Google Streetview car spied in St Leonards

Saw the google streetview car in St Leonards today. At about 15:00 it was driving down Tower Road from Bohemia Road towards London Road, then a few minutes later driving down St Peters Road, obviously having been round the block.

A 'Rupert'

Had an unusual one with a laptop today. I don't normally do laptop repairs, but this one seemed straightforward if the cause wasn't so bizarre.

The CD mechanism had been pushed down so the tray wouldn't open. This was caused by the user burning a CD and setting the laptop down on the floor whilst it completed.

What the user hadn't bargained on was their dog, Rupert sitting on the tray as it ejected on completion of writing the disc.

Stripping the drive out of the laptop and removing the outer casing revealed a simple repair - one of the runners had been bent and was easily straightened.

A large project and a puzzle

I have volunteered to help the Hastings Music Festival with their information technology systems and have the task of migrating their bespoke Access database to an online version. This is going to be a challenging project, which hopefully will reduce the administrative burden on their army of volunteers.

The other newsworthy post of today is a puzzle. One of my clients runs a linux server with Samba providing file-sharing to their network. Part of the role of this machine is to provide real-time telephone statistics via a plugin I wrote for PHP-Nuke. In order to make this system work, it needs to map a shared windows drive into the linux filesystem. The mount is set to activate at boot in fstab, yet every time the server is downed, the shared drive is not mounted. Any suggestions?

fstab snippet below (username and password blanked out)

//oak/advance /var/www/html/modules/Phone_Stats/raw smbfs password=*****,username=***** 0 0

Bits and Bobs

A few jobs on today, some not even IT related (although you could argue that wiring a scart lead from a video recorder to a tv is technology).

I set up a blog for a racing tips service at http://www.samphire85.info/ and sorted out a few network niggles for one of my bigger clients, including re-training spamassassin so it didn't mis-identify emails from their domain as spam. sa-learn is a useful tool - I'll have to spend a few hours learning the various command line options for future reference.

A synopsis of the options are below;

--ham Learn messages as ham (non-spam)
--spam Learn messages as spam
--forget Forget a message
--rebuild Rebuild the database if needed
--force-expire Force an expiry run, rebuild every time
-f file, --folders=file Read list of files/directories from file
--dir Learn a directory of RFC 822 files
--file Learn a file in RFC 822 format
--mbox Learn a file in mbox format
--showdots Show progress using dots
--no-rebuild Skip building databases after scan
-L, --local Operate locally, no network accesses
-C file, --config-file=file Path to standard configuration dir
-p prefs, --prefs-file=file Set user preferences file
-D, --debug-level Print debugging messages
-V, --version Print version
-h, --help Print usage message

Network Cabling

Spent much of today up to my neck in Cat5 cable, wiring a network for a firm of
Will Writers.

My back is now killing me!! At least all the points tested ok and I was able to hand-over the installation smoothly.

The ongoing saga of my HP Laptop

As readers of this blog may be aware, I bought myself a HP G70-111EM laptop back in January, however had to return it for repair following a burning smell when booting. For many years, I have used only Toshiba laptops, but was convinced by a special offer in my local electronics store.

I received the repaired unit back from HP last Thursday. For two days it was fine, but upon booting it this morning, had exactly the same symptoms as when I sent it in for repair. I telephoned HP and asked whether I could have a replacement unit, as clearly mine was unfit for purpose. I was informed that no, I had to send it in for a further repair. This means that out of ownership for one month, I have had 5 days usage from this machine.

I have sent an email to the CEO of HP in the UK asking him to take some remedial action before I start bringing in big guns such as Trading Standards etc.

Their response will be posted here.

Is there anyone out there?

Just curious - does anyone read this blog?

Networks

I had a call today from a client stating that one of the network printers at a remote site was not responding to the Head Office print server, yet would respond to individual workstations at Head Office. This company runs two networks (one for external support and one for internal usage).

The main routers for the IP Clear circuits used for WAN connectivity provide NAT services to route across the two networks.

Pinging the printer from the main server produced a response, yet pings from the print server were being lost.

The printer had its default route set to a broadband router (which mainly provides DHCP services and redundancy in the WAN link) this router had full connectivity to the internal network and the the print server was set to have its default network as the support network and to utilise the support router.

Changing the default route on the printer to the main router gave immediate connectivity both from Head Office/remote workstations and the Head Office print server. Perhaps I was being a bit too clever for the broadband router when I initially set up the routing tables.

Support for TurboCash

I am now an approved consultant for TurboCash. If you wish advice with accounting software (I am also experienced in Sage and Quickbooks), please do not hesitate to contact me.

Setup/Custom Reporting can all be provided at a reasonable price.

