- Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

Router shopping
by Barry Toner 30 Jan '11

30 Jan '11

Afternoon all, I've pretty much decided that it's most likely the routers the problem here. Looking at the DrayTek range is making my mouth water. Two I'm looking at are here http://www.seg.co.uk/ and here http://www.seg.co.uk/ Both look very nice. I especially like that the Router can double up as a NAS. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support NTFS, just FAT16/32. According to what I'm reading here though you can use drives larger than 32GB with FAT32? http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_maximum_partition_you_can_partition_FAT32 Do any of you folks know what the maximum capacity is? EG Any point hoping a 2TB drive can be used as formatted with FAT32? Cheers, Barry Soon to be broke!

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Network troubleshooting
by Barry Toner 24 Jan '11

24 Jan '11

Hi all, I've been pulling my hair out for the past week and a half. Suddenly our bandwidth dropped off. I'm on a 20MB connection and normally get 1.5 to 2.4MB/s download from fast servers like the BBC and Sendspace.com where I have a premium membership. I began to notice speeds of 93K, 21K, and on one freaky moment 4Bytes! After 6 phone calls to the lovely outsourced call centre. During which, I explained the drastic reduction in speed. Coupled with the fact that i had noticed I was losing packets. One 1st line Agent was able to see when he pinged my cable modem this was indeed happening. That it wasn't my hardware or the 6 computers I had at home. That I did know a tiny bit about computers and had confirmed that not only there was no hijackers on my WIFI, but that it didnt' make a difference whither I had my Netgear Router in the mix or was directly connected to the modem. Then after my ISP botched and ordered me two replacement modems the speeds flew back up to normal and life went on. Today i noticed during mudding lag had started again. I also noticed using Ventrilo I was getting insane ping rates. In the thousands. I started some ping tests again. pinging on wifi, 36 pings, 28 recieved. min - 22ms, max 480ms, avg 46ms Is this normal and should I expect a loss of packets on WIFI when i'm getting full signal, (as I was sitting beside the router, have all my WIFI gear bar the IPhone as N Adaptors). I did lose approx 1 packet out of the standard 4 packet Windows ping test when connected to the Router wired, and the modem wired, this afternoon. I'm trying to figure out how to establish what is the problem and minimise my own expense in the process. I can take a hit on time but I dont' want to go out and buy a new router just to test. Should I buy all new Ethernet cables? Demand my ISP send an Engineer out to check the cable box, and pay the £30 fee if all's fine? Is there any decent networking troubleshooting tools you all recommend? At first I thought was because I was messing around with creating my own 2K8R2 server networking at home, then i realised it wasn't just the Server and the one laptop who was using it as it's Domain and DNS that were having problems. Web Pages were/are loading slowly. I've ruled out viral and malware infaltrations. I know no WIFI encryption is full proof but I'm using WPA2, TKIP, ASE, MAC Address Filtering, hiding the SID, checked the client tables on the router to see if any non-recognised addresses are popping up. I'm at a loss as what more to do and don't want to go back to the ISP without as much concrete evidence as possible. BTW. I know they do throttle but this is for peer to peer s'fers between set hours. They say streaming, and browsing will not be effected. It's Virgin Media in the UK. Cheers as this is driving me mental! Barry

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JFW 12.x and event viewer
by Andrew Hodgson 19 Jan '11

19 Jan '11

Hi, Not sure if this is related to JFW 12, but is anyone else seeing that when viewing the event logs on a Windows system that JFW is no longer reading the actual contents of the event text? I am having to copy and paste this into a temporary Notepad session at the moment. This always used to work and on the same system as well. Thanks. Andrew.

