive adapter that I used to plug the laptop hard drive into and copied all the data from the hard drive to my XP workstation. My Vista workstation did not know what to do with the new device. Welcome to the wonderful world of driver hell. I moved the device over to the XP machine and XP recongized that I have a external usb hard drive attached to the system. I copied the 7.3 gb of data over to my XP machine hard drive and then I copied it over to my user share on the network.

This is where the fun begins folks. I started this mess around 10 am this morning and figured I would just work on this inbetween my other work tasks today. I figured I would have it done pretty quickly. Never assume that a computer related task will happen quickly and without any problems. I always find myself assuming that and then wind up spending way more time than expected. I tried to copy the data from my network share to a folder on my Vista machine and after Vista estimated the time it would take it came up with 5 days and 2 hours to move 7 gb of data. I looked at the bit rate the data was moving and it was fluctuating around 25 to 30 kb per second. My Vista box is a Dell with dual core processor at 3.2 ghz and 2 gb of ram. I have a 160 gb hard drive plus network storage. I have a race horse under the hood folks and that does not matter. My nic is a gb ethernet and I have a GB ethernet connection to the switch. There is no way this connection should grind to a hault like this.

The downside to this nightmare is that the DVD writer is on the Vista machine and the XP machine is my dual boot windoze/linux box that does not even have a cdr writer on it. That means that I have to burn the DVD on the Vista machine. I finally got smart and totally bypassed the gui interface and went to the command line interface. I used xcopy to copy from the network share to my backup directory on the hard drive. I started the process , locked down the workstation and went to lunch. Once I came back from lunc the data had been transferred. I have tried several times to burn the data from the windoze explorer to a dvd ram disk with little to no luck. My next and final attempt at this is to use a DVD burning program called BurnFree which is ad driven freeware for copying dvd movies on Vista OS. If that does not work I will be forced to cart the data on an external USB hard disk to my friend.

During my research on the Net I did find some TCP settings to muck with as well as some system services that could supposedly be turned off and give me some more network speed. I tried all of the suggestions but none of them did the trick thus far. Due to time constraints in writing this I dont have time to give you all the gory details but if you do a Google search you will see lots of conversation going on about this problem.

BAD VISTA. You dont play well on the LAN... LOL

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

I have always been intrigued with "Crackberry" devices.  Oh, yeah, I meant to say I have always been intrigued with Blackberry data devices.  I call Blackberry devices "Crackberry" devices because the folks  that own them always seem to be fiddling with them no matter where they might be.  

Once upon a time the cell phone was this large black leather bag that weighed 25 lbs and took up the front passenger seat of your car.  Cellular telephones disconnected us from land line telephones and gave us a new freedom while being mobile.  We could be on the road and still communicate with loved ones, co workers, vendors and clients.  Never in our wildest dreams did we dream that the telephone that used to be solely an audio voice device would turn into so much more. 

The RIM blackberry's primary feature that attracts so much attention is the ability to send and receive corporate and pop3 e-mail.  Any business can install a Blackberry Enterprise server and seamlessly integrate the business e-mail communications and send and receive this e-mail on the Blackberry device.  If the Blackberry Enterprise Server is too costly of a solution you can download a Blackberry redirector that integrates into Outlook and forwards whatever e-mails you want to your Blackberry account. 

I can also set up to ten e-mail accounts on my Blackberry Peal that will forward to my device and I also have my own Blackberry Email address that I can give others. 

One of the nice e-mail functionality that I love is the ability to filter out all of the e-mail or spam that I do not want to receive on my Blackberry device.   

Now that we have briefly touched on the e-mail functionality of Blackberry I would like to touch upon some of the unique characteristics of the Blackberry Pearl. 

• The Pearl is half the size of all the other Blackberry devices
• The Pearl is a Data device that combines telephone , e-mail and data services
• The Pearl features a very nice  Audio player
• The Pearl gives you Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk clients
• The Pearl has a micro SD port that allows you to increase your ability to save data such as music and pictures
• The Pearl has a very nice Digital Camera with flash
• The Pearl provides stereo headphones that allow you to listen to the Audio player as well as talk on your telephone. 
• The Pearl provides VAC or voice activated calling
• The Pearl comes with a mini USB data cable that utilizes the RIM desktop manager to synchronize your data.

