Microsoft have just released SharedView – a program that looks like it can be used to present your screen to multiple (up to 15) computers. Not sure how it works yet as it doesn’t work with Lotus Notes (see my posts on the Microsoft forums). These forums are brand new – I was the first to post (2) posts for support/product feedback. I’ll be testing this out on the home pc tonight, and it will be interesting to see if gmail is supported as a mail client.
It uses a Live ID for the presenter (but it is not needed for the clients watching the screen) and as yet does not support audio (but neither does webex that I’m aware of). I think it will take some time for users to get used to getting SharedView installed on their computer and running it – it doesn’t seem to be deployed via a web applet/activex component like WebMeeting.
More later after I’ve got it working…..
On the two boxes that I’ve upgraded to WSUS version 3 this week I have received errors with the IIS Worker process crashing. One of the boxes has DEP intervening with the process and the other box just comes up with a message asking me to send the data to Microsoft.
Eventvwr shows event 1009, Source W3SVC with the error message being “A process serving application pool ‘WsusPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘4652’. The process exit code was ‘0xc0000005’.”
The DEP error states “To help protect your computer, Windows has closed this program”,
Name: IIS Worker Process. Clicking on Change Settings gives me the DEP Screen,
which shows the IIS Worker process already allowed. Clicking close then offers to send a report to Microsoft (again). Oddly enough, the mmc console seems to work ok when launched so at the moment I’m not sure what is causing it. Seems too much of a coincidence for it NOT to be wsus3 though.
Not had too much time to look at the main cause for this – it could be due to the fact that the pc’s haven’t been rebooted since the install (and may need .net patches installed)
I installed Adobe’s flash player 6 on my pc tonight and was surprised to see Comodo Antivirus kick in with a “Not-a-virus:RiskTool.Win32.PsKill.q” for the nsprocess.dll file included as part of the install – presumably to kill any previous installs currently running. I’ve seen things like this with Symantec Antivirus and pskill from sysinternals before but not with Flash Player!
I submitted the file to virustotal.com and got the following results.
| Antivirus | Version | Update | Result |
| AhnLab-V3 | 2007.5.10.0 | 05.09.2007 | Win-Trojan/ProcKill.4096.B |
| AntiVir | 7.4.0.15 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Authentium | 4.93.8 | 05.08.2007 | no virus found |
| Avast | 4.7.997.0 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| AVG | 7.5.0.467 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| BitDefender | 7.2 | 05.10.2007 | no virus found |
| CAT-QuickHeal | 9.00 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| ClamAV | devel-20070416 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| DrWeb | 4.33 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| eSafe | 7.0.15.0 | 05.08.2007 | no virus found |
| eTrust-Vet | 30.7.3622 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Ewido | 4.0 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| FileAdvisor | 1 | 05.10.2007 | No threat detected |
| Fortinet | 2.85.0.0 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| F-Prot | 4.3.2.48 | 05.09.2007 | W32/Trojan.RZG |
| F-Secure | 6.70.13030.0 | 05.10.2007 | no virus found |
| Ikarus | T3.1.1.7 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Kaspersky | 4.0.2.24 | 05.10.2007 | no virus found |
| McAfee | 5027 | 05.09.2007 | potentially unwanted program Generic PUP |
| Microsoft | 1.2503 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| NOD32v2 | 2255 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Norman | 5.80.02 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Panda | 9.0.0.4 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Prevx1 | V2 | 05.10.2007 | no virus found |
| Sophos | 4.17.0 | 05.08.2007 | no virus found |
| Sunbelt | 2.2.907.0 | 05.05.2007 | no virus found |
| Symantec | 10 | 05.10.2007 | no virus found |
| TheHacker | 6.1.6.112 | 05.10.2007 | Trojan/KillProc.p |
| VBA32 | 3.12.0 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| VirusBuster | 4.3.7:9 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
| Webwasher-Gateway | 6.0.1 | 05.09.2007 | no virus found |
That is 5 antivirus products that presumably block or intefere with Flash from being installed.
