One little check box

So having recently installed Windows Server Service Pack 2 on a client’s SBS 2003 R2 box over the Christmas/New Year break (yes, I know but they were too busy to allow it any other time) it was only upon their return did I strike the following strange problem.

A shared HP printer on the server was showing offline. Strange, all the other HP printers off the server were fine. When I attempted to print a page to the offline printer the job just sat in the queue. I killed all the print jobs and restarted the Print Spooler service and then a test print worked. However, when I asked a user to try and print again the printer was offline again. Did a quick Google and couldn’t find anything so rather than muck about I thought that I’d call HP since surely they had seen this before.

After being accidentally hung up on by the first technician I told the next technician in great detail what I had done and that I suspected the issue to be something related to Windows Server Service Pack 2. He suspected a corrupt driver. Ok, that is possible I suppose. So I deleted and recreated the shared printer on the server (resetting all the page sizes to A4! Why oh why doesn’t this happen immediately??). Guess what? same problem. Next he got me to create a new printer on a workstation to see if I had the same problem. Ah yes, same problem. Next he wanted to delete the printer, restart the server and start hacking the registry.

At this point I had to put my foot down and say that there were users on the system and I believed the real issue was linked to Service Pack 2. He told me to wait on hold while he checked something. Fine, while you’re doing that I’ll Google some more. Guess what? I found the issue! Guess what? It is related to Windows Service Pack 2. Here’s the solution :

Apparently Windows Server 2003 SP2 has some changes in the way SNMP is handling printer queues. It now does multiple SNMP threads for the printer queues instead of 1 round robin.

To resolve this, check if your printer’s SNMP is working properly.

To workaround, in the Printers and Faxes folder,

File > Server Properties
Goto Ports Tab > Click the offline Port > Configure Port
Uncheck “SNMP Status Enable”
OK
This will turn off SNMP querying and set the printer to always Online.

Anyway, after making the changes and checking that the printers work from the clients workstation my HP friend comes back from hold and I tell him that I’ve solved it. Oh, he says, yes Windows Server Service Pack 2 can cause those issues. Arrrggh… If you knew that why didn’t you tell me up front?

Support is never easy is it?

Re-enabling older file types in Office 2003 after SP3

Here’s a post that should help you if you need to implement older Office file types after installing Office 2003 Sp3 :

http://blogs.msdn.com/david_leblanc/archive/2008/01/04/office-sp3-and-file-formats.aspx

In the post you’ll find some handy .reg files that will re-enable the older file formats without having to go in and hack the registry (always a good move).

Here are the closing comments from the post (from Microsoft of course):

In closing, I want to emphasize that we’re not removing support – we’re making the default safer. If you’re among the users who do need to be opening these formats, we will continue to support you. We also recognize that we have not made any of this as usable as we’d like, and we apologize that this hasn’t been as well documented or as easy as you need it to be. We’re also going to take a hard look at how we can do better in the future.

Now I know that Microsoft is screwed no matter what it does but don’t you think Microsoft, that a warning dialog box during the install of the Service Pack might have been a good idea? Hmmm? If there was one then I could understand your ‘making it more secure‘ claim BUT keeping this thing hidden or as you euphemistically put it “hasn’t been as well documented or as easy as you need to be“, then I gotta say that my BS detector is flashing big time, since it appears more likely you are trying to force people into the new versions of Office. Now while that in itself is not a bad thing and necessary to ensure we are all safer, one would again tend to think that the way this has been conducted is more along the lines of benefiting stockholders rather than users. Maybe?

You’re watching

We’re happy to announce a couple of milestones for our YouTube videos. Firstly, our total views has now exceed 40,000! Wow, that means that 40,000 people have looked at what we have placed online. Secondly, our most popular video, about getting started with Microsoft Virtual PC, has now been viewed over 6,000 times. Remarkable.

If you have watched our videos then we thank you for taking the time to view our content. As always we encourage people to send us feedback (good and bad) on our offerings. Regular viewers will be happy to know that we have recently purchased Camtasia Studio Version 5 and all our new videos will be using this fantastic product. At the moment we are just working through the product tutorials so we understand how to get the most from the product. With all the new features of Camtasia we hope to make what we present much slicker and more professional.

A recent comment on one of the videos raised an interesting point. We were asked why we solicit for donations in our recent videos. The answer is that these videos are not generally done as part of our normal business, they are done we get a few spare moments. Unfortunately, these days we have to put priority on work that provides us with revenue that pays the bills. If we were to get some revenue from these videos (no matter how small) then we could spend more time developing more videos, improving the number and content of what we provide. So if you like what you see and want to see more then we would appreciate a donation via http://donation.saturnalliance.com.au and help us. It doesn’t have to be much, even a few bucks does help.