Now that I have briefly touched on some of the features that stand out with regards to the Pearl I have a couple of comments about usability.  I like the ability to be on the bus listening to MP4's that  I loaded on the mini SD card.  I also like the ability of getting a phone call while listening to music and the music automatically being muted while I handle the call.  Once the call is ended the music continues. 

One of the biggest learning curves that I had to overcome was how to use the keyboard to tap out messages.  The keyboard is not a full QWERTY keyboard which means that it has keys (buttons) that combine two letters instead of one.  I really felt clumsy and frustrated trying to learn how to type using this keyboard. 

The first typing method is called "Multi tap" which means you find the key that has the letter you want and you tap either one time or twice depending on which order it appears on the button. 

The second typing method which is very difficult to wrap your brain around is called "Sure Type" .  If you have been typing for any length of time either on  a personal computer or doing text messaging on your cell phone you are used to pushing a button and inputting the appropriate letter, number or symbol. 

SureType technology works best if you just start hitting the keys where the letters are that you want to use to construct the words in your message.  As you type the SureType technology learns what you want to say by putting together different combinations of  letters that you chose from.  The longer you use this method the more accurate it gets.  Not only that but the SureType technology saves a custom word list so that when you type in a specific key combination it already knows what you want to type and completes it for you.  I have been very amazed at how well this actually works. 

Ok, what are you waiting for?  Go to your cellular provider and tell them you want to put your hands on one of these data devices and give it a test drive.  Be sure to click the link below this blog review to see a nice flash video of this device. 

 

BlackBerry Pearl - Small, Smart and Stylish. Explore The New BlackBerry Smartphone

Windows Live Writer Beta

I discovered Windows Live Writer Beta and I think I like it ok. It allows me to publish to multiple blogs or to choose which blog I want to publish to.  It not only supports native Windows Live Blogs but it supports other blog services such as Blogspot.  One of the unique functions of Windows Live Beta is that it logs on to your Blog account after you  give it access and it determines the blog format that you have selected and it downloads any typeface or fonts or graphics that you have in place so when you are publishing an article the WYSIWYG editor shows you exactly what the blog will look like.  Other products like this allow you to post text and  graphics to your blog but you have to preview what it actually looks like before you can publish it.  You can insert the following items as well.

• Hyperlink
• Picture
• Table
• map
• Tags

I am using this tool now to post this article to my Chief Blog.  Enjoy!

Windows Live Writer Beta

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

 I have been using Windows Vista Business and Ultimate for some time now.  All in all I have enjoyed using the software despite some of the learning curve and hardware/software hurdles to get here.  Then again being an I.T. professional  I am willing to go where most people do not dare to go.  I do not mind the words crash recovery and bleeding edge when it comes to computer technology. 

Identify theft is a buzz word both in personal finance circles as well as Information Technology.  Companies are coming to their senses and realizing that there are some very talented yet unscrupulous people who sit at home or at their cubicles at work and figure out ways to hack into Microsoft Windows and other  Operating Systems. 

More and more people are going mobile and carry around sensitive data.  No one wants anyone to have unauthorized access therefore Windows Vista could be a good choice with an OS with extra security built in.    Bitlocker Drive Encryption is one such security aware program that can encrypt your data. 

I subscribe to several Vista related RSS feeds including ITsVista and saw the article about ROHOS Logon key utilizing a USB drive.  USB drives are so cheap now you can carry around more drive space on your key ring than you could have put on some of the earlier hard drives.  One of the things that I hate to do is to constantly have to type in my password on my Windows Vista laptop.  I thought that the pricing matrix for this type of utility was very nice as well. 

Data security software, Secure Windows logon; Disk encryption; Using a USB flash drive for logon; FREE download; FREE updates;

Incompatible driver error in Vista with Roxio driver

Go to this link to fix your issue with Vista not liking the driver for Roxio. Early on when I first ran into this problem there was not a solution. That was several months ago. It is nice to NOT see that darn error popping up all the time now.



