rebelpeon.com

Category: electronics

  • Windows Phone 7

    Well, it’s been a few years, and I finally bought a new phone.  I used to have the Touch Pro 2, and while I enjoyed the keyboard, there was a lot not to love to.  Let me count thy ways:

    1. Windows Mobile 6.5 (even with all the hacked ROMs that I used)
    2. Thickness.  Man was that thing a pocket sore
    3. Windows Mobile 6.5

    Pretty much everyone I work with either has an Android powered phone or an iPhone.  While I’m sure either would’ve worked just fine, I was holding out for the new Windows Phone 7.  I loved playing with a friend’s Zune HD.  The interface is just so much more fresh and, I’m not all that into apps, which is what both Android and iPhone seem to be centered around.

    I waited, and I waited (and I was in Singapore for a few months), but I finally received my phone a week before Christmas.  All-in-all, I’m very fond of it, and getting around is so much better.  I ended up with the HD7, since I’m on T-Mobile through work, but I’ve also played with the Focus as that is what all the AT&T guys have.

    There are a few issues which I’ll get to, but talk about a completely awesome overhaul.  The touchscreen is smooth and responsive, the icons are finger friendly, and most of all the integration is very intuitive.  The one thing I was really worried about was moving away from a keyboard.  On all my smartphones I’ve had a physical keyboard of some sort.  However, with the Windows Phone 7 keyboard, I’m able to type just about as fast and accurately.  Also, I never used to use my phone for music, but now I’m using it quite a bit.  The Zune integration is nice, and my (overly expensive) headphones sound excellent on them with no static/electric background noise.

    Overall I am very happy, and I know with all the money that Microsoft has banked on it, it will at least try to become a large player and continually grow.  However, as mentioned there are a few annoyances that I have (there are more comprehensive lists elsewhere):

    • Dialer does not auto-complete names and numbers.  This is something that was great with WinMo 6.5.  In fact WP7 does it for text messages, just not for the dialer.  Boo.
    • No gapless playback with MP3s
    • I’m sure there are other things, but nothing that actively bothers me…

    Microsoft has said that there is an update coming out in January/February timeframe to fix some of the other issues (copy/paste, etc), and I’m sure there will be many other updates to come to fix other issues.  However, right now, I’m glad I jumped on board.

    If you’re interested, here are all the WP7 phones available now.

  • Offline SharePoint

    I’m sure a lot of you have heard about Colligo for offline SharePoint.  Unfortunately, the SharePoint sites that I continually access where for my company have some interesting security setup and therefore I’ve never been able to get Colligo to work.  Since I had originally tried, I never really bothered to figure it out as we were told it simply wouldn’t work.

    However, when I installed Office 2010 I noticed that there was a SharePoint Workspace 2010 which does offline SharePoint too.  Since we only use MS products for security I was very optimistic about getting Offline SharePoint finally working (incredibly useful for working on flights).  Well, I attempted to use it and quickly realized it will only do offline SharePoint for SharePoint 2010.  Unfortunately we were still on 2007.

    Fast forward through a bit of searching, and I ran across a nice KB article that explains how to sync a SharePoint 2007 site with SharePoint Workspace 2010 using groove.  I don’t really care how it works, as long as I can have offline editing and syncing.  Yay!

  • Another Xbox 360 Dead

    That’s right folks, almost exactly three years after my first Xbox 360 died (from the exact same issue), my replacement one has also just bit the dust.  What is hilarious is that is was doing something so complex as streaming a video from my Media Center PC.  Strenuous indeed. 

    While my Xbox is technically out of standard warranty, because I am once again getting the three light, red ring of death, my warranty is extended 3 years which would expire in December of 2010.  Sadly unlike last time, they don’t send you a box, so I have to find adequate shipping materials to send it to them asap.

  • More CSS Fun

    As I am sure you gathered from other recent posts, we are using (read: testing) CSS for a lot of stuff.  Well, we found out a beautiful new issue when creating and editing projects from the command line. 

    When you look at MSDN about adding a filter to a Project, you are presented with the following syntax:

    /Filter “+text1.txt -*.exe -dir1 +…*.jpg”

    Needless to say, that is not correct.  For AddProj, they syntax has to be correct, but for EditProj, syntax is a lot more lax (the below is the syntax for EditProj).  Regardless, everything in the quotes is incorrect.  Instead a filter should look like the following:

    Filter=+“text.txt” -”*.exe” -“dir1” +”…*.jpg”

    They are either updating the MSDN article or creating a KB article about this.

