The dryer conked out this week and stopped heating the air. I popped the back off the dryer this morning and was pretty shocked about the amount of dust and cat hair in the dryer. I think there was easily enough to make a lifesize cat out of it all. Anyway, after taking the side panel off and still not finding the thermostat I took the back off the dryer and there they (both) were. After shorting out the second thermostat, the dryer started to heat up so I know that is the fault.
When i went to the repair shop in town they couldn’t find any record of the model number on their system. Fortunately I had found the part number on ezee fix’s website and when I quoted that, they were able to look it up. They didn’t have any in stock but will have some in on Tuesday and its cheaper than online (just) as I don’t have to pay postage and the online shop wouldn’t have shipped it by Tuesday (and this way I’m supporting the local shop)
Only now, after I’ve finished all my migrations, have I discovered the Windows User State Migration Tool (USMT) which looks like a scriptable version of the Files And Settings Transfer wizard. This tool might have saved me some time instead of having to do it all by hand.
Microsoft released a new version of their Windows AntiSpyware (Beta) for download. What is weird is that the existing beta software had an update routine in it, but when you ran it, it did not detect a new version. Apparently the changes are to do with extra real time protection agents, new threat categories and improved stability and performance (although I never had any performance problems with it).
It is perfectly possible to subscribe via email to yahoogroups with an email address containing a plus sign. However if you try to verify the email address you can’t as they encode the plus sign to %2b and then the server drops the %2b to a space and complains that “sb @domain.com” is invalid (which it is).
Looks like they’ve update the entire site with new colours and everything – my first thought was eek! My second thought was hmmm – wonder what is new.
So far there is a new feature called bookmarks to share a list of caches, and the cache page has the ability to bookmark or ignore listings.
I don’t like the way the pages change the background colour for each page that you visit but I might get used to it…..
Symantec have released a patch for the UPX vulnerability in their products as documented in their UPX parsing engine heap overflow vulnerability and Symantec Client Security document. Only a few of our machines were affected and rather than upgrade them to the latest release it was easier to install the nodec2exe patch
I found a referral to this site in google today – Findory : Absoblogginlutely. This somehow links websites together with how relevant they are, quite similar to bloglines. I do like the way they have reproduced the content with related content too.
2 of our clients have managed to get corrupt symantec antivirus definitions which means the services stop. As the services are stopped I am unable to update them with the console and I’ve disabled liveupdate. Unfortunately the symantec.com websites are unavailable (and so was msn search) (even though they are using the akamai network to protect against ddos). In the end I used the ftp service at ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/antivirus_definitions/norton_antivirus/ to download the definitions onto the local pc.
Having said all that I spent about an hour trying various things to fix the client but in the end gave up. I’ve now uninstalled the software and moved across to our new corporate mcafee software instead. I’m not saying this is any better (I doubt it) but we’ll see….
As I write this msn search and symantec are now available again.
Kristen brought me Froderick the Gnomad for valentines day – similar to a travelbug used in geocaching, this is a cute gnome that is trackable and has an online photo album. When I saw Mike’s gnomad I wanted one too but at the time we only had 1 day left in the states and I wasn’t going to be able to get one.
Kristen remembered and got me one – thanks luv!
Seeing as though its been a long time since i’ve done much work with Group Policies, it took me a long time to work out why the policy for disabling Windows Updates within IE and the start menu would not work, yet the settings for telling where the client should go to get its updates did work.
Eventually I read a website which tipped me off and is actually obvious when you think about it. I had created an OU and moved computers into it, but I hadn’t added the users to the OU. Therefore only the computer configs were amended but not the users.
Now that I’ve done it correctly, WUS seems to be working pretty well (apart from one machine that thinks it needs to download .net framework 1.0 patches when in actual fact it needs to download 1.1 patches.