http://kb.roxio.com/content/kb/Creator/000131CR

Yes, I am a sucker for punishment. I figure that while I was playing musical OS's with my 40 gb hard drive on the Toshiba laptop that I might as well give Vista RC2 a spin. After RC1 turned the laptop into a clam shell on the last try I had pretty much given up on doing that again. My experience with Linux this week gave me enough reason to try this again. After all, what is the worst that could happen? I would have to put the dreaded Toshiba recovery cd back in and reboot and restore the laptop to factory defaults. How many times have I done this in the last 2 months? I have lost count. LOL
The first install of Vista locked up the laptop. I am not sure what happened so I turned the laptop off for several minutes, restarted it and gave it try number 2. Heck, you cant say you gave it a Boy Scout effort if you just give up when a computer freezes up right? In this case the second try was the charm. I left it running and went to church to attend the weekly praise team practice and left my son Justin watching the laptop as it installed the new OS.
As luck would have it the install went flawlessly and when I got home after practice I was greeted with the initial desktop setup screen which allowed me to set up specific user paramaters that would allow me to log on to the desktop. So far so good by this point. The install process rebooted the laptop several times and before you know it I was running with Vista RC2 without any major catastrophes. The first test for me was to insert the Linksys Wifi card into the same pcmcia slot and see what happened. What happened caused me to smile because Vista saw it immediately and started installing Broadcom wireless driver software for it. I dug around in the network setup section and figured out how to connect to my WAP here at home. I can not begin to tell you how happy I am that Microsoft has completely screwed up the networking configuration in Vista. Then again that is outside the scope of this article so I will visit that again as I learn more. I was very suprised that Vista identified the wireless adapter as a Broadcom and not Linksys which is the brand. The wireless Linux gurus at work told me that the Linksys card probably uses the Broadcom chipset and that is why that happened. I guess you learn something every day huh? I removed the broadcom drivers, reinstalled the Linksys Wifi manager and drivers and rebooted. Guess what? The wifi manager would not run and the drivers for the Linksys wifi card were not recognized by Vista. So, you know the drill, out with Linksys drivers and software, rebooted and let Vista work magic with its Broadcom drivers all over again. Heck , if it is not broke why fix it??
I am happy to report that over all I am pretty happy with Vista RC2. I have serveral hurdles to overcome and the immediate one will be to figure out how to do this and that in this OS vs XP SP2. In an effort to remove any and all security risks in the OS Microsoft has screwed the lid down on the pot so tightly that you have to pull out a screw gun and take all the screws loose so you can see what is happening under the hood. That probably did not make sense as far as word pictures go but hopefull you got that. LOL
My first software snafu came when I tried to install and USE Incredimail. For some of you that wont be a huge loss especially if you dont use it for email. However I am not so fortunate because a good friend of mine got me stuck on Incredimail long ago and now I feel creatively crippled when I can not use all of the cool stationary and animated gizmos that comes with this email client. The application installs just fine however when the app starts up and the notifier starts up to tell you that you have new mail the application locks tight as a drum. Vista now has a cool software widget that TELLS YOU the obvious. " Incredimail is experiencing a problem and will now be shut down. Before we kill the processes involved we will see if we can peek under the hood and fix it for you." So far all the widget really does is confirm the blantantly obvious fact that the app is frozen. The other thing it does is give you a handy dandy little link to the website of the software manufacturer. I bet Google is pretty hacked off about that functionality. LOL.... Hey honey, how can I figure out where to find the Incredimail website dear? How about www.incredi...... OH STOP IT.... LOL
Our next stop in the software discovery zone last night was in Microsoft Vista Widget land. Vista has a desktop application launcher like Rocketdock. However , from what I can tell you can only use Microsoft Widgets that they developed and I dont think you can drag normal apps in there to use. Please understand that I am still a rattle shaking toddler when it comes to this OS so I might be wrong about that. As of now I have the following widgets showing on my desktop along with my desktop icons which I will remove later if I can. At the top I have the Weatherbug widget , in the middle I have the analog clock widget and under that is the CPU/MEM system widget and at the bottom I put a calculator widget since I am always and forever figuring out how much moola I need to give away to the creditors. LOL...
My third stop in software discovery zone today happened to be with Symantec Anti Virus which is provided for free by the college where I work. I plugged my laptop into the work LAN and downloaded the latest and greatest version of Norton Anti Virus by Symantec. I spent at least 2 hours trying to get Norton Live Update to work only to find out that version 10.1 does not work with Vista but version 10.2 does. On my first install of the new version that is supposed to work with Vista Live Update did not install correctly and all of my pretty icons turned into white place holders. I was pretty excited about that developement, let me tell ya. I decided to reboot the PC thinking that maybe I needed to after a major install of an AV product even though I thought it was weird that it did not prompt me to do it anyway. When I rebooted the pc I was greeted by the dreaded recovery screen as if I had pushed F8 on boot up. I was once again reminded my Microsoft that there was a problem in software land and the OS was having a problem booting. Imagine that huh? I would have never known except for the pretty logo that was supposed to be there was GONE..... LOL
In a desperation attempt I clicked on the trusty and faithful LAST KNOWN GOOD menu selection and I was greeted by a pretty Vista logo and the logon screen. When I finally landed back on my user desktop GUI all of my icon place holders were once again pretty icons. Woooohooooo. Vista was happy but Norton Anti Virus was not. After several attempts I managed to get Live Update reinstalled and working. Live Update is doing what it is supposed to be doing however the definition file screen is not showing todays date yet. After researching the specific error on Google I was told to delete all the live update index files etc and that is supposed to fix that problem finally. I will play around with that tomorrow.
I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed with no problems and I installed AVS Video Tools on the laptop and I am converting some video files to .wmv format with no problems. I am noticing that AVS is a cpu hog as it has the cpu system clock pegged solid at 100%. I am pleased to say that out of 1 gb of ram on my laptop it is only using 33% of the available ram.

