Computer Hardware, Microsoft, Troubleshooting

Unmountable_boot_volume

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Usually when you receive this error it means your HD is going bad. If your computer keeps rebooting and then asks to start in safe mode, that’s a good sign. Keep hitting the usual F8 button at startup to deselect the option of reboot on system failure. We don’t like that option anyway. Endless loops of reboots help no one.

If then on the giant blue screen of death you see this message:
“STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”, then try this simple repair step before calling it a day.

1.) Put in your Windows XP CD
2.) Boot off your Windows XP CD (usually hit F12 to bring up the boot menu)
3.) When the Welcome to Setup screen appears, press the “R” key to start the recovery console
4.) If you’re prompted, enter the administrator password (on Home edition it’s usually blank)
5.) At the command prompt type “chkdsk /r” and press enter – this will find and repair most issues found
6.) After Checkdisk has finished running, you can type “exit” and hit enter to reboot the machine

Microsoft, Troubleshooting

Adobe Flash Crashes IE

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I had a fellow employee at my work complain that every now and then his IE would crash. After several failed attempts to figure out when this was happening (and why), he finally told me it was an error with Flash. The error is as follows:
Flash Error

So I was looking around trying to figure out why this was happening. I know – the easiest way to find out how to stop it would be to have the fellow employee let me know what site he was at when it was happening. But I digress, here’s how I “fixed” it.

1.) Go to \windows\system32\macromed\flash\
2.) Duplicate flash9b.ocx (Copy/Paste)
3.) Rename the file flash9b.ocx to flash9b.ocx.old
4.) Rename the file Copy of flash9b.ocx to flash9b.ocx
5.) Duplicate flash9b.ocx (Copy/Paste)
6.) Rename flash.ocx to flash.ocx.old
7.) Rename the file Copy of flash9b.ocx to flash.ocx
8.) Duplicate flash9b.ocx (Copy/Paste)
9.) Rename the file Copy of flash9b.ocx to flash9.ocx

You will need to close out of all active IE windows to make the changes stick. You may also need to reboot just to be sure. This seems to only affect flash 9b.ocx files when the system also has ATI video drivers.

Linux

Eggdrop Bot Installation on Ubuntu

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Since I’m being lazy this post is mostly for me. Here’s a good starting place:
Egghelp.org
After you’ve downloaded the tar.gz file, uploaded it to your server, and pretty much gone to ./configure, then come back here.

If you can go to ./configure and everything runs peachy, you’re a better system setup guy than I am. Otherwise Eggdrop requires TCL to be installed and compiled (you should get some sort of compiler error saying it can’t create executables if not installed).

apt-get install gcc
apt-get install tcl8.4
apt-get install tcl8.4-dev

That’s it. Go and run that ./configure again.

Unless you’re on Ubuntu 14.04…
./configure --with-tclinc=/usr/include/tcl8.6/tcl.h --with-tcllib=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtcl8.6.so

Linux

Apt-Get not apt-getting

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I had just finished installing Ubuntu 7.10 on a virtual machine. This virtual machine had no active connection to the internet (which is why this actually happened).

After install, I tried to run the software update service. It said that there were no updates to install. I tried to apt-get install ssh and that failed too. So I tried apt-get update. No updates. Hmmm.

It turns out that if there is no active connection, Ubuntu will comment out all the sources for software in the sources.list file. You can find it here:
cd /etc/apt
nano sources.list
uncomment some of the repositories and save the file
apt-get update

Microsoft, Troubleshooting

Windows Updates

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Windows updates were failing to install on a computer. Here’s the steps I did to correct the issue:

1.) Reboot. This didn’t do anything but waste 4 minutes of time.
2.) Erase C:\WINDOWS\system32\SoftwareDistribution folder. Redownloaded Update Files but didn’t help.
3.) Download the Windows WGA and try to install. Failed on installation.
4.) Start off the Windows Disk and do a repair. Ended up in the same boat as before, but the computer starts up quicker now.
5.) Re-Register DLL files for windows update. This ended up working.

How to register DLL files:
1.) Open the command line (Start >> Run >> CMD)
2.) regsvr32 wuapi.dll, regsrv32 wuaueng.dll, regsrv32 wuaueng1.dll, regsrv32 wucltui.dll, regsrv32 wups.dll, regsrv32 wups2.dll, regsvr32 wuweb.dll
3.) Reopen the Windows Update window and try to update again

[edit: I had “regsrv32” instead of “regsvr32”. This has been fixed.]

Microsoft

Exchange 2007 IMAP Errors

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At the office, we run MAIA MailGuard for our SPAM filter front end, and Exchange 2007 for our End-User mail server. It’s a great combination of free software and Microsoft software.

Maia worked great with Exchange 2003 because of the default “on” setting Exchange had for IMAP services. This default is no longer the case in 2007 – it’s off unless you specify otherwise. Obviously I had to get this working, otherwise no one could log into their SPAM filter page and check things out. Even I, the administrator, could not log into the Maia page. Harsh.

Maia uses IMAP to authenticate with the Exchange server. IMAP has to be turned on in order for authentication to work (I’m hearing reports that SP1 of Exchange2007 has a GUI for these settings, but here’s how I did it anyway):
1.) Open up the PowerShell on your exchange server
2.) Start-Service -Name msexchangeimap4
3.) Set-Service msexchangeimap4 -StartupType automatic
4.) Set-imapsettings -LoginType PlainTextLogin
5.) Restart the Microsoft IMAP Service

Basically this turns the IMAP protocol on, then sets the service to automatically start on bootup, and then changes the IMAP settings to allow unencrypted (non-TLS and non-SSL) passwords. IMAP service MUST BE restarted for this to work. I guess you could also reboot the server, but why do that if you don’t have to? You can change the “IMAP” to “POP” for any of these commands. Also, other IMAP settings include “PlainTextAuthentication” which turns off TLS but still requires a Secure Client or “SecureLogin” which is the default TLS and SSL authentication. And if you’re learning without reading the manual (like me), Set and Get commands can be interchanged for the most part.

Microsoft, Networking

Enable Remote Desktop Remotely

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I find it sometimes necessary to enable remote desktop (RDP) after a machine has left the building. As long as the machine is VPN’d in or somehow connected to the network, I can fire up a couple commands, few clicks, a reboot, and then I’m free and clear.

Open RegEdit (start >> run >> regedit)
Navigate to: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server
Change the DWORD fDenyTSConnection to 0 (not 1)
Reboot the machine (shutdown -m \\computername -r -f -t 20)

EDIT:
I forgot to add an important step, namely the step after opening regedit. You must File >> Connect Network Registry, and then type in the name of the computer. THEN you can navigate to the HKLM.

Ramblings Of An IT Person