Technote

After waiting over a month since I saw it announced at Google IO back in May, I finally have the final build of Froyo (Frozen Yogurt) running on my AT&T Nexus One.

It's great!

All of the promised improvements are there and it really seems faster...

The FINAL, FINAL, FINAL solution. (No, we didn't switch to Exchange.)

I have several other articles on this site talking about Zimbra not working at a client's home network, but working fine at the office and other locations.

The problem was that the compressed javascript files would not download and the Advanced Web Client would not work. It stalled during download and hitting refresh multiple times MIGHT get it to almost work (the code for handling folders would almost never load). If we took the computer into the office, it worked fine. If we took it home, it worked fine. If we cleared the cache, we were back to having the problem.

Sometimes Firefox would work, but IE almost never would...

I had a client report a problem using Outlook 2007 when trying to send email to a group list. The error was "An unexpected error has occurred" (what, as opposed to an expected error?) when email was sent and Outlook wouldn't expand the list when the + was clicked in the "To:" box.

The problem turned out to be pretty simple...

Strange Dell-ness!

I had worked on a client's Dell Vostro tower computer and everything was fine when I dropped it off. Later, when he tried to hook it back up and getting running, all it would do is power up, turn the fan on and off, power down, and repeat.

The thing that cleared everything was to unplug everything (sometimes a system will to boot from a camera drive or the SD card on a printer, so try unplugging those, first) including the power cord. Then press and hold the power button for a full 60 seconds.

Hook up the power cord and power the system up (don't hook up anything else!). Once you see the hard drive light flashing and it appears to be booting up, go ahead and hook up the monitor cable. If that looks good, go ahead and hook everything else and you should be fine.

Weird. This tip was provided to me by Dell tech support awhile ago, but I didn't document it. Since this is the second time it's happened, I thought I better put the tip where I could find it.

When upgrading Zimbra, one of the first things it does is check your hosts file for two entries. It needs a valid localhost entry (the mysql setup is sensitive about this) and it needs a valid host FQDN entry for the server itself.

It wants to see something like this:

192.168.12.5   mail.xxxxxxxxxxx.com mail
127.0.0.1      localhost.localdomain localhost

The upgrade script kept complaining that my hosts file was incorrect, but those two entries where there and they looked fine.

Here's the error (sic):

 ERROR: Installation can not proceeed.
  Please fix your /etc/hosts file

So...

I had a client that had a new Windows Server 2008 R2 server shutdown spontaneously.

In reviewing the logs, I saw where the system went into shutdown, but I couldn't tell why. All I had to go on was a 0x500ff reason code.

Resources I found to help diagnosis this issue included:

Systems Shutting Down with 0x500ff:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2001061

Shutdown codes:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376885(VS.85).aspx

None of these were really helpful, though, because the problem was kind of my fault. You see, we had installed the server, but it wasn't in its final secured location. It was sitting in an empty office. An empty unlocked office.

When some kids came in to the facility to hang out and wanted to use a computer, they tried a few times to log in, couldn't, and powered the server down, since it wasn't "working".

Oops. Looks like I have to get the server physically secured sooner, rather than later.

If you've purchased an external drive lately, Western Digital has been "helpful" by taking up .5 gb of space on your drive with their software. I really dislike the software as it just doesn't back things up the way I want to do it. I have Carbonite for offline backup, I just want to be able to image my system so that I can, theoretically anyway, recover more quickly if I have a hard drive failure.

I don't want a snail's paced backup of the files WD thinks I want. I want an IMAGE!

So, I wanted to get rid of the fake CD that keeps showing up and using up one of my drive letters...

So I setup a new server for a client and somehow named the server with the Dell standard naming convention of D followed by the Service Tag. This is what I use for workstations, but not such a good idea for a server as I like to have what they do be part of the name. Often something clever like SERVER1.

Anyway, I had already configured my RDP licenses and set that all up under the old name, so I knew my licensing was all set. I renamed the server without a problem, but then I kept getting notified that I only had x days and my RDP licenses would stop working.

This is the problem with installing Windows Server stuff when you are provided with a friendly Wizard that steps you through everything. All the critical stuff gets set for you, but heaven help you when you want to find the place to change it...

A lot of netbooks are fast enough to run Office 2003 without a problem, but if you are installing Office 2003 with the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, the "Microsoft Software License Terms" will show up and be too big to be able to see the form elements you need to click on to be able to continue...

I think I've found a bug in the Acronis restore system. My problem was that whenever I tried to restore a TIB file (image of my Dell D620 laptop), Acronis restore would get to 99% and fail. Repeatedly. Like 5 times. Each attempt taking almost 2 hours. Man, that's frustrating.

When I was doing the autopsy and checking out what was wrong, the logs reported errors on the drive, but only at the last second when the volume was getting finished up.

I also noticed that the size of the FAT16 volume created for the Dell utilities and the NTFS volume created for Windows was slightly different from my live system. Both drives were 320GB 2.5" SATA drives, but the attempted restored volumes where different.

For instance, my FAT16 on my original drive was 376MB and the FAT16 on my failed image drive was 384MB. The size of my original NTFS volume was 297.72 and the size of my failed volume was 297.71.