Device Manager Empty

This has happened to me a number of times now. All of a sudden, plug and play hardware stops working and when you go into the device manager it all appears blank. Microsoft KB311504 suggests that this is caused by the Plug and Play service being stopped but this was not my problem.

My problem was that the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum registry key was lacking permissions. Use REGEDT32 (Windows 2000) or REGEDIT (Windows XP) to add the System account with full control and Everyone with read to make this work again.

AV Filtering mail with Evolution

This site has a nice script to run each incoming mail through ClamAV and to display a warning and move it to a quarentine folder if it contains a virus.
Thanks to Fred Blaise.

XGL on Dell Inspiron 5100 with SUSE 10.1

This documents my attempt to install XGL on my Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop using Suse 10.1. I first tested it with the Kororaa Xgl Live CD so I knew that it would work. I had some problems with the login screen (seen this reported elsewhere - but I don't have it with SUSE 10.1) but overall it worked well. The following procedure works for me!
First a bit on hardware:

• Dell Inspiron 5100
• Radeon 7500 Mobility with 32 MB Video RAM
• Using Xorg "radeon" driver with 3d dri enabled

I mainly followed the procedure on Opensuse.org here.

Download the following RPMs from Suse factory i586:

• compiz
• xgl
• libwnck

Download the following RPM from Suse factory noarch:

• xgl-hardware-list

Install the RPMs. I had a dependency issue when I tried this:

• error: Failed dependencies: libpng12.so.0(PNG12_0) is needed by compiz-cvs_060621-2.i586
• I used --nodeps and it installed with no apparent side ill effects. There is a libpng12.so.0 in /usr/lib provided from libpng-1.2.8-17 so I am not sure why I got the error.

Make sure that you have enabled 3d acceleration from YaST:
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Activate the desktop effects from the Gnome Control centre:
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It didn't work for me first time because it said 3D acceleration enabled although it was. I saw this:
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When I checked the status with glxinfo I got this so I know it's working:

• name of display: :0.0
• display: :0 screen: 0
• direct rendering: Yes

After a bit of research I found the XGL control applet sometimes does not identify that 3d acceleration is enabled and that if you hold shift and double click on “3D Acceleration: Disabled” then you can force it to on:
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You can now click on “Enable Desktop Effects” and you now have XGL!
The only problems I have are:

• I occasionally get lines or corrupted pixels on screen. A quick spin of the cube (CTRL+ALT+ARROW) sorts these out quickly.
• Windows have pink lines around them after restoring from hibernation. I have to restart the X server to sort these out.
• The display does not handle full screen dvd video very well. Either use a hardware player (!) or turn of desktop effects to be able to play video at any decent speed.

VMware on Suse 10.1

I've tried using CrossOffice to run MS Office applications on Linux but you really can't beat VMWare with an XP guest machine to run Outlook. That is unless you can't get VMWare to run. Thanks to Nilesh Bansal, now I can. 

SUSE 10.1 Wireless on Dell Inspiron 5100

As always I had to use ndiswrapper to get my wireless working but this time was the easiest ever. I followed the following proceedure:

1. Downloaded the latest drivers for my minipci from here. Bear in mind that I am in the UK so these are the non US/Japan drivers. Click here if you want the US or Japanese drivers. (If you don't want to download the 48MB packages you can find the UK bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys as a download here.)
2. Used Yast to install ndiswrapper. It seems that Novell have split the drivers into tools&docs in one package and kernel modules in another. I selected ndiswrapper-1.10-19 in Yast and it auto selected ndiswrapper-kmp-default-1.10_2.6.16.13_4-19 for my Kernel.
3. Followed the instructions I found in /usr/share/doc/packages/ndiswrapper/README.SUSE. (Copy here.)
4. The only thing that didn't work was the WEP key instructions. Because I elected to use the new user mode network control I had to use the Network applet to join the wireless network.
   (Image lost due to Blog move)

