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.

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?

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

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.’

Dear Digital Blue

Every piece of your software I have ever dealt with is utter rubbish.

For me, the torture began with the comically-named “Digital Blue Digital Movie Creator”, to which you had to add a redundant ‘digital’ to avoid never being able to sell the software to schools. Most recently, it was your dodgy QX-series microscopes. At every turn your products reveal themselves as cheap, gaudy, and developed by people who clearly have never read any of Microsoft’s application design guidelines, have almost no clue of how networked computer systems operate, and appear to have nothing but disdain for accepted principals of user interface design. They do, however, seem to be quite fond of designing user manuals in Microsoft Paint.

Every time a teacher hands me another one of your wretched creations with a hopeful and innocent gleam in their eye, my day is ruined. The bitter tears I would otherwise weep during the hours of anguish trying to get it to work are held back only by my hope that either you one day learn how to actually write software that isn’t a steaming river of effluence, or that you go bust. Frankly, at this point, I’d rather it was the latter.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Dear BT

The management website for your MyOffice system is so ridiculously bug-ridden, it beggars belief that the school has put up with it for so long. Frankly, it’s hard to believe that any of your customers put up with it.

It took me over an hour to create just six new email accounts today. There were supposed to be seven, but on my final attempt, I managed to associate a user login with our account that simply doesn’t work. When I try to remove the user, I’m told it doesn’t exist.  I can’t create a new login with that username, because the system says the name is in use, even though it supposedly isn’t. This phantom user now haunts our account like some digital ghost in the ethernet, unable to manifest a useful presence in the form of a functioning login, but still occupying our realm in a way unsettling to anyone else present – chiefly by claiming one of the finite number of user licenses on our account, of which we are desperately short.

I’ll be calling you next week to explain all this, and much more, in detail you may find chilling. I’ve only had a couple of months experience with your half-cocked excuse for an internet services system, and I already can’t wait to be rid of it.

Love and kisses,
AngryTechnician

Scripting is not a user interface

… or ‘why Windows Virtual PC is a retrograde step’.

The newest version of Microsoft’s Virtual PC software, dubbed simply “Windows Virtual PC”, has some interesting new features that make it a useful and interesting inclusion in Windows 7 in the form of the much talked-about ‘XP Mode’. This is touted as a way to resolve the problem of what to do about older software that runs on Windows XP but doesn’t run well on Vista or Windows 7. So, the perfect way to work with legacy applications. Except for one minor detail.

There’s no way to let these programs use the most popular piece of legacy hardware in existence today: the floppy drive.