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Microsoft Management Summet 2011
by Ryan Shugart 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Greetings: To the other Windows admins out there, I was wondering if anyone else was going to MMS this year or had ever gone? Looking at the web site (http://www.mms-2011.com) it looks like there will be quite a few presentations I'll benefit from on the systems management track, but before making my case to the boss I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle such a thing as a blind person. I've heard its very fast paced, and it'll be in a rather large venue. Chances are that I'd be the only one there from my company. So, was just curious if anyone's tried this before and how it worked out? Thanks. Ryan

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Microsoft Management Summet 2011
by Ryan Shugart 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Greetings: To the other Windows admins out there, I was wondering if anyone else was going to MMS this year or had ever gone? Looking at the web site (http://www.mms-2011.com) it looks like there will be quite a few presentations I'll benefit from on the systems management track, but before making my case to the boss I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle such a thing as a blind person. I've heard its very fast paced, and it'll be in a rather large venue. Chances are that I'd be the only one there from my company. So, was just curious if anyone's tried this before and how it worked out? Thanks. Ryan

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Truely unattended win 7 install?
by Ben Mustill-Rose 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

Hey all, Was just wondering if anyones been able to make a truely unattended windows 7 install? I don't mind about the partition selection, but even if I automate everything that I can using vLite, I still have to confirm some things durin the install such as regional information. What seems strange is that the key sequences don't seem to be consistant for the stuff that isn't automated across different installs which is making it pretty hard for me to do this on my own. Asa side note, when ever I try and get vLite to skip the user creation screen, the iso that it makes won't ever install due to install.wim being corrupted. I'm using a windows 7 ultimate oem disk at the moment which seems to work just fine if the install is attended. Any thoughts are welcome; I was able to make a unattended disk that worked perfectly fine when I was installing the RC, but I just can't get it to work now. Cheers, Ben.

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windows 7 not respecting administrators group server 2003
by Nehemiah Hall 07 Jan '11

07 Jan '11

I'm at a loss here. I'm a member of the administrators group on a server 2003 domain. We just put several windows 7 machines onto the domain, but none of them will allow me to make any changes that require UAC permission. It doesn't give me any error, it just keeps giving the same UAC prompt, asking for username and password. Suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks. Nehemiah Email/MSN: nrh(a)n-republic.net Twitter: miahtech Skype: trekky-techie AIM: NehemiahRepublic

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Newbe Server 2008 R2
by Barry Toner 05 Jan '11

05 Jan '11

Hi folks, Let me say first of all I've little to no experience of this. Other than a year 3 years back assisting in a large Software House with Server 2003. I've install Server 2008 R2 at home. I've assigned it as a DC and install Active Directory. I'm flying by the seat of my pants and don't know what i'm doing. I want to be able to log-on to the Active Directory service using my laptop. Poked around in Active Directory and I created a Computer object under tx.r2.com (which is the address I gave my DC). I then created a User Object for myself. Now what? Is there tutorials or something? I can of course sift through the Microsoft documentation, but this is such an massive product and already I am drowning. Help! Cheers, Barry.

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SCSI cards
by Ryan Shugart 30 Dec '10

30 Dec '10

Hi: I was just curious if anyone has ever seen this before, its baffling everyone else I talk to and I'm about at the bang head on desk point. We have a backup server, it was running Windows Server 2003, and had an HP SCSI card inside that is basically a rebranded LSI Ultra 320. We were getting really fast backups, Backup Exec reported the average speed of 2GB per minute, and while someone said we could have even gone faster, that was plenty for us so I never bothered. Anyway, right before Christmas, I wiped the drive, installed Windows Server 2008R2 and installed the latest Backup Exec 2010. Everything works fine accept that the drive now backs up at about 100MB per minute. HP's Library and Tape Tools indicate the SCSI bandwidth has gone down to 5MBPS and should be at least 20MBPS. I don't know a lot about SCSI, but its almost like the card has fallen back to an older form of SCSI in some kind of backwards compatibility mode. The WS2008R2 drivers are up to date, and cabling wise nothing has changed from when it was working. I've gone to Symantec, Quantum (the vendor of the tape library) and HP and they all blame someone else in the chain. So I'm just curious if anyone knows what could cause something like this to happen? Thanks. Ryan