FindaPro Relaunch

I've just uploaded the re-work of the FindaPro directory website. There are still a few tweaks to put in place, but the client wanted the revenue streams up and running as soon as possible. The site has been written using PHP and MySQL and is fully bespoke, featuring postcode searching and a content management system.

Why not pop over there and have a look?

Duplicated MAC addresses

Had a fairly interesting one today, a client complained about the speed of their proxy server running squid.

This machine has two network interfaces and upon investigation it transpired by looking at their router logs that both had identical MAC addresses leading to all sorts of mayhem.

Disabling the second network interface (which was only in the machine as a 'hot spare' resolved the issue.

Odd Jobs

Not much of note for today, setting up a VPN endpoint for a customer using a Draytek router, re-installing some network printers that had been inadvertently deleted and re-mapping a windows share onto a linux machine.

My daughter will be happy

Her Nintendo DS went wrong, when switching on, the displays flashed, then the system powered down. After getting extremely poor service from Nintendo (no response), I researched this on the web and found that it is a common fault. The ribbon connectors to the displays work loose causing the console to shut down.

After ordering the required screwdrivers from ebay, I was ready to follow the dis-assembly instructions at http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=98240 and re-seated the ribbon cables after giving them a clean with a dry cotton ear bud.

Putting it back together it now works!

Spam Email

Big problems with one of my clients, they are receiving thousands of spam emails per hour. Their ISP is not much use, nor is their web-host who is complaining about the volume of traffic.

I have set up a whitelist on their email server to dump everything except for legitimate email addresses, however their host is not able to do the same and is having to forward all of the messages to their ISP for collection.

There are four alternatives;

1. Change the customers domain name. This may be the only course of action to stop the influx, however will involve a fair amount of disruption to the customer.
2. Set up a free address with Google mail for example and point the hosts mx record to Google.
3. Set the mx record with their host to point to their internal mail server. This will most likely saturate their bandwidth and server.
4. Transfer the domain elsewhere, and point the DNS 'A' record (website) back to their original host.

I'm waiting for instructions from my customer and have asked them to make direct contact with the host.

The case of the missing CD Rom

A help desk call arose today, where the CD-Rom drive was detected in the BIOS, but not within Windows XP. Device manager showed error 39.

After attempting removing the device in device manager and re-installing did not work, it was time to dig out the registry hack.


In Registry Editor, expand My Computer, and then expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
Expand SYSTEM, and then expand CurrentControlSet.
Expand Control, and then expand Class.
Under Class, click {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.
In the details pane of Registry Editor, on the right side, click UpperFilters if it exists and delete.
In the details pane of Registry Editor, on the right side, click LowerFilters if it exists and delete.

Re-starting the computer then revealed the CD-Rom. Please note, ensure your registry is backed up prior to editing it.

Apparently this can be caused by removal of some CD burning software

Unravelling Paypal IPN

Back to work on the Findapro website. Just unravelling the Paypal payment notification system in order the backend can be as automated as possible.

Interesting ones from yesterday

The laptop turned out to have a large number of trojans on it, which were detected after booting from my ultimate boot disk. Whilst I had the machine booted, I backed up the users documents to a removable USB drive, then re-formatted the hard drive and re-installed XP just to be on the safe side.

No news on the email case.

A couple of interesting ones

The first is a laptop that the user reports has a virus, it keeps re-booting when CTRL-ALT-DEL is pressed to log in. The user states this happens in both safe mode and normal and thinks it is a virus. I'm not so sure - I'm going in tomorrow to carry out a data recovery and will post back the actual cause.

The second is a user complaining about not receiving emails. I have asked that he gets the senders to send me their bounce messages so I can investigate further. There is no filtering on the server other than to flag spam/viruses.

I'll keep you all posted.

HP Technical Support

Whilst on a client site on Monday, I plugged my new HP laptop in to carry out some checks and found that some of the smoke that makes it work escaped.

Not a major problem thinks I, I'll log it with their technical support when I get back to my office...

The error report was raised fairly easily, usual sort of stuff...purchase date, serial number etc. I then sat back to await their response.

Within an hour an email had arrived advising me to fill out a questionaire (serial number, date of purchase etc). All of these details were conveniently attached to the bottom of their email. This was filled out and sent back.

Approximately two hours later a subsequent email was received advising me that they needed to escalate my call and could I provide some details (serial number, date of purchase etc). Is this starting to get familiar?

I finally received a phone call from them advising that a courier would collect my laptop for repair today.

I'm not sure about you, but I would have expected a company like Hewlett Packard to have a more joined-up support system.

Free telephone support

Due to abuse of my free telephone support by one of my customers, I have had to take the regrettable decision to cease providing free telephone support with effect from the end of next month (February).

Customers who have a support contract will still enjoy the free telephone/remote support, but all others will have to pay my published fee for off-site support of £25.00 per hour.