For some reason my vpn to remote sites was sometimes kicking me out after 3 mins. It didn’t always do it and it seemed to affect different clients. It looks like setting the MTU value to 1498 (instead of the low 1300) did the trick. See kb826159 for the relevant registry changes.
Month: October 2006
I checked on Dell’s website yesterday for the latest wifi drivers for the Inspiron 600m to fix the widely reported vulnerabilitys. Dell has a driver available but when you download the file, you can extract the files from it. However double clicking on the setup program causes the dellinfo.exe program to crash followed by a message stating “Error – This installer does not support installation on this computer.”
So far I’ve chatted with about 3 people on the dell chat program. The scary thing was when a tech asked me “Why is it your downloading the driver if the wireless card is ok?” – I had to (patiently) explain that I’m trying to download a driver to patch the critical vulnerability that is (from the readme) “Urgent = Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system.”
His solution was to send me the driver cd but we got cut off before we managed to exchange shipping address’s.
I checked the driver on another inspiron 600m this morning and the dellinfo.exe crashed on this machine but it tried to install the drivers but failed to do so with 2 more crashes that were reported to microsoft.
I tried chat this morning and the tech stated that the driver may be corrupt and I would need to contact customer care to report this. I called the customer care line 1 800 456 3355×7241969 who then after not understanding a word I was talking about put me through to support who then told me that they had put me through to the wrong department and I’m now on hold again – awaiting to put me through to the wireless support card. They can’t support me as apparently someone else installed the driver “2 hours ago” and therefore the download must be ok. A conference call to hardware support was the next step. Unfortunately hardware support were too busy to answer the phone so the tech guided me to the intel website and I downloaded the driver from the driver page on intel.com. Whilst I was downloading this driver my boss tripped over the phone cable, pulled the phone off the desk and hung up – I let out an involuntary wail as it was the end of 90 minutes with “technical hold support”. However the wireless drivers from Intel loaded ok but interestingly the windows driver version is the same as the version that I was currently running (9.0.4.17), but the Intel Wireless software (an alternative to Windows Wireless configuration utility) was upgraded a couple of versions to 10.5.0.3.
Note that if you scroll down on the driver page you can actually just download the windows driver by itself (something I should have done as I don’t use the IBM configuration software as the Windows Management software is easier to use as it is standard across all the laptops.
I’ve finally got Kristen’s ipod to work after several days (a week on and off). The symptoms were that upgrading the ipod (at itunes prompting) would just result in a hang of itunes as would a restore. I was also getting messages such as The ipod “Ipod” cannot be updated. The required folder cannot be found. The ipod “Ipod” cannot be updated. The disk could not be read from or written to.
I solved the problem by doing all of the items below. (Note that if you are going to follow these instructions, make sure you have a backup of your ipod or don’t mind loosing the data on it!)
- Copy the data from the ipod drive in windows to a temporary location on the pc’s hard disk and then format the ipod by right clicking on the drive in explorer, choosing Format and then doing a quick format (You may need to ensure that the drive letter that Windows sees is a unique one to the drive. If this is needed, right click my computer, choose manage and then go to disk management. Right click the larger ipod disk and choose change drive letter)
- Uninstalled itunes and rebooted
- Deleted %appdata%\Apple Computer\Itunes and %temp%
- Reinstalled itunes
- Delete the temporary copy of the ipod data
When I launched itunes it all seemed to start working properly – Kristen will be pleased.
Interestingly is that when I formatted the ipod, after the pc reboot there were files and directories back in the drive -I guess the ipod autoloads its OS from the hidden partition on the disk.
You can’t do a push install due to the firewall settings and secure policies. However there are instructions on how to install backupexec agent manually
I don’t have much exposure to Mac’s and was surprised to see that if you use certain versions of entourage (i.e. version X) then you need to enable imap on the exchange server. Microsoft’s mac support page on exchange has the prerequisites for various versions of entourage. Interestingly, the new version 2004 needs webdav so I’m guessing it using something like rpc over http for exchange?
I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.
However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.
As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.