2 2

SCSI cards
by Ryan Shugart 30 Dec '10

30 Dec '10

Hi: I was just curious if anyone has ever seen this before, its baffling everyone else I talk to and I'm about at the bang head on desk point. We have a backup server, it was running Windows Server 2003, and had an HP SCSI card inside that is basically a rebranded LSI Ultra 320. We were getting really fast backups, Backup Exec reported the average speed of 2GB per minute, and while someone said we could have even gone faster, that was plenty for us so I never bothered. Anyway, right before Christmas, I wiped the drive, installed Windows Server 2008R2 and installed the latest Backup Exec 2010. Everything works fine accept that the drive now backs up at about 100MB per minute. HP's Library and Tape Tools indicate the SCSI bandwidth has gone down to 5MBPS and should be at least 20MBPS. I don't know a lot about SCSI, but its almost like the card has fallen back to an older form of SCSI in some kind of backwards compatibility mode. The WS2008R2 drivers are up to date, and cabling wise nothing has changed from when it was working. I've gone to Symantec, Quantum (the vendor of the tape library) and HP and they all blame someone else in the chain. So I'm just curious if anyone knows what could cause something like this to happen? Thanks. Ryan

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removing avast5?
by David Mehler 26 Dec '10

26 Dec '10

Hello, Does anyone have a procedure to remove avast5 from a machine? Add/remove programs won't do it due to the fact that the program has a self protection module. Thanks. Dave

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SQL Server 2008 R2 with Jaws 12
by Andrew Hodgson 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

Hi, Anyone here used the above with SQL Server 2008 R2 management studio? I am getting very inconsistent reading of the left-hand pane where we have the master tree view of the databases, management objects etc. I am having to double check all the work I am doing on that side of the screen with the Jaws cursor at the moment, to ensure I hit on the right object... The rest of the system is working fine. Thanks. Andrew.

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SQL Server 2008 R2 with Jaws 12
by Andrew Hodgson 21 Dec '10

21 Dec '10

Hi, Anyone here used the above with SQL Server 2008 R2 management studio? I am getting very inconsistent reading of the left-hand pane where we have the master tree view of the databases, management objects etc. I am having to double check all the work I am doing on that side of the screen with the Jaws cursor at the moment, to ensure I hit on the right object... The rest of the system is working fine. Thanks. Andrew.

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mailman administrator
by David Mehler 19 Dec '10

19 Dec '10

Hello, Do we have any mailman administrators onlist? If so, please contact me privately. I've got a mailman issue and am needing to resolve in a very quick manner. It involves adding a second domain to mailman although sounding easy i've not been able to get this going. I can provide additional details. Some urgency! Thanks. Dave.

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accessible u3 tools for system maintence and repair
by David Mehler 11 Dec '10

11 Dec '10

Hello, I've got a u3 drive that has System Access on it. I'm looking for recommendations for free/low cost preferably free tools for system maintence and repair purposes. I'm assuming that the system I plug the u3 drive into will be infected in some way so am looking for antispyware, antivirus, antimalware programs, as well as a hardware checker type program. Any recommendations or any other suggestions welcome. Thanks. Dave.

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troubleshooting and linux live CD repair and recovery
by David Mehler 03 Dec '10

03 Dec '10

Hello Everyone, I've got a problem and there's some urgency with it. I've got a pc, it's an older dell p4 2.4 ghz I think running xp home. It's no longer booting. It was working fine yesterday afternoon and was powered down. On next power up last night there were no errors on the screen, but the box didn't boot the only thing was a cursor thingy at the top left of the screen. I checked cables, they're all in tight, checked the primary drive I am 50 50 on whether it's getting power it feels like it might be, but i'm not 100% certain. I unplugged it's drive cable and restarted the box it complained immediately that the primary master had been removed. I plugged it back in and said error went away, but no other errors came up indicating that the system detected another issue with the drive. Two reasons i'm very worried about this drive are: 1 I don't think it's been backed up and there's files that are only on this drive, and 2 I don't have another internal hard disk to use with the box. I do have an external ntfs formatted terrabyte drive USB that I can use. Last time I looked there were not any speech accessible windows live CD options that were out there, has this changed? If not, a Linux option would be welcome. I need to get speech then find out if the drive is responding and possibly repair it, a suggestion was made that the mbr could have got corrupted, I do not see how but I don't have any other ideas. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Dave.

