Work Journal
For Week of July 12, 1999
Page last Updated Wednesday, December 22, 1999 10:00 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I got a notice from Ebay yesterday that I was high bidder on an auction that I knew I had lost. I see in the news today that Ebay was down again on Saturday which probably explains the message I got from them.
I did a run through of all my internet job searches this morning. I never ceases to amaze me at how old the posting are at some sites. Worst of all some sites do not include a date of any kind, so you cannot tell if the job posting has expired or that it was posted 3 months ago.
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I just love the Microsoft error code database. I look up error 2140 which I get when starting Internet Mail Service and Microsoft says this is a problem with ARCserve and to contact the vendor. Once again the error code database points me in the right direction. NOT!
Internet Mail Service will not start any more. Did a fresh NT server install and using Service Pack 4 this time instead of 5 to see if this helps. Also using Exchange 5.5 install files from July edition TechNet CD instead of the files I downloaded from Microsoft some time ago.
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I have emailed the ISP which is providing my dialup access to see if they have a guide for configuring Exchange 5.5 to communicate with their mail server.
Patiently waiting for information from my ISP on configuring Exchange 5.5 Internet Mail Service to work with their mail server.
evening: Reorganized the data on my server and did a backup of old utilities and data I can't afford to loose. Some of the utilities like Checkit I thought I had lost.
My Canon BJC-4000 printer and/or the driver has been playing tricks on me today. Regular documents print fine but envelopes have a mind of their own. The return and mailing address don't always print and when they do print they are inset too far on the envelope. I played with the settings for a while, trying to print envelopes in various orientations but never got the proper result.
Downloaded Netscape Communicator 4.61 so I can see what The Silicon Patch looks like with a browser other than Internet Explorer 5. Netscape appears to view my web page just fine.
With IE5 installed I cannot view a web page title in the title bar at the top of the browser window. Netscape does show the page title properly which enabled me to fix the frames page to show Silicon Patch as my site name. I don't watch the title at the top of a browser so I didn't catch this problem. A reader made me aware of it, and now it is fixed.
I now see one of the problems with using frames is if you want the title of the current page to show up on the browser that it must take some HTML code work. As this site is currently configured no matter what page you are viewing in frames shows the title as Silicon Patch because that is what the frames page title is. If you open a page in a new window the title for that page is picked up and shown by the browser.
A quick search in help in FrontPage did not provide any answers on how to get the current page title to be shown by the browser. There is probably a command in HTML which tells the frames page to pickup the title from the current page and display it.
I had one problem with FrontPage today. Somehow one of my pages reverted to a text document which when I went to edit it would open in Notepad. I am not sure what caused this to happen. To solve the problem I had to force FrontPage to open the file and then do a save as to make the file an HTM file. Then I had to delete the text file and the next time I published the site FrontPage asked if I wanted to remove the test file from the Web Server.
I am going to try something different when writing the Work Journal. I am going to try write up a days worth of notes and publish it the next day. So what I write on Thursday July 8, 1999 will show up as notes for Friday. I think this will give more continuity to the site by only publishing once a day, and each day not having numerous updates as I have done in the past. There maybe exceptions to this when I come across something different or special that I know someone is watching for.
I found some Exchange 5.5 notes on the Microsoft site which I hope will help me get my Exchange server to communicate with my ISP. So far the ISP has not been any help but I am working on a new email to their support center which hopefully will generate results.
In DHCP Manger on my Primary Domain Controller I added an IP address reservation for my Exchange server. I found that while the ipconfig command shows the MAC address for the NIC with dashes, DHCP Manager will not allow them. The address must be entered as a continuous string of characters.
I am following the documentation for Exchange Internet Mail Service I got from Microsoft step by step to ensure that I have everything configured properly. I have verified that Exchange routes mail between users on my NT network.
Next I verified that Dial-up Networking is configured properly by dialing up the ISP and pinging a server on the internet by it's IP address and it's domain name. Both pings worked so according to the documentation my configuration is suitable for sending mail.
I ran both of these test before and was unable to send mail so there is another piece to the puzzle I have yet to find. I still think it has to do with Mail Retrieval settings under Dial-up Connections. This section can be configured to use ETRN, TURN or custom commands to communicate with the ISP's mail server and send/retrieve mail from it.
Not an overly productive day as far as the Silicon Patch goes. Did a bit of reading up on DNS, as DNS is one of the keys to getting Internet Mail Service working on my Exchange server.
Spent some more time on the Microsoft site looking for information on the Internet Mail Service. Had limited success in the TechNet section which would provide some interesting information but in my case when things started to look good the material would refer me to an appendix or section which had been omitted from the document. With online documentation like this the print industry has no need to worry about it's future, for when you buy a book you know you are getting a compete reference.
Got a call this morning ( Friday July 16 ) with news of a job offer which I accepted. Great way to start the day. The job is a one month contract to upgrade desktop and laptop computers to Windows NT 4 and Office 2000. I hope to make notes at work about the trials and tribulations of upgrading a variety of PCs and laptops to NT. This should be fun.
Decided to start off with a fresh install of NT Workstation
prior to installing Office 2000 Professional on my production PC in the Silicon
Patch. Strange thing happened, my OEM install
CD for NT
4 Workstation wanted to see an upgrade product before it would install. I have
not run into this before. I know I used the upgrade CD to make the startup
disks but I would not expect this to cause a problem. I solved the problem by putting
my NT 4 Server CD in the cd-drive and this worked as an upgrade product.
BootMagic got in the way of the install rebooting so I booted with a Win98 boot disk and used fdisk to make the partition NT is installing on the active partition. This did not work so I used PartitionMagic to change the active partition which failed to correct the problem. I let the Windows 98 partition boot and opened PartitionMagic and used the boot manager to remove Windows 98 from the boot manager and add Windows NT as the bootable partition. Voila I am back in business. Ah not so fast after NT converted the partition to NTFS it rebooted and Win98 came up again. I then set Windows NT as the default and disabled BootMagic and things started to act normal.