An upgrade to XP wasn’t working this morning with the pc giving various error messages – Setup was unable to verify drive C, Setup cannot copy the file: driver.cab. At this point it had damaged the w2k installation enough that the previous installation would not boot. A chkdsk from the recovery console would just reboot the pc. Booting to BartCD I was able to run defrag and a chkdsk with no problems found. I tried different installation media and still got the same problem. I searched for a BIOS upgrade but couldn’t find anything useful so I then swapped the cd drive itself and it is now working (or at least it is most of the way through the upgrade).
If you notice anything funky with emails or hosting, please let me know via a comment on this site (or at my flickr account as I am moving hosts this week. First up is the helsby.net domain. The website (what little there is) was moved yesterday and emails setup on the main server for the appropriate mail forwarding and I flicked the dns switch just now. This should really only affect emails to Kristen and I as the website is not really used (at the moment)
After that I will be moving this absoblogginlutely.net domain – that is going to be a lot more complicated due to sql servers, MovableType installations, redirection of subdomains, ftp accounts and what not. The good news is that I won’t need to pay more for hosting for the next two years and by this switch of hosts I’ll be consolidating the various payments made to various companies for hosting and domain registration.
WSUS3 is out. I’m probably going to install it on a site where version2 isn’t working properly due to the dreaded selfupdatetree problem (and yes I have run the vbs script to patch it)
The family waiting room at Riverside hospital has a neat web based (I assume) application that shows you the list of patients in the hospital and their progress. When you checkin at the hospital, the accompanying person is given a piece of paper with a number on that relates to that person. They can then look up the patients status on the various monitors around the waiting room to see if they have checked in, awaiting surgery, in surgery, recovery or what room they are in. This makes it easier to keep up to date on someone’s status. They also tannoy announcements whenever a doctor has new news for the family. It’s a cool system but would be really good if this was available outside the hospital on a website so that a patient could let people know their number (and I guess they’d also need a passcode to prevent unauthorised disclosure) so people would know how soon to leave their home to come visit and what room they would be in.
They also have free wireless for internet access and a couple of phone jacks for the poor souls who have to use dialup to access the internet. Each room also has incoming telephone access (in comparison to the hospital in the UK which had premium rate dialin access for each bed which is a despicable practise and I think there is actually talk of dropping this charge) and you can even Send an electronic greeting card to patients.
For those of you who don’t know, Kristen is undergoing surgery at the moment for the removal of her thyroid. Before she went down for surgery she seemed pretty relaxed and was joking around like crazy – I’m not sure if they put something in her drip or whether it was the fact that she’d only had 3 hours sleep in the past 49.5 hours. For more updates, keep an eye on Kristen’s blog where I’ll post updates.
For some reason, one of my (terminal) servers has started to show funky dialog boxes in office applications. Everything looks plain, like in vb3 days and the options dialog box in outlook is unusable as the dialog is too small for the content. Any ideas on what has caused this?
Wrong dialog box
Correct Dialog box – everything fits in the screen (although I snipped the bottom off)
Update – Mike – you are a genius. The funny thing is that I thought it was the fonts but at first glance it seemed ok. However, I compared the fonts in the appearance setting of the display applet in control panel and sure enough, the font settings were blank. A look at the Tahoma font in the font applet and it was 0 bytes – aha! Installed Tahoma again across the network and the fonts and dialog boxes are now back to normal. – Sir, I owe you a pint.
Zoomit has been updated, the tool that allows you to zoom into part of the screen, annotate the screen or have a break countdown timer displayed on the screen when doing presentations. I went to a presentation last week on Microsoft’s Forefront Technology software (which seems to have promise but doesn’t seem to be anywhere near capable as a replacement for Mcafee, Symantec etc due to the lack of functionality) which was in dire need of a zoom tool as the presenter even commented that he was having difficulty seeing the screenshots on his screen (so why on earth they were included in the powerpoint presentation I don’t know). At the end of the presentation I fired my laptop up, loaded zoomit and took it to the (Microsoft) presenter to show it to him and suggested he downloaded it and uses it in the future.
Update You can the presentation and virtual machines for Forefront by downloading the Microsoft Forefront and System Center Demonstration Toolkit. I intend to write up my thoughts from the meeting into a blog post later (as I have to provide feedback to the rest of the office anyway)