Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

April 26, 2007

Status update on my computer issues and my workarounds

Filed under: Computer Tips,My Life — Suramya @ 12:44 PM

As I had posted earlier my laptop was having issues after I got the fan fixed on the system. Now it keeps shutting down randomly anywhere from a min to 15 mins after startup. I have given it to a shop for repair and I am supposed to get it back tomorrow. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will get fixed.

My Dad’s laptop is still having the same issues as earlier (Windows install is messed up on it, Cut and paste doesn’t work. Apps refuse to start etc) but I won’t be messing with it till I get my laptop back. Since the issues got really annoying I started remote desktoping into my desktop from the laptop to work and thats been working really well. Unfortunately the XP on the laptop has gotten into such a state in the past two days that I can’t use rdp on it either. So I decided to avoid windows alltogether and booted off a Knoppix Live Linux CD on the laptop and am using rdesktop on it to access the server (My desktop). So far its working great.

I even got sound working on RDP. I can now play music on the desktop and listen to it on the laptop via RDP. Here’s the command I used to get it working:

rdesktop -r sound -z -x l -f -a 16 192.168.15.10

where:

-r sound:[local|off|remote]
Redirects sound generated on the server to the client. “remote” only has any effect when you connect to the console with the -0 option. (Requires Windows XP or newer).

-z
Enable compression of the RDP datastream.

-x
Changes default bandwidth performance behaviour for RDP5. By default only theming is enabled, and all other options are disabled (corresponding to modem (56 Kbps)). Setting experience to b[roadband] enables menu animations and full window dragging. Setting experience to l[an] will also enable the desktop wallpaper. Setting experience to m[odem] disables all (including themes). Experience can also be a hexidecimal number containing the flags.

-f
Enable fullscreen mode. This overrides the window manager and causes the rdesktop window to fully cover the current screen. Fullscreen mode can be toggled at any time using Ctrl-Alt-Enter.

-a
Sets the colour depth for the connection (8, 15, 16 or 24). More than 8 bpp are only supported when connecting to Windows XP (up to 16 bpp) or newer. Note that the colour depth may also be limited by the server configuration.

I also installed EXT2IFS on the server so that I can get access to my ext3 partitions from windows. This program provides Windows NT4.0/2000/XP/2003 with full access to Linux Ext2/Ext3 volumes by allocating drive letters to the volumes. This means all software installed on the system can access the partitions. Its really cool. Haven’t hit any issues with it so far…

So after installing all this stuff I can work without any major issues. But I still want my laptop back.

Well this is all for now. Hopefully I will get my system back soon.

– Suramya

December 29, 2006

Sending an e-mail to users whose password is about to expire

Filed under: Computer Tips,Knowledgebase — Suramya @ 4:15 PM

If you have users that don’t login to a windows system or Outlook Web access and just use POP/IMAP to download emails then you must be used to having these people call in to have their passwords reset when their passwords expire which can be a pain.

The following script sends out an email to Exchange users when their passwords are about to expire so that they can login to change their password and not bother you.

Download the script from here: Sending an e-mail to users whose password is about to expire

Will post the script to do the same on Unix/Linux systems later.

Thanks,
Suramya

PS: I DIDN’T WRITE THE SCRIPT SO IF IT DESTROYS YOUR SYSTEM DON’T BLAME ME.

November 3, 2006

Find out when Windows XP box was rebooted/shutdown

Filed under: Computer Tips — Suramya @ 12:02 PM

The event manager in Windows XP allows you to find out when a system was rebooted or shut down. To run the Event Viewer follow these steps:

1. Click on Start -> Control Panel
2. Double click on the Administrative Tools
3. Click on System in the left pane. Resize the window so you can see the Event column in the right-hand pane.

Once you have the window open look for an entry of 6009 in the Event column. This shows when the PC was shut down or restarted. A start-up will be logged by a number of events, mostly with the code 7035, 7036 and 26, corresponding to various services and checks.

Source: Check a computer’s event history

– Suramya

October 18, 2006

How I broke Windows XP Genuine Advantage test and then fixed it

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Tips,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:50 PM

A couple of days ago I had a slight problem with my internet connection, basically what was happening was that I couldn’t access google.com and associated sites (Orkut, gmail etc) but I could access everything else with issues so I spoke to a Comcast representative and she told me to run the following command on my Windows XP laptop (I told her I was using XP because I didn’t want to get into an argument with her that the problem was because I was using Linux.):

regsvr32 softpub.dll

I ran the command and it didn’t fix the issue. So I decided to un-register the dll using the following command:

regsvr32 /u softpub.dll

as I wasn’t sure what this dll did and didn’t want to register random stuff on my system. I ran the command and everything was fine for a couple of days, I could browse the net without issues and everything seemed to work.