Linux and wireless nightmares

I am sad to say that while Fedora Core (RedHat) Linux installed just fine on the Toshiba Satelite laptop I still had issues with it. The first issue that I had was that I was having problems downloading all of the updates from the RedHat repositories. Perhaps they were just busy and that is why I kept having to start all over again with multiple downloads. The major issue that I was facing with regards to using Linux as the primary OS for my laptop was the wireless network card configuration nightmare that faced me. Lets just say that everything that I read about how to make this happen is not for the faint hearted. As a matter of fact I would go as far to say that your typical Windows literate computer users would not be able to figure this out on their own. Here are a couple of reasons why. First and foremost Linux does come with its own version of a GUI desktop such as KDE in Ichthux however it is so different that you can easily get lost. The GUI interface easily avails the user to the familiar Internet related applications such as Firefox, Email, IRC, IM programs etc. The fly in the ointment is that when you get ready to do any basic maintenance or try to install any software you are in for a treat. That treat is called the terminal window or command prompt. That is where the real nightmare begins and your excitement of using a new OS ends. The second reason that most folks would run screaming from Linux is that the install procedure for applications is no where near as intuitive as your typical windows software. There is a program built into Linux called Adept which allows you to download new updates for the OS Kernel and other applications that come with that particular distribution of Linux. Those packages seem to install ok however the gotcha with that is if you install a program that will conflict with another one of the apps already installed it could potentially corrupt the whole install of Linux and render it useless. Do you remember what Spy Assassin did to the first install of Ichthux the other day? Now lets say you are out surfing the web and you want to download a program off the web that is Linux compatible. Lets take Firefox for example. You download it just fine but then you get to take a trip down nightmare lane in the terminal program where you have to figure out how to extract the compressed fine, change directories to the location of those files and then try to install it. Good luck on that one. The third reason that folks would give up on Linux on the laptop especially is the difficulty level of installing your wireless adapter. Fedora Core did not recognize the Linksys Wireless adapter that was plugged in to the pcmcia card slot. The BIOS recognized its presence through card and socket services and provided the needed power to the device but Linux certainly did not see it. I wont bore you with all of the gory details of what it entails but lets just say that what I read about HOW I needed to get it to work was enough to make me say " Is all of this really worth running Linux on my laptop??" Sadly enough the potential migrane caused me to change directions on what OS I would use on the laptop. One other thing that you seriously need to consider about playing around with Linux is that you really do not want to try to dual boot this OS with a Windows Operating System. The reason I say this is because you can delete the partition that Linux is on but you will have a lot of fun getting rid of the GRUB Boot Loader that Linux installs in the Master Boot Record. Thanks to my inexperience with Linux boot loaders and my not changing the Adminstrator password on XP I found myself just using the recovery cd to wipe the drive and start from scratch. POOF. All my software configurations were gone AGAIN. LOL...