Blog: Networking

We could not get any of the HP 4345’s to update their firmware. The first time that we would update the firmware on one of the printers it would look like it worked but the firmware revision number did not increment. All sequential attempts in updating the firmware would result in errors within the printer’s event log.

Solution: After trying many different things with many different HP technicians even replacing the formatter boards on the printers all together we found a solution. [more]We had to remove the third party BAR DIMM card that was installed on the printer before updating the firmware. My best guess is that it was actually trying to push the updated firmware file onto the BAR DIMM instead of the HD on the printer and thus was not able to read it.

I recently found myself in a situation where some pictures, that to me were priceless, had been deleted from my camera memory card. Unfortunately those pictures had not been moved or copied to any other media. Like most of us I wanted a free method of recovering them. I found a software called Recuva, which is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted. This includes files emptied from the Recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes and viruses! [more]

I download the program and installed it to my USB thumb drive. It installs as a simple .exe, which when ran opens a simple little GUI that allows you to scan any drive, filtering by pictures, music, documents, video or show all files found. After it finds the files you select them from the list and recover them to the location of your choice. I was actually able to find pictures deleted off the memory card over a year ago.

If interested you can download and read more about it hear. http://www.recuva.com/

Windows Steady State has been around for some time. It used to be called Shared Computer Toolkit for XP.  It saves changes to the system disk in a cached area and then when a user logs off, the system is right back like it was before they logged in.  Microsoft calls this Windows Disk Protection.  An admin can log in and make changes that are retained.  User documents can be redirected to another drive letter and those changes will be retained.  This software will work on XP, Vista, standalone, workgroup, domains – with group policies.  Windows Steady State could be very helpful with computers that are shared by multiple people such as those in a training classroom setting.

I visited with a HP storage engineer at a conference and he told me that the I/O module on a 1510i does NOT have the disk configuration information in it’s memory, but that the disk configuration is written on each disk drive. Therefore, if the I/O module fails, you can replace it with another module and the drive configuration (RAID, LUN’s, etc) will not be effected. He also suggested that if the I/O module fails, then you should move the cache memory from the old to the new I/O controller prior to bringing up the system so that the cache will be flushed to the disks.  I definitely recommend contacting HP support if your I/O controller goes out to verify this, but it made me feel better about the recoverability of our SAN.  If you have a spare I/O module on hand, recovering from an I/O module failure should be easy (in theory).

When building a terminal server, don’t forget to uninstall IE Enhanced Security BEFORE you install terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server, especially if you plan to sysprep the server and image it. For some reason, if you don’t do this, certain keys are left behind in the registry and in the default profile user hive (ntuser.dat file) that cause issues. IEES is uninstalled, but new user profiles created on that server still have remnants and do not function as expected. Users may get the IEES pop-ups when visiting any site that is not in their trusted sites list and it seems to affect JavaScript execution privileges as well. Here is the Microsoft article that addresses this issue (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/)933991). The workaround if this has happened is to follow Method 4 and then rebuild the affected profiles. If Method 3 is followed, it doesn’t seem be a complete fix from our experience.

There are two SCSI driver standards that are available for most SCSI HBA’s. The older standard (SCSIport) has been replaced by a newer technology (STORport). STORport allows faster I/O, duplexing and other advantages. You should use the STORport drivers for all HBA’s when available. This is especially revelant for FC cards. The details are: [more]

Classic SCSI (SCSIPort):

• commands were queued on an adapter/LUN basis
• Maximum number of I/O's per adapter is 256, with 16 LUN's per adapater
• Queue limit on LUN level, with a maximum of 20 outstanding I/O's
• If one LUN reaches it's limits all other LUN's will be blocked as well
• Will remain for direct attached storage

Storport:

• No limitation on adapter queues
• Each LUN has a queue limit of 256 outstanding I/O's
• Designed for Fibre Channel attached storage
• Exchange and SQL will probably not be using Storport directly
• Except for SQL RAW disk functionality which will bypass volume management (for higher performance)

More details: http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6...eb/Storport.doc

Do not install Vmware tools with the complete option on ESX guests to prevent possible problems with your backups.  This installs the shared folders feature which is not available on ESX.  This causes the VMware tools to keep a file (hgfs.dat) open and can cause backup errors.  To disable the shared folders feature, remove hgfs from the registry key ProviderOrder under KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order\.  [more]

See http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1317 for more information.

The Remote Desktop Connection client has been updated in XP SP3. Besides the layout changes shown below, one of the changes in RDP 6.1 is the /console switch. To connect to the console of a machine, you must now use /admin bringing the final command to “mstsc /v servername /admin”. [more]

For most people who are running Exchange, the combination of “Recover Deleted Items” and standard backups will be enough to restore most deleted emails. But what about when a user is using a PST file instead of an Exchange mailbox and they deleted an item from the Deleted Items folder? Instead of having to listen to a users agonizing sobs when you deliver the “I’m sorry, we tried everything we could but we were unable to save him” line, try the below ‘the gloves are off’ recovery method. [more]

A PST is essentially a database. Items are records within the database and there is an index that points to each item. When you empty the Deleted Items folder, Outlook doesn't actually delete the items, it just deletes the items' listings from the index. The item is still in the PST, but unrecoverable because Outlook has no idea where it is without the pointer in the index. The space the item takes up is called "whitespace".

When you Compact a PST, the item is finally removed permanently and the whitespace is recovered, often shrinking the PST by many megabytes. Once the PST has 20% "whitespace", Outlook begins compacting the PST. If the Deleted Items folder contained a lot of messages, Outlook may begin compacting the PST immediately and the items will be deleted forever within a few minutes.

To recover the items which are no longer in the index you need to force Outlook to rebuild the index by causing corruption. You can cause corruption by using a Hex editor to delete some characters from the beginning of the PST file. If you delete the wrong ones you'll cause corruption but not in the index and Outlook won't rebuild the index.

Recover the Deleted Items

Acquire a simple Hex Editor. I like XVI32 since it is simple and doesn’t require installation.

1. Open 'Outlook.pst' in the Hex editor.
2. Delete positions 7 through 13 with the spacebar. (On the right side of the screen if you are using XVI32) As you clear the characters, the editor displays the code “20” in their position. (On the left side of the screen if using XVI32.)
3. Save the PST, it is now corrupted.
4. Run the Inbox Repair Tool, SCANPST.exe, to recover the file. Use Windows Search utility to find it.
5. The Inbox Repair Tool creates a backup and repairs the damage and recreates the PST.
6. Open Outlook. The Deleted Items folder should now contain the deleted messages, unless Outlook has already deleted them for good by compacting the PST.
7. Enjoy your tickertape parade when you save the day with your techo-wizardry.