Moving from Vista to Suse 10.1

With my laptop failing and having to send it back to Dell for repair it seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the latest beta of Vista (beta 2). Unfortuneatelty my graphics card (Mobility Radeon 7500) didn't let me use Aero and I had quite a few problems with beta 2:

• Mouse clicks sometimes not registered on desktop (same with default detected device and downloaded synaptics driver)
• Some 700MB out of 1GB of memory in use when just on desktop (!)
• Slow response

So, I decided to move back to Suse only this time I will try 10.1 with XGL so watch this space! I know XGL will work because I tried the Kororaa XGL Live CD v0.2.

Playing with Exchange 12

I had my first look at Exchange 12 yesterday and had huge problems getting it to install. You have to have MMC 3.0 installed but even though it was installed, the install claimed it wasn't.

I found the answer on the Exchange EHLO blog.

Create this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\MMC30Core

Blocking hackers access to SSH

Since putting a Suse 10 box on the internet and allowing SSH through the firewall we have been getting attempts like this on a regular basis:

May 27 09:14:20 nprobe sshd[689]: Did not receive identification string from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:40 nprobe sshd[816]: Invalid user aaa from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:43 nprobe sshd[818]: Invalid user aaa from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:46 nprobe sshd[820]: Invalid user aaa from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:49 nprobe sshd[822]: Invalid user aaaudio from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:52 nprobe sshd[824]: Invalid user aaaudio from 140.136.158.182
May 27 09:20:55 nprobe sshd[826]: Invalid user aaaudio from 140.136.158.182

Found a cool script on the Novell cool solutions web site that scans the system logfile and then blocks access from the systems that have been trying to gain access with invalid user names.

I followed the reccomendation to modify the script for Suse 10 and this worked for me:

#!/bin/bash
LAST_IP=0.0.0.0
COUNT=1

# Set MAXCOUNT to the maximum failures allowed before blacklisting
MAXCOUNT=5

#
# The three lines below put the leading lines in /etc/hosts.allow
# Note: This script overwrites the entire /etc/hosts.allow file.
#

echo '
# /etc/hosts.deny
# See "man tcpd" and "man 5 hosts_access" as well as /etc/hosts.allow
# for a detailed description.
http-rman : ALL EXCEPT LOCAL' > /etc/hosts.deny

#
# Scan the /var/log/messages file for failed login attempts via ssh.
# Parse out the IP address, and count the failure occurances from that IP
# If the IP fails more than 5 times - deny further access
#

for IP in `/bin/grep sshd /var/log/messages|/bin/grep "Invalid user"|/bin/sed 's/^.*from //'` 0.0.0.0; do
if [ ${LAST_IP} == ${IP} ]; then
let COUNT=${COUNT}+1
else
if [ ${COUNT} -ge ${MAXCOUNT} ]; then
echo "ALL: ${LAST_IP}/32" >> /etc/hosts.deny
fi
LAST_IP=${IP}
COUNT=1
fi
done

PC line PCL-RP100 Rumble Game Pad

I always like to install the latest drivers but when buying OEM hardware it proves difficult to track down the drivers.

For this particular device it proved to be a company called Ruling Technologies.
I am also informed by Glen that:

http://www.rockfire.com.tw/

Is the manufacturer, drivers are by Padix (same company)
Work fine with XP but not with Vista

Enjoy :-)

Blog Offline

Ooops. Blog has been offline for a couple of days because I had a server issue. Seems one of my recurring SQL jobs didn't finish within 24 hours and got it's knickers in a right old twist. Disk utilisation was through the roof and I stopped IIS services as a troubleshooting step. Problem was, I forgot to restart them!

Strange thing with the SQL job was I restared SQL server and the job (SMTP Log Trim) ran manually fine..... Hmmmm....

