Dave Hildebrand.com

There’s an app for that

Dave — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 18:52:16 +0000

I was the recipient of a shiney new 64gb iPod touch this morning. I’ve got the wordpress app installed and am posting from it. I wish we had bought the nurses touch’s instead of the Motorola WinMo devices. These are waaay better.

Palin’s Farewell Speech is a Poem

Dave — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:38:02 +0000

Enjoy.

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Rebuilding Windows XP boot.ini

Dave — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:16:12 +0000

A customer was concerned with an error they were seeing when booting their XP Home PC. Windows would continue to load correctly but the error still had them worried. I suggested they bring it in for me to take a look.

Invalid Boot.ini, loading from C:\Windows

The problem was caused due to a corrupted boot.ini file which is usually located in the C drive. Since I had a copy of XP Home I tried to rebuild the boot.ini as per the instructions below.

Insert the Microsoft Windows XP CD into the computer. Note: If you have a system recovery CD or restore CD (not a Microsoft CD) these steps will likely not work for your computer.
Reboot the computer with the CD and press any key when prompted to press any key to boot from the CD. If you do not receive this prompt and/or are not able to boot from the CD see document CH000217.
Once in the Microsoft Setup menu press R to open the recovery console.
Select the operating system you wish to use; if you only have Windows XP on the computer you will only have one prompt.
Once prompted for the password enter the Admin password and press enter.
Once at the command prompt type bootcfg /rebuild to start the rebuild process.
The rebuild process will step you through a number of steps depending upon how many operating systems you have on the computer and how the computer is setup. Below is a listing of the common steps you are likely going to encounter.

Prompt for the identified versions of Windows installed. When you receive this prompt press Y if the bootcfg command properly identified each of the Windows operating systems installed on the computer. It is important to realize this command will only detect Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT installations.
Prompt to enter the load identifier. This is the name of the operating system for the boot.ini. For example, Microsoft Windows XP Home users would enter Microsoft Windows XP Home edition.
Prompt to Enter OS load options. When this prompt is received type /fastdetect to automatically detect the available options.

Once you have completed all the available options in the rebuild and are back at the prompt type exit to reboot the computer.

See Microsoft KB289022 for more info on boot.ini.

Microsoft Offends Some, Causes Knee Slaps For Everyone Else

Dave — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:20:59 +0000

A bit of a controversy over a recent Microsoft IE 8 advertisement. While it has caused many a Maude Flanders “think of the children” diatribe, I think it is actually quite funny.

Take a look for yourself.

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IT Humour: Update

Dave — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:00:04 +0000

Last year I posted a video that would make any IT pro laugh hysterically. I said the creators should win an award for their work, and they did just that. The folks over at thewebsiteisdown.com have not rested on their laurels and have produced two more gems. I feel for the IT pro who has to deal with Chip the sales guy as he uses “Excel” in inventive ways and as Chip calls for tech support for his failed hard drive.

Remember to all ways remain calm.

I really hope they keep pumping these out.

A Time for Change

Dave — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:04:00 +0000

It has been quite some time since I’ve had a new theme here at the blog. I’ve decided it is time to get up to date on HTML 5 and what you see is a minimalist HTML 5 based theme. I will be styling to my liking as time permits.

Top 5 Features to look forward to

Warning: Highly technical one and a half hour video on HTML 5 goodness.

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How to Crack WEP

Dave — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:51:18 +0000

WEP is the redheaded stepchild of WPA & WPA2. For quite some time it has been very easy for someone with limited Google searching skills to crack. In the video below the presenter shows you how easy it is to crack WEP.

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This information is for all Bell Sympatico subscribers out there. This is what Bell uses by default for you when you use their router. Bell used to leave the wireless open, which is deplorable, but using WEP as the default is not much better. It would take someone 5 minutes to crack your wifi network and start sniffing packets for your banking info, etc. Take the time to log into your routers and switch to WPA or WPA2 & use a random pass phrase like the ones available at GRC.com.

Rain Gutter Cable Tray

Dave — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:29:29 +0000

Rain Gutter Cable Tray

This is the most ingenious use of a rain gutter for something other that shunting off rain I have ever seen. My office is currently in cable hell and this lil trick just might be the thing to fix it.

Check it out over at Flickr.

IMF Updates Keep Prompting for Installation

Dave — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:02:56 +0000

With the recent update to the IMF signatures for Exchange 2003 I got caught in a never ending circle of installation prompts. The new update would install, then last months update would ask to install and so on and so on. After realizing what was going on I went in search of answers. The 1st thing to try was to reset the Windows Update Cache. It can be done by plopping the code below in to a bat file and running it on the offending server.

net stop bits
net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 /u wuaueng.dll /s
del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\*.*
del /f /s /q %windir%\windowsupdate.log
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll /s
net start bits
net start wuauserv
wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow

This did not solve the issue for me. I turned out that my WSUS server did not mark the old IMF update as declined. Once the old update’s status was changed to declined the update cycle was stopped dead in its tracks.

Remove a Windows Service

Dave — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:25:47 +0000

Last night I moved my PRTG virtual machine to my newly installed ESXi server. The move went well, but when I went to boot up the PRTG VM the service wouldn’t start. PRTG was nice enough to tell me that I had another copy of the service running on the network and even gave me the command to find the PC it was running on.

Turns out it was running on an old monitoring PC I had used years before that was still powered on. Since I still use it for a couple of other monitoring apps I couldn’t just turn it off. As a temp fix I stopped the service and set it to disabled. Now the PRTG VM started up and began collecting data once again.

As the PRTG uninstaller did not remove the PRTG service from the old monitoring PC I still needed a way to pitch it even though I had disabled it. A quick search turned up a couple of options, the easy way and the slightly more difficult way.

The Easy Way:

sc delete “service_name”

In my case the command was:
sc delete PRTGService

The Slightly More Difficult Way:

**Dislaimer: This process involves working in the Windows Registry. Before deleting any file please make a backup in case of borking your system.

Run Regedit

Find the registry entry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services”

Look for the service there and delete it.