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.

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?

Recovering a deleted Microsoft Outlook PST file

• Have you just discovered that one of your users has lost their Outlook data store (PST file)?
• Are you using POP3 instead of IMAP or Exchange, and therefore don’t have a copy on the mail server?
• Was the PST file stored in a location that isn’t backed up for some reason?
• Did it happen to a very senior member of staff, and through no fault of their own?
• Are you starting to think you, as the Network Manager, might be totally boned?

Welcome to my Tuesday afternoon.

Recovering the data

Under normal circumstances, Pirform’s Recuva is my go-to program for quick and easy file recovery. However, this problem proved too much even for the deep scan option to find a trace of the file. This needed a more thorough solution:

1. PhotoRec is a recovery program that completely ignores the file system on the disk, and instead siply scans the underlying data looking for patterns that match known data types. It was originally designed to recover photos, hence the name, but currently works on about 100 different file types, including Outlook’s PST files.
2. Once I’d recovered some data, I quickly found the recovery wasn’t perfect; I couldn’t open the PST fies in Outlook. This was hardly surprising given that part of the data store had been overwritten and Recuva couldn’t even begin to attempt a recovery. I then turned to Outlook’s Inbox Repair tool (Scanpst.exe), which is installed by default with Outlook. After running the recovered files through Scanpst, I was able to open them in Outlook.

Dear Xerox

If you’re too lazy to write some damned code to present a list of valid months for when I could have bought a printer, try not to fire the guy whose job it is to add a new line each month.

It’s now October, and according to your warranty registration page, I apparently couldn’t have possibly bought anything from you since August.

Have fun typing up the registration form I sent you by fax instead.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear SMART Technologies

It’s admirable that you’ve gone to as much effort as you have to ensure it is easy for administrators to install the software to support your SMART Board IWBs.

It would be more admirable if you’d actually given the Install Manager software a quick trial run before releasing it, because product activation during a silent install simply doesn’t work, due to a bug in your Windows Installer package.

Years ago, DHL had a slogan along the lines of “a promise is nothing until it’s delivered”. Sadly, the same is true here. It doesn’t matter how much effort you’ve put in; if your software falls at the last hurdle, it is useless.

The lesson here? Tests. They’re not just for cricketers.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Stubborn

In the last week I have reduced the number of printers in the school by six. That may not seem like much, but bear in mind that no-one has gone without as a result, and you begin to understand the reason why we have been spending so much on consumables. We have printers coming out of our ears.

All of these now-retired printers are HP. Which leaves me with a happy feeling inside.

What does not leave me with happy feeling inside is that every time I have gone to remove the various bits of HP software from the workstations, I have ended up having to resort to Autoruns, the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, and hard file deletions to get rid of them after the uninstall programs largely failed to even run, let alone do anything remotely resembling an uninstall.

Did you know that the HP Deskjet D2460 software CD installs more than 20 component pieces of software, only 2 of which have functioning uninstallers, and most of which are completely hidden from Add/Remove Programs entirely? This is the sort of ridiculous obscenity you only truly learn about when you have to start digging through said obscenity in a titanic struggle to pry your computer from its slavering, undying jaws, the obsidian tendrils of its CLSIDs clinging desperately to the last remaining vestiges of its sundered registry keys.

Today I installed what I intend to be the first of many Xerox colour laser printers in the school. The driver download was a grand total of 2.6MB. By comparison, the smallest driver download for the D2460 is 36.0MB.

THIRTY-SIX MEGABYTES. For a DRIVER.

Guess which one of these printers works better?

Lazy behaviour

I noticed early on at my current job that on one of my servers, I got the following message whenever I logged in:

This would be immediately followed by a similar and more lengthy message, this time regarding UDP instead of TCP.

Here’s what I found when I looked it up on RM’s knowledge library:

“This may occur if the server to which you are trying to connect has NetOp service enabled. You can safely ignore the error message. It is a normal behaviour when connecting remotely to a server via remote desktop.”

Normal behaviour.

Translation: ‘We’re too lazy to fix this so it will annoy you every time you log in, forever. Love and kisses, RM.’