Bonjour? Au Revoir.

Lets say you’re using Autoruns one day and the following conditions arise:

• You notice that the Bonjour service has somehow made its way onto your system (usually courtesy of iTunes or Adobe Creative Suite).
• You find yourself incensed that some dodgy and largely unnecessary Apple networking software has installed itself without asking.
• You discover that the Bonjour service in inexplicably absent from Add/Remove Programs, thus further infuriating you over the stealth nature of the install.

Under these conditions, DON’T do what I did and simply delete the references to mDNSResponder.exe and mdnsNSP.dll using Autoruns. All that will get you is a machine that, after its next reboot, can no longer resolve DNS addresses correctly, leading to a short sharp visit to System Restore. Instead, here’s how to remove Bonjour without tanking your network connectivity:

1. Run the following via Start -> Run:"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove
2. Go to the C:\Program Files\Bonjour folder (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Bonjour if you have ended up with a 32-bit version of Bonjour on a 64-bit OS)
3. Rename the mdnsNSP.dll to something else (it doesn’t matter what, my preference is for mdnsNSP.turd)
4. Reboot
5. Delete the aforementioned Bonjour folder from Program Files.

Et voila.

The unwanted guest

Earlier today I had to guide my father-in-law through fixing the functionality of being able to click on links in other programs (i.e. Outlook) and have them open in a web browser, which stopped working immediately after uninstalling Google Chrome.

I have come to the conclusion that Google Chrome is like an unwanted house guest: you’re not really sure why you invited it in (despite looking OK when it arrived), and you soon find it’s not as nice as the other guests you have over. Then it starts trying to convince you that you don’t need to have other people over, and when you ask it to leave, it breaks something on the way out.

The Angry Technician’s Guide to Managing Windows 7, you Idiots

I am tired of hearing people say they don’t want to deploy Windows 7  because they can’t manage it properly on their Windows 2003 domain.

This is utter rubbish.

I heard this all before with Vista, and it wasn’t true then either. Here’s a summary some of the idiocy I’ve seen:

• “You have to have Windows Server 2008 R2 to join Windows 7 to the domain” – UTTERLY WRONG.
• “We can’t use any of the new Group Policy settings because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – PLAIN WRONG.
• “We’d have to upgrade our domain schema to support the new Group Policy settings” – UNTRUE.

and along with them, the slightly different but equally ill-informed:

• “We can’t use Group Policy Preferences because we don’t have Windows Server 2008/2008 R2″ – ALSO WRONG.

OK, listen in, morons. I will now explain how you (yes YOU), can manage Windows 7 using Group Policy and Group Policy Preferences with only Windows Server 2003 servers on your domain. This is a technical article, so try to keep up.

Downselling

It seems that the Dell store doesn’t quite understand the concept of what makes one number bigger than another.

Last time I checked, going from a 3-year warranty to a 1-year warranty didn’t count as an “upgrade”.

Toner

I recently bought a Xerox Phaser 6125N for the school, as a result of good experiences with similar Xerox printers at previous schools. This one, however, had started to concern me as it seemed that the toner cartridges were reporting as empty when they still had a bit left in them. I knew this because the cartridges on these printers are very simple; they don’t incorporate the image transfer components like so many of Xerox’s competitors, and opening them is as simple as sliding a small trapdoor open by hand.

Last week, I did a little experiment. I borrowed a Petri dish from the science prep room, and used a funnel to shake out what was left in an ‘empty’ cartridge into the dish.

Left-over toner from a magenta 6125N cartridge (p/n 106R01332), with 10 pence coin for scale

Now clearly this isn’t a mountain of toner, but it is significant, and more than I was expecting. Next week when I have more time I intend to weigh both a full and ‘empty’ cartridge to find out the weight difference between the two, then weigh this residue to see what percentage is being left over. Care to place any bets?

Testing

If there was one thing I could rely on in my last school, it was that no problem was ever down to the infrastructure cabling.

The school’s network cabling had been done in house for years before I started there, and it was there that Bond taught me the fine art of Cat5e. I don’t remember us ever having an infrastructure cabling problem, except for the time it was chewed through by glis glis.

That meant that when I moved to my current school, I immediately decreed we would not be using contractors again any time soon, since I could take care of it and know I was doing a good job. This in turn led to me becoming intimately acquainted with several loft areas of the school over the summer, and more importantly, the purchase of my first Fluke Linkrunner kit. At nearly £600, it was an expensive purchase, but worth every penny; I view it as an essential for anyone who takes network cabling even half seriously. If you can’t trust the cabling, you can’t trust the network.

Which is why I have subsequently become infuriated by the fact that the contractors who previously installed network cabling at the school clearly did not have one.

In fact, they did not appear to have a testing tool of any kind. It turns out that I should have decreed that any of our previous cabling contractors who ever showed their faces again on site would be repeatedly stabbed in the eyes with an IDC punchdown tool. I’ve already had to re-terminate patch panels in two separate buildings after discovering that they hadn’t been terminated properly, a fault that not only demonstrates utter incompetence, but is also impossible to miss if you use even a basic continuity tester.

I am the Angry Technician. I am a professional, and take my job seriously. That is why when I install cabling, I GODDAMN TEST IT.

Dear Acer

Question: Who in their right mind would ship a server in this day and age that has EDB disabled by default, with no way to turn it on in the BIOS?

Answer: YOU WOULD, YOU DONKEYS.

This server is less than a year old. I should not have to install a BIOS update just so I can get Hyper-V working. Especially when said BIOS update takes far longer than it should and is extremely poorly documented.

Thanks to you I didn’t leave work until 23.15 last Friday. I inherited this server when I started my new job. Rest assured we will not be buying any more from you.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

How to be a Favourite – #7: The Thank-you Email

You probably all know someone who seems to get the things they ask for from IT more quickly than you. Chances are, they are a Favourite.

Until recently, I thought I’d covered the main ways of becoming a Favourite. Then someone demonstrated possibly the easiest method of them all:

7. Send me a glowing and unsolicited thank-you email, copied to the Headmaster

Let’s face it, that probably trumps all six of the previous methods.

RM don’t have a damned clue what they’re talking about

Within minutes of logging onto an RM system for the first time, I became frustrated with the fact that on most workstations, any keyboard shortcut using the Windows key had been disabled, even for administrators. Win+R, Win+E, and Win+L are shortcuts I use all the time, so my frustration mounted quickly.

First I was told that Win+x shortcuts were disabled because they are “a security risk”, on the basis that by using Win+R, someone could run programs that aren’t on the Start Menu. There are three flaws in this argument:

1. If your workstation security is set correctly, it shouldn’t matter what program they can run. Security through obscurity is a fallacy I do not entertain.
2. There are plenty of other ways for someone to start programs that aren’t on the Start Menu.
3. You can disable this command using Group Policy for particular users without affecting administrators, or the other benign shortcuts.

Later I found an RM support document (TEC85637 for those with access) that boldly stated that by leaving Win+L enabled, users would be able to lock the workstation and stop other people from using it, even if they were prevented from locking the workstation elsewhere in the UI (i.e. by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and clicking ‘Lock Workstation’). When I first read this, I’ll confess I’d never tested such a scenario, but it seemed very unlikely.

So I checked.

It’s utterly false.

RM really don’t have a damned clue what they’re talking about.

Dear RM

If your unnecessary replacement login screen for XP doesn’t work with usernames longer than 20 characters:

1. Why does it allow you to type more than 20 characters in, and
2. WHY THE HELL DID YOUR MANAGEMENT CONSOLE ALLOW ME TO CREATE THESE USERNAMES IN THE FIRST PLACE?