I installed SP5 off the server, then Office 2000 Pro except for PowerPoint. Then installed Outlook 2000 beta 2, configured second NIC to work with Shaw internet service and rebooted. Configured IE5 and Outlook and did a quick test and internet communications work fine.
Loaded video driver, reboot and set resolution, reboot again and all is
well except I realize that I forgot to install FrontPage 2000. I install it and
when I try to open my web site it blows up and will not open again. After trying
various things I uninstalled all the Office software and reinstalled Office 2000
beta to get started. Now FrontPage works so I can publish this and be done for
the day.
I found that I made an error in posting my web site earlier and FrontPage cleaned up most of the mess. I had to use LeechFTP to delete up some of the directories on the web server that FrontPage didn't remove.
Uninstalled both installations of Office and deleted the Microsoft Office directory under Program files. Installed FrontPage 2000 only from the beta CD and am working in it now so it appears to be working fine for the moment. I installed FrontPage in a directory called applications and will install Office 2000 Professional in the default directory.
I should explain that with previous versions of MS Office I found it possible to install a 120 day evaluation copy of say Office 95 Pro and then install on top of it a full retail version of Office 95 Standard. After this process none of the products would time out including Access which was a part of the Office Pro evaluation install only. I want to see if I can do the same with the Office 2000 beta and the Office 2000 Pro retail product. So far it is not working. It maybe that the problem is that I am using a beta and not a timed evaluation copy of the production code.
The last installs I did yesterday did not produce good results.
After all the install and uninstalls I have done I figure there are too many files from all the installs on the PC to have any chance of getting the beta of FrontPage to work with Office 2000 Pro. So I have started to reinstall NT 4. Once again I need an upgrade product for the installation to continue. I had better make an new set of startup disks sometime using the OEM CD. I used the install program to delete the old NT partition and selected the non partitioned space as the area to install NT.
After NT detected the first NIC I installed the driver for the second NIC. I have never tried to do this during the installation of the operating system before. As usual NT does not get the port and IRQ settings for my 3Com ISA card correct and I have to change the IRQ. I let the video pass with the default driver and will install the correct driver later. After NT reboots and I logon I installed the correct video driver for my Intel video card and choose not to reboot at this time. I instead reconfigure the port and interrupt settings for the second 3Com NIC and setup the IP addresses required for DNS and the gateway for my Shaw internet service as well as WINS for my LAN. After rebooting I have to fiddle with the video settings and end up having to reinstall the Intel driver during which I get a blue screen of death. Rebooting fails, last good known configuration fails as does VGA mode. The problem appears to be trying to load gfxi2c.sys. I have never run into this before and since I did not make the emergency repair disk I am going to start over again.
This time I will make the emergency repair disk. In preparation while NT is installing I have been using one of my NT servers to format floppies to use for the emergence repair disk. I have also been using the NT server to run WordPad which I am using to type these notes which I can later cut and paste into FrontPage. I have never made an emergency repair disk for NT during installation before. I have used rdisk to make one after ward though. It seemed strange that you answer yes that you want to make and emergency repair disk and them have to go through many more steps before you actually make the disk.
This time after the installation is done I have only reconfigured the second 3Com NIC and setup the gateway and DNS for Shaw and then let NT reboot. Ipconfig shows that both NICs are configured properly. I map a drive letter to a share on my server and install the Intel video driver. The driver change doesn't appear to have happened and I decide to leave things well enough alone for the moment and install service pack P5. After the SP5 install rebooted the PC NT tells me the display setting is wrong and now the Intel video driver is working and I can set the resolution to 256 colours at 1024 X 768 with large fonts. The font change requires a reboot.
Now for software installations. I install FrontPage only off the beta CD in a directory called application.
FrontPage is working fine as expected from earlier tries to run it by itself. I am typing this in FrontPage after cut and pasting the above work from WordPad and reformatting it to the default font and font size. Next to install Office 2000 Pro which I expect will kill FrontPage because it is beta code.
Installed Office 2000 Pro retail edition in to the default location. As predicted FrontPage is not happy and will not work. I uninstall all office components and reinstall the beta Office product to make use of FrontPage. I got the Office 2000 Pro full edition not the upgrade at a very good price so I think I may end up using the money I saved to buy FrontPage 2000 which will still put me ahead of the game if I had bought the Premium edition which includes FrontPage.
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The latest copy of The Computer Paper has an advertisement from www.stupidcomputer.com who are a Canadian on-line computer store. One of their reasons for you to shop on-line is that "Your wife won't notice you buying more computer stuff if she's sleeping!" This makes me think of a friend of mine who's wife notices when there is more or less computer stuff in the house. I on the other hand with no wife or roommate have only my bank account to answer to.
If you use Outlook and are having performance problems or are looking for ways to organize your data better check out http://www.maximum-tech.com/outlook.htm for an article written by Tom Syroid on Outlook file management.
One tip on Outlook I have to add to Tom's. If you setup multiple PST files you can set which one new mail will go to. Right click on the Personal folder you want to make the recipient folder for mail. Select properties and at the bottom of the properties page you will find a check box by the option "Deliver POP mail to this personal folders file". Click on the check box next to put a check in the box and click on the OK button. Now the next time you open Outlook your default inbox will have changed. This Personal folder becomes the default folder for incoming mail, contacts, drafts etc..
I have added a link to Shawn Wallbridge's web site, www.maximum-tech.com to my Favorite Places page under Recommended Daily Reading. The site contains Shawn's daily notes on computers and other daily happenings as well as articles on hardware, software and games.