We also have be toying with the idea of sponsorship on our videos, again to raise some capital to improve our offerings. If you know a business that may be interested in sponsoring one of our productions please contact me (Robert Crane – director@ciaops.com).

The bottom line is that the videos we do will continue to be produced and placed online for free but they will continue to be done as they have been, in an ad hoc manner, when we have time. However, to everyone who has taken the time to view our videos, provide comments, ratings and feedback we thank you very much and hope that you’ll keep watching.

Another great FREE utility

Well no so much a utility as a setting I suppose. What is it? It is OpenDNS. What does it do? It allows you to point your DNS to much bigger, faster, better featured, highly reliable, etc service for retrieving the domains you type into your web browser. Why is it better? Well apart from being all the things I just mentioned it allows you to monitor all your DNS requests, for all your networks from a web console (cool). Also, it can be configured to prevent requests to phising and “adult content” web sites. This means that if a user inadvertently clicked on an email that contained a link to a phising site (to obtain their banking details for example without them knowing) then the request would be automatically dropped and the user would get a nice warning page.

By using OpenDNS on your network you’ll ensure that not only will your users get a faster response to their request for web sites but they’ll also be better protected. Even better you can access all you DNS statistics from a web console and lots more features. To cap it all off OpenDNS is TOTALLY FREE! So there is no reason not to use it.

Take a look at OpenDNS and I think you’ll find that it has plenty of really cool benefits for a price that is hard to match.

Don’t believe Windows Vista ain’t selling?

Heard recently that last year PC (excluding Macs) manufacturers shipped 260 million PC’s. Microsoft also announced that in the same time frame it sold 88 million copies of Windows Vista.

Say what??? 260 million PC’s and only 88 million shipments of Vista. But wait it get’s worse for Microsoft. It is my understanding that the 88 million shipments of Vista include upgrades (ie not destined for new hardware anyway).

Now Vista does have some excellent features that do make it a worthwhile purchase BUT for the average consumer it means they are going to HAVE TO buy new MORE POWERFUL hardware to run Vista on. Strangely, most consumers ask WHY? To them apart from the flashy Aero interface (which is a resource hog anyway) what benefit makes it worthwhile now? NOTHING! They’ll just wait until they upgrade their PC in 3-4 years and get it then. If we go into recession then this may blow out to 4-5 years.

In my books another mistake from Microsoft not looking at what customers ACTUALLY WANT rather than telling them WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE. The market has spoken Microsoft and I certainly hope you are listening. But ….

Look what I found out after I…

Have been apply Office 2003 SP3 in swaths across customers while they are all away being merry and I can access every workstation unrestricted. That was until I found this blog post! Turns out that by installing Office 2003 SP3, the ability to open and save older legacy file formats will be blocked. Hmmm…why? The reason for this decision is strictly for security reasons. Some older file formats including some from Microsoft are insecure and do not satisfy new attack vectors that hackers can use to execute malicious code. The decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised. Hmmm…the old security excuse eh? I wonder how many of my customers this is going to piss orff? Hopefully, not too many!

If you need instructions to re-enable certain file formats, please read this article KB 938810. It involves registry modifications so, as usual, backup your registry before altering. GREAT! Another fantastic Microsoft solution – HACK THE REGISTRY! Is there ever a solution that doesn’t involve this for pity’s sake??

Hmm…sounds to me like Microsoft wants everyone to upgrade to Office 2007,

Because it is better? Because the ribbon interface makes using it so much better? Or because Microsoft needs the cash? I wonder!

When will company’s like Microsoft start looking at this sort of stuff from what is best for the customer? Not while they have stockholders I’ll bet!

2 worthwhile utilities

Ok, let’s start off the New Year with 2 interesting and helpful utilities.

Firstly IEPassview – This utility will allow you to display all the passwords stored by Internet Explorer. Yes, that’s right boys and girls, all those passwords for login to protected sites and things like ADLS routers.

IE PassView utility can recover 3 types of passwords:

AutoComplete Passwords: When you enter a Web page that contains a form with user/password fields and a login button, Internet Explorer may ask you if you want to save the password, after pressing the login button. If you choose to save the password, the password is saved as AutoComplete password.
Be aware that some Web sites (like Yahoo login page) deliberately disable the AutoComplete feature, in order to avoid password stealing by other users.
HTTP Authentication Passwords: Some Web sites allow the user to enter only after typing user and password in a separated dialog-box. If you choose to save the password in this login dialog-box, the password is saved as HTTP authentication password.
FTP Passwords: Simply the passwords of FTP addresses (ftp://…)

Next WindirStat – will calculate and display disk usage.

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

This is a great tool for determining what is chewing up all your disk space and then actually going in and cleaning it up.

Best of all both utilities are free for download. How’s that for a New Year’s present?