  • Windows Home Server

    With the release of Power Pack 3 for Windows Home Server, I have been thinking about trying it out.  Having an MSDN subscription and a virtual machine host made this quite a bit easier, as I didn’t need to purchase any additional hardware to use it. 

    Prior to installing WHS, I had a Windows 2008 virtual machine that I installed all my stuff on and had shares.  It definitely worked, but some of the cool features of WHS kept me wanting to move in that direction.  Things like automated backups of client machines, a console, better managed and accessible shares, and Media Center tie-ins (I have a Win7 virtual machine as a Media Center and an Xbox 360 as the extender).  All in all, I think it is definitely going to be a move in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t issues getting there.  I am going to outline a bunch of them here in the hopes that others can find comfort in the work I have done to resolve them.

    1. Installation – As I mentioned before, I was installing it to a virtual machine.  No big deal right?  Wrong.  My virtual machine host does not have a keyboard, monitor, or mouse hooked up to it normally.  I just have it sitting in the closet chugging a long.  The downside to that is when I am building a new virtual machine, it had better not need the mouse until I can directly connect to the machine or install the integration drivers.  This is because in Hyper-V when you are using Remote Desktop to manage the host, until you are able to install the drivers, you have no mouse.  Well, sadly, with the MSDN version (not sure about pressed CDs), the tabs are not correct with the EULA Accept page.  There is no way for you to accept the EULA to progress through the installation.  Boo.  That means I had to drag a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into the closet to get things working.  It just seems silly that this is an issue for something that is meant to run headless anyways (obviously not during the installation, but still).
    2. Domain Membership – Do not add the WHS machine to a domain.  I know you want to if you are running a domain at home, but don’t, just don’t.  I really wanted to run it as a domain member too, but there are just too many issues, and tricks MS has done to make it not worth your while.  Things such as the machine powering down every 48 hours when it is a member (annoying at best), to the console crashing after adding domain members to the local windows home group manually.  While I know you can work around most of these things (except for the console crashing), what benefit are you really getting?  Just leave it as a member of a workgroup.
    3. Firewall Rules – Much like domain membership, the best answer here is just to turn off the Windows Firewall on the box.  I am not sure if it was because it updated to Windows 2003 SP2 which enabled it by default after the base install or what, but there was nothing but headaches with the Windows Firewall enabled.  Some of the more quality examples were:
      • The website you are supposed to access resides on ports 55000/56000.  That was not allowed in the rules by default.
      • When setting up the Media Center connector, it uses DCOM to connect.  DCOM typically uses a random list of high ports (1024-65535) to do its bidding.  Granted, you can change the ports to only use a few, neither of which is added into the firewall rules.

      Just silly stuff like that, which take awhile to troubleshoot, when they don’t need to.  Turn it off.

    4. Carbonite Online Backup – This is the current beast I am dealing with and it is a fun one.  Carbonite works exactly how I want it to, and I have been using it on my Windows 2008 machine to do online backups for over a year now.  It works.  It isn’t fast, but it works.  Moving it to WHS has been a fun test of intelligence.  In my setup I had 2 drives, one was 80GB (the minimum to get it setup because I just wanted to play at first) and one 800GB.  Everything works great, except for Carbonite.  For the time being, I just wanted to backup the data in some of the shares.  No problem, right?  Just point it to where the share is located on disk (D:sharessharename) and we are good to go.  Wrong!  WHS has a special drive configuration that allows you to simply add drives whenever and whatever size and it will automatically add that space to your shares.  It does this via junctions, tombstone files, and a service that manages where all the files are stored.  I won’t delve into it here, but you can read all about it yourself.  Basically the files in your share are elaborate shortcuts to the actual files, which are spread across all your drives, and then the files are managed by the service, and then could move every hour.  So, when you point Carbonite to D:sharessharename, you are effectively backing up the shortcuts.  Instead you need to point it to the junction point and all the files there (these are hidden system files) at C:fsDE.  As I mentioned, these files are always moving around though based on the service.  Therefore, the only way for Carbonite to work correctly on a WHS is if you have a single large drive, which is exactly what I am going to do.  As soon as you add another one, files could get moved, and your backups will not be complete.
    5. Protocol Mismatch – For the longest time I was receiving the following error whenever I was trying to install the connector on a client machine (Windows 2003, Windows 2008, Win 7)

      Protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 6.0.2030.2, but partner computer [server] uses protocol version 6.0.2030.0. A connection cannot be established

      This was because the http://server:55000/enrollid/id.aspx webservice that the connector uses on the WHS machine was returning the incorrect version.  The only way to fix it that I found was by installing the final build of Power Pack 3.  The beta didn’t work, nor did downgrading to a previous PP.