Updating the Java plugin in Firefox

 I was trying to use Logmein from my Suse 10 Linux laptop but the Java viewer kept crashing. Despite installing JVM 1.5 the plugin was still showing v1.4.2. I eventually found the plugin directory was /usr/lib/firefox/plugins and had to create a link from here to replace the Java v1.4.2 one.

The command I used was:
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_06/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

The Mozilla plugin directory is /opt/mozilla/lib/plugins so adjust accordingly.

The Java verifier now shows both browsers using JRE 1.5.0_06 and Logmein works!

OES and Imanager not working

Playing with OES and could not get iManager working. Turns out you have to disable IPv6.

Novell TID 10098152 tells you how:

The following steps should be followed to disable IPV6 on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9:
1- Modify /etc/modprobe.conf.local by adding the following:
#
# please add local extensions to this file
#
install ipv6 /bin/false
2- reboot

*** In some circumstances, it is also necessary to modify the /etc/modprobe.conf and change the following:

alias net-pf-10 ipv6
to
alias net-pf-10 off

ClustrMaps Beta

Just added ClustrMaps Beta to the blog - Just to get an idea where hits are coming from.

Thanks to Dugie for the idea.

How to remove ADC-GLOBAL-NAMES attribute

Had a problem with a mixed Exchange 5.5/2003 system where some Exchange 5.5 directory entries were refusing to synch into the Active Directory. Turns out the 5.5 directory entries were pointing to non-existent AD entries. I had to remove the ADC-GLOBAL-NAMES attributes by running Exchange 5.5 Administrator in raw mode (c:\exchsrvr\bin\admin.exe /r). Having done this, a full sync of the ADC got everything working again.

More details in Micrsoft support article 319474.

Unable to install Microsoft .Net 2.0 Framework

I've had a Windows update refuse to install on a couple of machines which are used for software testing. Turns out these machines had Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 beta1 and Visual J# Redistributable beta1 installed.

Machine #1 was easy, I just went to add/remove programs and removed the beta stuff but machine #2 did not show the beta software to remove.

I found a Microsoft KB article Q320112 but I am always squeamish about manually deleting stuff from the registry so I did it a slightly different way.

Firstly I downloaded beta1 of .Net 2.0 and J# packages from here and here.

Then I used the installer cache to uninstall J#

• Start > Run > Installer
• Right Click Date Modified
• Select Comments
• Click Comments
• Scroll down to find Visual J# Beta
• Right click and uninstall

Then I installed it from the downloaded file

Then I uninstalled it from add/remove programs.

Repeat for Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 beta1.

Finally I manually installed Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 from here.

CS Gallery Upload Manager Added

I've added the rather awesome CS Gallery Upload Manager to this CS 1.1 based site. It allows bulk photo uploads from Windows into CS.

You can find CHiwi's Blog here.

CS 1.1 Gallery Service Extension is here.

CS Gallery Upload Manager (Works with CS 2.0 and 1.1 with above extenstion) can be found here.

Windows Server 2003 Access-based Enumeration

Ever wanted to hide the files and folders that a user did not have access too (just like them old NetWare days?), well now you can with Windows Server 2003 Access-based Enumeration.

Thanks to Brian McCann for this one.

Download the Admin tool.
Download the readme here.

Citrix ICA Web Client

This client needs either local administrator or power users rights to run correctly on the workstation. To allow normal users to run it, edit the permissions on this registry key:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSLicensing - Users - Full control

You could this either manually or through group policy.

Installing Windows Sharepoint Services v2 to use SQL Server

You need to do two things:

1. Extract files to temp directory:
stsv2 /c /t:c:\temp\wssv2

2. Install to use external SQL:
c:\temp\wssv2\setupsts remotesql=true

Upgraded to CS v1.1

I've upgraded the Server to CS v1.1.

It wasn't without problems - The main one was that the tables aspnet_Membership, aspnet_Users and cs_Userprofile did not agree with each other before the upgrade.

Thanks to Derek Larkin for the answer! He also has a blog here.