Then all of a sudden after a couple of days I get an error message stating that my version of windows could not be validated so I must be running a pirated version of XP. The funny part was that I had installed WGA two months ago on the laptop and it had validated the license and the license is valid. So I went to the Windows update site and tried to validate my copy but ActiveX refused to run. It told me to try a manual check where it downloaded the ActiveX and then tried to run it but that also failed… Finally I tried a check using an executable I downloaded but that validated my license as valid. Now I was confused and tried to force a validation test but every time the system would refuse to run ActiveX and the validation would fail.

After beating my head on the issue for a little while I finally remembered the dll that I had unregistered a while ago so I went through my command history and found the command to re-register it and went ahead and registered it. Then I had to reboot the box and when it came back up I was finally able to run the online validation tool which verified my version of windows was valid. After it verified it I had to reboot again and that fixed the issue.

Moral of the story: If you don’t know what a dll does then don’t uninstall it.
Second Moral of the story: Its a good habit to keep a log of all the commands you run, and any changes you make to the system. Having this will save you a lot of time an energy when something gets messed up.

This is all for now, will post more about my experiments with computers and the messes I caused later.

– Suramya

July 3, 2006

How to photograph Fireworks

Filed under: Computer Tips,Interesting Sites,Knowledgebase,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:32 AM

As some of you probably know I love taking photos but I have always had trouble capturing fireworks, they just don’t come out nicely for me 🙁

The following article’s have some awesome tips on how to photograph fireworks so now that I know the secret you can expect some nice pics of fireworks on my site in the near future 🙂

For Digital Cameras: New York Institute of Photography – Tips on Fireworks Digital Photography

For Regular Cameras: How to Photograph Fireworks

Thanks,
Suramya

March 11, 2006

Tools to check folder ACL’s in Windows

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:30 PM

Tools to use that show “ALL” of the the ACL’s permissions that are on these network folders:

I haven’t tried any of these tools yet so I can’t vouch for them. However these were recomended by smart people that post to the Security Basics @SecurityFocus Mailing list so I am sure that they work ;).

Thanks,
Suramya

November 14, 2005

How to fix your Monitor refresh rate in Debian

Filed under: Computer Tips,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 12:00 AM

The easiest way I have found is to use the ‘gtf’ command. The syntax of the command is:

gtf Horizontal Vertical RefreshRate

so if you wanted a screen resolution of 1024×768 with a 100 hz refresh rate the command would be:

gtf 1024 768 100

and the command will show you a line something like this:

# 1024×768 @ 100.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 81.40 kHz; pclk: 113.31 MHz
Modeline “1024×768_100.00″ 113.31 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 -HSync +Vsync

Now you need to copy this to the monitor section of the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

so that it would look something like:

Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Generic Monitor”
Option “DPMS”

# 1024×768 @ 100.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 81.40 kHz; pclk: 113.31 MHz
Modeline “1024×768_100.00″ 113.31 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 -HSync +Vsync

EndSection

Save the changes and restart the xserver for the changes to take effect.

Hope this helps.

– Suramya

October 28, 2005

Linux Emergency Room

Filed under: Computer Tips,Linux/Unix Related,Tutorials — Suramya @ 12:41 AM

Really good article on how to create and use Emergency recovery tools to recover a crashed Linux system.

Complete Article:
The Linux Emergency Room

– Suramya

September 21, 2005

How to Investigate Intermittent Problems

Filed under: Computer Tips,News/Articles,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:14 PM

A really really good post by James Bach on how to investigate Intermittent Problems. Any person who does product testing should read this. Even developers/programmers need to read this as this will make it easier to find and fix bugs.

Brief extract from this post:

Some Principles of Intermittent Problems:

  • Be comforted: the cause is probably not evil spirits.
  • If it happened once, it will probably happen again
  • If a bug goes away without being fixed, it probably didn’t go away for good.
  • Be wary of any fix made to an intermittent bug. By definition, a fixed bug and an unfixed intermittent bug are indistinguishable over some period of time and/or input space.

…
…

Some General Suggestions for Investigating Intermittent Problems:

  • Recheck your most basic assumptions: are you using the computer you think you are using? are you testing what you think you are testing? are you observing what you think you are observing?
  • Eyewitness reports leave out a lot of potentially vital information. So listen, but DO NOT BECOME ATTACHED to the claims people make.
  • If someone tells you what the problem can’t possibly be, consider putting extra attention into those possibilities.

Original Post:
How to Investigate Intermittent Problems

– Suramya

August 16, 2005

SIP Tutorial

Filed under: Computer Tips,Funny News — Suramya @ 11:04 PM

Was doing some research on SIP and was looking for SIP tutorials and found the following link:

HotSip

This is a hillarious explanation on how SIP works. Check it out.

– Suramya

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