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bluetooth devices and pc's
by David Mehler 20 Nov '10

20 Nov '10

Hello, Does anyone use a bluetooth headset with a pc? I've got my machine to recognize the device, it's a motorola headset and xp, it's recognized, and paired. It's authorized to access the bluetooth audio service and i connect it up. The problem is I don't get audio from the device. Any suggestions? Thanks. Dave.

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New email lists for blind computer professionals
by John G. Heim 14 Nov '10

14 Nov '10

I would like to let everyone know that the International Association of Visually Impaired Technologists has two email lists for blind and visually impaired computer professionals. There is a talk list for discussing general and technical issues. To subscribe, send a message to talk-subscribe(a)iavit.org or point a browser to http://lists.iavit.org/listinfo.cgi/talk-iavit.org There is also an announce list for news about the International Association of Visually Impaired Technologis. To subscribe, send a message to announce-subscribe(a)iavit.org or point a browser to http://lists.iavit.org/listinfo.cgi/announce-iavit.org

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anyone use an irc client?
by David Mehler 05 Nov '10

05 Nov '10

Hello, Does anyone use a Windows IRc client? I've got Jfw 10 on my box and am needing to get in to an irc channel. I'm looking for a client that is accessible. Thanks. Dave.

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word 2010 and uploading web pages
by David Mehler 29 Oct '10

29 Oct '10

Hi, Got a question on word 2010, I know it can create web pages, can it also upload them via ftp or sftp preferred? Thanks. Dave.

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FW: Looking for a good managed security and backup tool.
by Andrew Hodgson 26 Oct '10

26 Oct '10

Hi, This was sent to the bounce address. Andrew. ________________________________________ From: Darragh OHeiligh [Darragh.OHeiligh(a)Oireachtas.ie] Sent: 26 October 2010 09:56 To: blind-sysadmins-bounces(a)lists.hodgsonfamily.org Subject: Looking for a good managed security and backup tool. Good morning, I have a few servers and desktops at home that I want to manage centrally for a number of reasons. I had heard a lot about forefront client security lately so thought I'd give that a shot during the weekend. To my surprise, it doesn't support the environment I had in mind for it at all! I had hoped to install it on a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and with a WSUS server hosted on another machine. I gave the system a reasonable spec. It has a 120GB hard drive, 4GB of ram and two processors at 2.3GHZ. It really doesn't like my ideas. It's still complaining that it only has one processor, It says there isn't enough hard disk space, It still looks for a SQL database. Mainly because according to the release notes it only supports SQL 2005 and finally it wants it's own WSUS server. Why would it have this dependency when there's a perfectly fine WSUS server running on the domain? This is a virtual machine running on ESX 4. If forefront isn't the best option what is? I want to learn about a decent server managed security suite. In work I administer Office scan but I'd like to see what else is available. I'm reasonably certain anything is going to be better than office scan. I'm also looking for a decent backup system. In the past I've administered Backup exec and I know that works quite well but again, I'd like to try something different. I have a technet subscription so ideally, I'd really like to know the Microsoft solutions for these problems. Any thought's? Thanks Darragh

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Looking for a decent managed security and backup tool.
by Darragh OHeiligh 26 Oct '10

26 Oct '10

Good morning, I have a few servers and desktops at home that I want to manage centrally for a number of reasons. I had heard a lot about forefront client security lately so thought I'd give that a shot during the weekend. To my surprise, it doesn't support the environment I had in mind for it at all! I had hoped to install it on a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and with a WSUS server hosted on another machine. I gave the system a reasonable spec. It has a 120GB hard drive, 4GB of ram and two processors at 2.3GHZ. It really doesn't like my ideas. It's still complaining that it only has one processor, It says there isn't enough hard disk space, It still looks for a SQL database. Mainly because according to the release notes it only supports SQL 2005 and finally it wants it's own WSUS server. Why would it have this dependency when there's a perfectly fine WSUS server running on the domain? This is a virtual machine running on ESX 4. If forefront isn't the best option what is? I want to learn about a decent server managed security suite. In work I administer Office scan but I'd like to see what else is available. I'm reasonably certain anything is going to be better than office scan. I'm also looking for a decent backup system. In the past I've administered Backup exec and I know that works quite well but again, I'd like to try something different. I have a technet subscription so ideally, I'd really like to know the Microsoft solutions for these problems. Any thought's? Thanks Darragh Regards

