You’re awesome.

Love,

Able-X

Learn something new everyday.  I have a 5g Ipod Video 30GB, and disk use is NOT enabled, and it auto syncs playlists.  In this configuration it generally syncs when i plug it in, then un mounts itself and I get the happy “Ok To Disconnect” message.  Well today, it wouldn’t get out of “Do Not Disconnect”.

Turns out the issue was the ipod itself.  Hold down ‘Menu’ and the center button to reset the ipod, then after it restarts put it in the dock and it should start behaving normally!

Happy ipodding

Another odd one.  A user was having problems syncing his my docs, and kept receiving a strange error that “The Parameter Is Incorrect”. Well, here’s what I did to fix it:

Go to the offline files tab in windows explorer, hold down  ctrl+shift at the same time that you click the “Delete Files…” button. I know it’s kind of an unusual method for Windows but it does seem to solve the problem most times. It should pop up with a warning message and Yes or No buttons. Click Yes, reboot, and resync and all should be well.

If not, try the following (although I can’t say that I’ve tried it myself):

1. Disable Offline Files with  csccmd.exe /disable

3. Reboot into Safe Mode and delete all content under %SystemRoot%\CSC

4. Reboot again and re-enable Offline Files.

After this is done, try the Ctrl+Shift+click method again.

Also, be aware that the offline file database has a path name limitation. I don’t know what it is - but if your path\file name is too long it will corrupt the database and cause the “The Parameter is Incorrect” error.
Make sure that your file and folder names are kept reasonable. I also recommend not using special characters for any folder or file names.

Hope it helps!

So a user got a new laptop, and everything seemed ok.  Until he went to send an email and get an address from his contacts list.  IT WAS MISSING.  So, after a bit of google-fu, i was led to the following solution which worked like champ:

Step 1: Install the Outlook Address Book service

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287563/

To do this, follow these steps, as appropriate for the version of Outlook that you are running.
Microsoft Outlook 2002 and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003

1.    On the Tools menu, click E-mail Accounts.
2.    Click to select View or change existing directories or address books, and then click Next.
3.    If your Outlook Address Book is listed, click Cancel, and then go to the steps in the “How to Mark Your Contact Folder for Use with Your Address Book” section.
4.    If your Outlook Address Book is not listed, click Add.
5.    Click to select Additional Address Books, and then click Next.
6.    Click to select Outlook Address Book, and then click Next.
7.    Click OK when you receive the prompt that the address book you added will not start until you click Exit from the File menu.
8.    Click Finish.
9.    Click Exit from the File menu, and then restart Outlook.

My google-fu is strong.

Today was full of suck, with many users being very needy, and day 2 of no long distance in the office, so I spent all day on the phone with vendors.  Oh, and one of our sites backups hadn’t worked properly since last july.  And some shadow copies were disappearing faster than I could recover data from them.
And I found Limewire on a users machine who is always bitching about how her compy doesn’t work.
And a hard drive died.  So yeah, suck ass.

So I’m sitting here thinking “hmm, I think I’ll go play portal on my PC”.  So I meander my way over to it, and notice the lights are on, but no one is home.  Specificially, the PC lights are on, and the blue LED in my usb wireless card are on, but none of the fans are spinning and there’s no noise at all.  Normally this thing is noisy as hell since it’s PC that used to be a server, with multiple SCSI disks and the whole bit.

So I’m all “oh shit” and try to turn the power off.  I hold the button in, no dice, won’t turn off.  So I unplug it.  Lights are still on.  WTF.  I turn off the power supply switch.  Lights are STILL on.  WTF?  I even unplug the monitor, and the led’s are still on.  So I’m like “ok, uber capacitors or something”.  It’s been 5 minutes now, and the lights are STILL on, and it’s kinda creepin’ me out, cause there’s no electricity hooked up.

Seriously.  WTF?.

So yeah, I’m starting to get into this whole web 2.0 stuff finally. You can now follow me on twitter at twitter.com/Able_X, and I finally got around to buying a decent webcam, and I just uploaded a test video to my youtube.

Enjoy teh suck

Once again, the internet proves that any computer problem you find yourself with, the internet has already had:

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2006/06/22/438094.aspx

Shadow Copy failures: Scheduled task fails with General page initialization failed, error 0×8007000d.

I’ve rippled through quite a few nagging problems since my server failure at home a few weeks ago. One of the more intriguing problem I only noticed a couple of days ago. One server had not been running scheduled Shadow Copies. When you schedule shadow copies in Windows Server 2003 R2, not suprizingly it sets up a normal Windows Scheduled Task with name ShadowCopyVolume{volume} as shown below.

But, as you can see, it’s never run and has status “Could not start”. If you double click the task, you get the error “General page initialization failed. The specific error is 0×8007000d: The data is invalid”. Once you dismiss the dialog, you see the normal task details, but cannot edit the user field (greyed out and blank). You could however create manual shadow copies, so that pretty much narrowed it down to a problem with the scheduled task rather than shadow copies itself.

Some searching on Technet and the MS Knowledgebase drew a blank (or at least nothing appearing to be directly relevant). There’s an article here which gives some information which is close but only allows you to setup the task again with a domain account. I didn’t want to do that as the Shadow Copy scheduled task is supposed to run under the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account.

However, I bow to Anil’s greater knowledge from his blog entry here, specifically the update part at the end. Indeed, deleting C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application
Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18\d42cc0c3858a58db2db37658219e6400_xxxx”, deleting the scheduled task, disabling shadow copies and setting it back up again with a schedule creates it correctly.

Thanks Anil!
Cheers,
John.

Ok, so normally i’m not a product whore, but I found a really neat tool for monitoring windows servers at www.poweradmin.com

I’ve loaded it up on our data server and it enables all kinds of monitoring and notification options. I’m gonna keep it monitoring this server for a bit, and if it seems to stay as good as it looks now, I’ll add more servers to my monitoring. The all in one place monitoring is slightly awesomesauce as well.