I was doing a remote connect to a machine today and the “send ctrl-alt-del” for some reason didn’t work to bring up the task manager, so I had to get to it another way. For those that never noticed (or don’t recall), if you right click on the taskbar, you should see an option to launch the task manager. (I was looking to kill off a program that was being uncooperative.) Another way to get it is to press ctrl-shift-esc and it will popup.
Category: Tech Support
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“rm -f *” undelete
I really ought to find a way to alias “rm -f *” to “rm -i” IF the time is between 1 AM and 7 AM…. Last night I was working late (2:30AM or so when this happened). I had just made a few “refinements” to some of my audio streaming scripts (kept in a “Foreign News Sources” folder). I was curious to see if I had any scripts that were still using realplayer, so I had done a “grep realplay *” and saw a lot of results… but most were in temporary files (left over from a text editor ending in ~)… so there’s radiopragueenglish and radiopragueenglish~ …………..
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Recording online streams (real / wma) to mp3 format (or ogg) with mplayer
So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…
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Running Google Earth under Wine on linux
A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…
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Bellsouth mail.lig.bellsouth.net server phasing out?
I haven’t had much time to look into this, but one of the mailservers I administer is typically configured to relay through mail.lig.bellsouth.net, with mail.averyjparker.com as a fallback. Sometime overnight, mail.averyjparker.com started getting heavy use and on checking this morning was getting all of the outbound traffic. So, I did a bit of investigation mail.lig.bellsouth.net is no longer found and I’ve switched the configuration to mail.bellsouth.net and all is churning along well.
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New mass mailing virus
F-secure has information on a fairly aggressive new email virus. Their name for it is VB.bi although it’s aliases are…. W32.Blackmal.E@mm, WORM_GREW.A, W32/Nyxem-D, Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi depending on which AV vendor you check with. It’s a worm as well, in that it tries to spread through remote shares. It attempts to disable antivirus software as well. Here are some details from their writeup:
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Preparing for disaster recovery – system change log
There are a lot of elements to a good disaster recovery strategy…. knowing where offsite backups are located, keeping the offsite backups fresh. Knowing where any ON-site backups are. Having a plan for quick access to replacement hardware. One that probably is easily overlooked is very low-tech. That’s a system log. I don’t know that this isn’t a BAD idea for any system, but certainly is a good idea for servers and other “mission critical” systems. (In thinking about my desktop, this kind of log wouldn’t be bad….maybe a bit obsessive with a desktop, but…. I think I’ve messed it up more times than it’s spontaneously had problems…) So what am I rambling on about this time?????
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Sometimes the simplest things solve problems….
How many times have I had this kind of phone call…. “my computers not working”… “the light on the monitor is on, but there aren’t any lights on the keyboard. everything seems connected, but there’s nothing on the screen.” Usually, my first question is along the lines of… “have you tried turning it off and back on.” I sometimes hear “I can’t use the start button” or something like that. At this point, I suggest that they try disconnecting the power and letting it sit for a few moments (5-10 seconds is usually enough.) Plugging it back in and trying the switch.
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Outlook Express Cumultaive Security Update KB837009 will not install
I’ve run into this in the last few days too. (In spite of the fact that it’s an OLD update (April 13, 2004?) MS04-013…. I think on the last visit (and my first one to this machine) we had probably forced a visit to Windows update (which I think it may not have seen before…) Anyway, this is a Windows 98 system and the last update probably brought along Internet Explorer 6 SP1 along with Outlook Express. There was one update that would appear as being necessary on every visit to the Windows update site. The update was KB837009 and was listed as “Cumulative Security Update for Outlook Express 6 Service Pack 1″…
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Strange Novell Server error
I ran into strange problems accessing a shared Novell Netware (5.0) folder. Everytime the folder was attempted to be accessed from multiple machines the window would freeze and if you waited long enough, there would be an error message along the lines of “Netware Alert Message”… NIOS.NLM
Call to NIOS page unlock by module unknown failed Address 0x05650016, length 0x00700465 and then according to what I was told, ctrl-enter was instructed to clear the message and the machine rebooted.