Its been a quiet week for me this week – I’ve been out on site for three days but the guys back at the office has been busy. We were burgled on Sunday night and they stole ALL the NT/w2K servers so the disaster recovery plan was invoked – yeah right, of course it was!
Replacement servers arrive tomorrow so we have loads of restores to do – I’m a bit nervous about this as I’ve never had to do a complete DR on a NT box, mainly because once a server is up and running it gets used immediately and so there is no chance that you can back it up, format the disk and then try a restore from scratch. What is going to make it even more interesting is that these boxes use Active Directory and one of them has Exchange 2000 on it! Seeing as though the thieving scumbags also stole the firewall we’ve had no internet access at the office 🙁
At least this will give me some good experience in DR and hopefully wake some heads up to persuade people to pay more attention to DR and my requests for tape drives to be fitted (as guess how many machines didn’t have one!) When I requested a tape drive I even got the go-ahead and the order was ready to go when someone else ripped the paperwork up and refused the tape drive – so that machine is not backed up!

The lockergnome Webmaster mailing list was comparing a windows host with a linux host and the differences between the database platforms. What I want to know is that if you can download php for windows and mysql for windows, or chiliasp for linux, why are there no hosts out there which do asp, access databases AND php and mysql – that way no matter what freebie application you download from the internet it’ll work on your hosting provider!

How to make your password really secure:- Use the pound sign (£) character and then go use a pc with an american keyboard which doesn’t have the pound sign – then try to login…… 🙂

What a weekend! A friend rang me up yesterday to say their pc had crashed. On further investigation the entire windows\systems\iosubsys directory was missing. Took the pc home to fix. Ran scandisk and it found 35000 files with corrupt links and only 1 copy of the FAT on disk. Ran scandisk on it and it wiped out the windows directory and program files directory….I really hope he didn’t have any data in those directories as I know he didn’t have a backup! Fortunately my documents is ok and I’ve copied that off onto another disk. The machine is a Siemens Fujistu – the model that had loads of hard disk problems, so the disk will probably get returned in an RMA. In the meantime I’m having to copy the files across onto another from dos, a directory at a time and make a note of what directories did or didn’t copy. Then its a reinstall using the system disk and then install all the applications……AND someone else wants me to setup and configure their brand new pc this weekend too!

The BBC news is reporting a woman who racked up £28,000 of parking tickets over three years. Why they just didn’t do what they do in the States and tow the car(s) away I don’t know….wait – yes I do. They wouldnt have been able to claim £28000 worth of tickets! Apparently the annual carpark pass is £1800 so she would have saved a lot of money. Not sure why she had three cars though!

OK, I got the RSS feed to include a link to comment now. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain the number of comments in the post, but at least you can leave your own comment! In order to do it, I needed to do the following:-

First of all I needed to include the comment tags within the RSS field. Therefore the /span tag needs to be removed from the end of the blogitembody and put *after* the comments piece of code. I then changed the comment code so that it didn’t use javascript to create the hyperlink but used a full path so the line looks like this:-

<a href="http://www..../aspcomments.asp?blogid=<$BlogItemNumber$>">comments</a>
[<SCRIPT TYPE="text/javascript"
SRC="/...../aspcomments.asp?blogid=<$BlogItemNumber$>&count=1">
</script>]</a>

Hope that helps you Mike! (change the dots to the appropriate path)

test3

Mike was talking about trying to get comments into his RSS feed and I thought – simple! It just needs the tags adding into the rss span. Unfortunately not because the comments are all part of Javascript so they don’t work 🙁 I’ll have to try something else.

In the processing of trying to fix graphic and usb problems on one of the w2k servers I upgraded the bios as I got a “”Your computer’s system firmware does not include enough information to properly configure and use this device. To use this device, contact your computer manufacturer to obtain a firmware or BIOS update. (Code 35)” message.
Managed to fix the graphics on one of the w2k servers, which would only show me 680*400 and 16 colours by enabling the IRG for PCI VGA in the bios. Also, by changing the MPS version to 1.1 instead of 1.4 in the bios the USB ports also work!
Now I have a nice clean crisp background and no errors in device manager – sweet!