Month: February 2007

Kronos DST patch

If you are installing the Kronos DST patch and it prompts you for the database owner username and password, use tkcsowner for both username and password. This seems a bit of a security loophole (you can also find the default password for the suprkron username on google too). Entering this into the upgrade routine, you will be able to continue with the upgrade and not have to wait up to 4 hours for a tech to call you back with this information.
Note that these are default passwords and available in google searches quite easily IF you know these are the usernames that you need.
Oh, and by the way you need to reboot after the installation 🙁

Plesk worm on windows servers

There has been a worm infecting Windows servers running the popular plesk package (that provides shared windows hosting) due to a vulnerability in mailenable. My host has provided details on available fix, but first they disabled pop3 access to prevent the worm spreading. An interesting method of propagation and a pretty drastic measure to stop it – hopefully everyone signs up for the forum notifications or their helpdesk is going to be very busy.

Blackberry at work

We got Blackberry 8703e leashes at work on Friday afternoon so I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the weekend playing around with the functionality and working out how to do things. It’s a shame that their legal department spends more time writing a HUGE software licence and warranty booklet – 133 pages in all the different languages yet the getting started manual is only 51 pages, 10 of those are the terms and conditions. Strangely enough there is no mention of how long to keep the blackberry charged before using it or any instructions as to the various lights on the device, normally there are warnings of dire consequences and doom if batteries are not charged for 18 hours OR MORE!

Gigafast refusing rebates….

I received this email from onrebates.com this afternoon – “We regret to inform you that the above rebate claim has not been funded by the sponsoring manufacturer, Gigafast Inc., and therefore cannot be paid. Gigafast Inc. contracted with OnRebate.com Inc. to have OnRebate.com Inc. process Gigafast Inc. sponsored rebates but, in violation of the terms of this contract, Gigafast Inc. has not funded disbursements for several months and has not responded to our many funding requests or other attempts to reach them. As a result rebate disbursements to customers who purchased Gigafast Inc. products have not been made. At this point your rebate claim is being cancelled but your rebate details will be kept on file in the event that you are able to contact Gigafast, Inc. and get them to fund your claim.”
I’m not a lawyer but I imagine my contract is either with the shop or the rebate company, not Gigafast….As I paid on my credit card, it would be interesting to see what they have to say about it.
Update I’ve filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Emailed Microcenter (if this was in the UK I’d have also requested money back from the credit card company as the contact was broken. There is also a forum at Fatwallet where people are also adding their comments and reactions – looks like Microcenter, onrebate and Gigafast are going to be pretty busy.
Update 2 [email protected] is rejecting emails – very fishy.
Update 3 Microcenter are honouring my rebat – see the fatwallet discussion for up to date news.

OneNote text recognition

Did you know that if you right click a picture in OneNote there is the option to Copy text from picture? I discovered that this morning. The formatting is not great, but the text recognition from the screenshot in the previous window was pretty good (pasted in the extended entry).
One cool use for this feature would be to capture the text from error messages that have no option to select the text to copy into another application.

“Your availability time range is invalid, please correct” Lotus Notes error.

I got the “Your availability time range is invalid, please correct” when I went into my calendar options in Notes to try and fix another (unrelated) issue and for the life of me I couldn’t see why I would get this error message. The screenshot below shows the settings that I saw.

availability

However, if the Sunday box was subsequently checked, the time for that day was displayed and the time for some reason was set to be from 02:00 pm – 02:00 AM which is not a valid time range as it spans over to the next day.
So if you get this message, remember to check the disabled days first.

Finally manage to get WHS installing.

The PC that has been giving me loads of grief succumbed!
Admittedly the pc is a bit old but should be ok for WHS specs but everytime I tried to boot off the WHS dvd (or any other tool using WinPE) the machine would hang. I took the hard disk out of the machine, put it into my live pc and installed WHS on the hard disk successfully, tried putting it back in the original case and the pc would endlessly recycle 🙁
The next thought was to flash the bios to see if this would improve things. Previously I had search for the Bios (ASRock K7S8X) and hadn’t found anything, but this time I found a bios update from ASRock’s website. The trick was getting it onto the pc as the machine had no OS and all my other machines have no floppy drive. In the end I copied the files onto a usb thumbdrive, booted into BartPE and copied the files to the floppy. Then booted from another techie cd that gave me a dos prompt and I was able to update the BIOS with asrflash.exe
A restart and check of bios settings and I tried the DVD again, and this time it is installing ok.
Now to go and close the various bug requests I have open with Microsoft and other Beta software companies.

crc check

One of the first requirements is to check the crc32 checksum for the downloads before the dvd is burnt. Unfortunately no link is provided to any crc32 programs so I found one on consoleapps.com. It takes a while to generate as the dvd image is pretty large.
After the crc check it took 3 attempts to burn dvd of the installation media. The 3rd attempt worked fine and I popped it in the machine that I intended to install the software on. Unfortunately the same error occurred that I got when attempting to install Vista – the pc hangs after the capslock, numlock and scroll lock lights flash briefly. I tried swapping out the hard disk and dvd drive and it didnt make any difference. Putting the dvd in my main pc, the installation routine got further – to the point where it started to ask me if I wanted to install the software and to proceed any further would wipe my disk, so I know the dvd disk is good too.
I didn’t receive any help from Microsoft on the Vista beta so I’m not holding out much hope for WHS on this machine either 🙁
I didn’t go out and buy the larger hard disk as it doesn’t look like it would help much and it is snowing – again.
Update It looks like the problem is something to do with the WinPE environment as I have another tool that uses WinPE and it also hangs in exactly the same spot.