    Hopefully this little guide helps someone else out there.  As I tinker with it some more, I will probably add additional articles, but it is amazing how long it has taken me to get this silly machine up and running, especially when this is supposed to be an appliance.  I know that MS is learning a lot from this, but the polish is still a bit missing, and this is after 3 Service Packs (Power Packs).

  • Copy Files Between Untrusted Domains Programmatically

    Normally on a Windows machine when you attempt to access a share in a different domain you are prompted for credentials.  However, there are no copy utilities (copy, xcopy, robocopy, etc) that pass credentials in the command line.  Also, as it is an untrusted domain, you simply can’t do a RunAs (need to manually type in a password for that anyways).

    The answer was so obvious, I can’t believe it didn’t come to me right away.  However, net use, the simplest of commands, is your friend again.  Using the following command you can initiate the connection and then copy between the machines as much as you like via normal UNC path.

    net use [server][path] [password] /user:[username]

    copy [server][path][more path]

    net use [server][path] /delete /y

    By using the following syntax there is no mapped drive.  There is simply a stored connection with the associated credentials for the life of the profile or until the delete command is run. 

  • PSExec

    On my current project they deploy PSExec to all machines.  The downside?  It is a version from 2004.  Yes, that is right from over 5 years ago.  Needless to say, there has been nothing but problems with it.  Granted, PSExec is probably one of the easiest things to upgrade as you just need to upgrade the version that you are calling PSExec from.  It then copies itself out to the machine and does it’s job.  However, if the old version was ever tried against a machine, you may be in some weird state like we were where PSExec wouldn’t start, or it would and wouldn’t close, etc.

    Stumbling along the internet I found someone else who had this issue.  However, his processes doesn’t always work because there may be something hanging onto the PSExecsvc.exe file still.  Instead I recommend using the following batch file.

    sc %1 stop psexesvc
    sc %1 delete psexesvc
    del %1admin$psexesvc.exe
    del %1admin$system32psexesvc.exe

     

    It just deletes the service before it tries to delete the files.  Works like a charm.

  • CSS Project Destination Authentication Account

    Been a long time again, but I have a few updates to put up here.  They may not help a lot of people, but they are good things that I want to remember 🙂

    Commerce Server uses a pretty antiquated system for doing content and code promotions.  It is called Commerce Server Staging (CSS).  We have set it up, but want to better automate the deployment of all the CSS projects (jobs).  For the life of me, I could not figure out how to add in the destination authentication account programmatically.  Thankfully it wasn’t something short sighted I was missing.  After discussing with Microsoft for awhile, there is apparently some undocumented switches on CSS.exe.  After you add the project (css.exe addproj), you then need to edit the project with the following syntax:

    css.exe editproj [project] Destination=[server];[username];[password]

    Yay to automation!

    Update:
    Turns out you can do this with the Addproj also doing the same way with the semicolon separated items for the destination.

  • Xbox 360 and Netflix

    Netflix streaming straight to the Xbox 360 has got to be the coolest thing ever.  Last weekend we watched two movies that way.  I just wish they would get more movies on the streaming feature.  Screw DVDs moving forward.  It’s all about the streaming media.

  • Data Protection Manager and Windows 2008

    I’ve been playing with getting DPM running on Windows 2008 (SQL) for awhile now.  Mostly on and off, just when I have time to think about it.  Well, today I finally got around to getting it installed, successfully.

    First of all my setup:

    • Frontend is on Windows 2003 x86 R2 with SP2
    • SQL is on a Windows 2008 x64 box
    • Reporting Services front-end is on a Windows 2008 x86 box

    Things I found out while trying to install:

    • DPM will not install unless Reporting Services is installed on the same box as the SQL database.  You may be able to fix that afterwards, but this is a serious limitation.  In any sort of enterprise, reporting services is (or at least should be) segregated from the production database services box.  This was a large pain as I needed to move everything, ugh.
    • DPM’s installer doesn’t play nicely with UAC.  There’s a step that a registry item needs to be added to the remote SQL server.  However, if UAC is enabled on the SQL box, the installer fails saying that it can’t create that registry key eventhough I’m logged in as an administrator on both machines.  This is because on the SQL box, it’s probably getting the allow dialog box.  Simply turn off UAC on the remote machine, or run the installer as the local administrator account (password must be the same on both machines).

    Now I just need to start backing up my Exchange 2007 server, since it has log files dating back to March the 3rd (ouch).

    *Update*
    Well, it looks like the DPM team has finally released the Rollup package to allow for Win2k8 system state backups (among other things).  Check out the news.