1 0

Looking for a decent managed security and backup tool.
by Darragh OHeiligh 26 Oct '10

26 Oct '10

Good morning, I have a few servers and desktops at home that I want to manage centrally for a number of reasons. I had heard a lot about forefront client security lately so thought I'd give that a shot during the weekend. To my surprise, it doesn't support the environment I had in mind for it at all! I had hoped to install it on a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and with a WSUS server hosted on another machine. I gave the system a reasonable spec. It has a 120GB hard drive, 4GB of ram and two processors at 2.3GHZ. It really doesn't like my ideas. It's still complaining that it only has one processor, It says there isn't enough hard disk space, It still looks for a SQL database. Mainly because according to the release notes it only supports SQL 2005 and finally it wants it's own WSUS server. Why would it have this dependency when there's a perfectly fine WSUS server running on the domain? This is a virtual machine running on ESX 4. If forefront isn't the best option what is? I want to learn about a decent server managed security suite. In work I administer Office scan but I'd like to see what else is available. I'm reasonably certain anything is going to be better than office scan. I'm also looking for a decent backup system. In the past I've administered Backup exec and I know that works quite well but again, I'd like to try something different. I have a technet subscription so ideally, I'd really like to know the Microsoft solutions for these problems. Any thought's? Thanks Darragh Regards

1 0

FW: Looking for a good managed security and backup tool.
by Andrew Hodgson 26 Oct '10

26 Oct '10

Hi, This was sent to the bounce address. Andrew. ________________________________________ From: Darragh OHeiligh [Darragh.OHeiligh(a)Oireachtas.ie] Sent: 26 October 2010 09:56 To: blind-sysadmins-bounces(a)lists.hodgsonfamily.org Subject: Looking for a good managed security and backup tool. Good morning, I have a few servers and desktops at home that I want to manage centrally for a number of reasons. I had heard a lot about forefront client security lately so thought I'd give that a shot during the weekend. To my surprise, it doesn't support the environment I had in mind for it at all! I had hoped to install it on a virtual machine running Windows 2008 R2, SQL 2008 R2 and with a WSUS server hosted on another machine. I gave the system a reasonable spec. It has a 120GB hard drive, 4GB of ram and two processors at 2.3GHZ. It really doesn't like my ideas. It's still complaining that it only has one processor, It says there isn't enough hard disk space, It still looks for a SQL database. Mainly because according to the release notes it only supports SQL 2005 and finally it wants it's own WSUS server. Why would it have this dependency when there's a perfectly fine WSUS server running on the domain? This is a virtual machine running on ESX 4. If forefront isn't the best option what is? I want to learn about a decent server managed security suite. In work I administer Office scan but I'd like to see what else is available. I'm reasonably certain anything is going to be better than office scan. I'm also looking for a decent backup system. In the past I've administered Backup exec and I know that works quite well but again, I'd like to try something different. I have a technet subscription so ideally, I'd really like to know the Microsoft solutions for these problems. Any thought's? Thanks Darragh

1 0

xp and bluetooth
by David Mehler 24 Oct '10

24 Oct '10

Hi, I've got a laptop with bluetooth. It's running xp. I'm trying to connect a bluetooth headset to it and the one time I got it to prompt me for a pairing password the dialog was gone in the systray before I could get to it. Has anyone got a way to get xp to get and pair to bluetooth headsets in the time needed? My one headset is made by Jabra never heard of that one, the other is a Motorola hs15. Thanks. Dave.

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