Work Journal
For Week of August 9, 1999
Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I bought a new computer book to read, Windows NT Server 4.0 for Netware Administrators by Robert Bruce Thompson. I have been reading Robert Thompsons
day notes on the web for a while and from what little of the book I have read so far his
writing style appears to be the same on his web page as it is in the books he
writes. So far I have found the book quite informative as there has been information which other books I have never touched upon.
The fact that the book does some comparison of NT Server 4 and Netware 3.1X forces some information to the surface.
I was nice sitting out on the back step out of the sun reading and watching the neighbor
landscape his yard. A week ago his yard was over run by weeds so it makes me happy to see the yard finally being taken care of.
Some of the weeds were waist high.
I am going to try to reading part of a computer book every day. I have done this in the past but mostly in the process of studying for one certification exam or another. I have no immediate plans to try for any more certifications but I want to keep learning more as I would like to move from doing desktop support type work to network support..
I came across some information on Office 2000 today. There are apparently issues when using Office 2000 and Lotus Notes in regards to embedded objects. I don't have specifics but it was mentioned when I brought up my little discovery. I ran into a case where Word 2000 would open a Word 95 document but not the linked Word 95 or Excel 95 documents within it. Word would act as if it wanted to install another component such as a converter, then try and install it only to end with another message that it was unsuccessful at fixing the application. But why would a converter be needed if Word 2000 was already opening a Word 95 document already?
The document had been emailed to the user so I suggested they see if they could get it resent to them as the attachment my have been corrupted in the emailing process. This did not help to find a solution as the new copy had the same problem. I later found that another user with the same document had no problems with the linked files when opened with Word 2000. I now think the problem may be with the installation of Office 2000. I hope to get a chance to reinstall Office 2000 to test my theory.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
My present job is a term position which ends on the 20th of August. There is a chance I maybe offered more work by the same company but no guarantee. So it was nice to get a phone call today about another position which is for full time work. I interviewed for this position almost two months ago with an agency. They are only now getting around to filling the position. There is also another contract position I have to follow-up on next week which is a lead my friend the Simian Man gave me. I have already talked to one person about the position, but the person doing the hiring is on holidays.
I ride my bicycle to my current job where there are showers and a bike lockup in the building I work in. Today I was running a little late and as fate would have it I got a flat tire. So I had to stand at the side of the road and change the tube in my tire so I could get to work even later. Now tonight I have to fix the flat tube so I can have a spare with me in the morning.
Now off to get some more reading done.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I'm up in the middle of the night and it's raining and the lightning is lighting up the sky. I've got time on my hands so I dug up my UPSs and hooked them up to my server and primary workstation.
I have eliminated the Favorite Places page from the site and updated the Bookmarks Index with the contents of the old Favorite Places page. I find I like the Bookmarks page alot when accessing the internet with a computer other than my own. I also find that at times I use the Bookmarks page when I am at home cause it works so well for me.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
My mother received the Armada Notebook computer via courier today. This is the first time she has seen the difference between the Armada and her old NEC notebook. She is very happy with the large screen and how quickly the Armada boots. She has not spent much time with it yet, but has lots of bookkeeping to do in the next few days so I will hear more from her on the weekend of how much she likes the Armada.
One of the people I work with just got the Shaw Wave service at home. The installer put all the Shaw software on the PC and now Outlook will not work anymore because of a dll version change. He uses the computer for work, and the business supplied the computer to him. He uses Outlook for communicating with people at work by dialing into an Exchange server. Now he is SOL until he can get the Outlook media from work so he can reinstall Outlook. He is a quite knowledgeable user so he is probably better off doing the reinstall himself than waiting for Shaw to rectify the situation.
The fact that installing one software package installs a different dll file version for its own use which affects other software packages bothers me. Why does installing software have to copy files to common directories which will affect other software's ability to function. If you use enough different software especially software of vastly different ages you are bound to run into problems with dll files. It usually turns out if you install the software in the right order that you will get things so that everything will work. I had to to this when setting up the Armada for my mother as I had to install an old family tree package as well as Office 2000. A dll file was overwritten and the family tree software would not run. I had to reinstall it to change the dll file version to one that the family tree software would operate with. When I did this I remember wondering if this was going to cause a problem with any other software. I opened each app without any problems, but if there is going to be a problem it may not arise just from starting an application. But why should we have to juggle things like this. Either the operating system should be able to juggle the various dll versions ( I understand the Mac OS will allow multiple dll version to be installed and builds links between the various dll versions and the application so that there are no version conflicts.) or design software so that it keeps all the files it needs within it's own directories.
The nice thing about the Dos days and Windows 3.X is that most software was self contained. You could copy the whole software directory to another partition or even to another computer and execute the exe file and the application would run. Just try that with any so called modern software. We read in the press occasionally about ease of use, well I classify having software which when installed will not cause any changes which affect other application ease of use. I wonder if things like this ever come up in software development meetings, or are the developers too busy thinking about integration of the software with the Operating System and/or making the GUI more intuitive that thinking of the real world affect the way the architecture of their product will have on the average user.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
My little rant on the subject of dll file management yesterday produced the following comments from my friend the Simian Man:
One of the other things that we should keep in mind is that Windows 2000 will "protect" its core files by reexamining them at boot up and replacing them with "reliable" versions each time you start the computer. I tend to think that this is going to be the norm rather than the exception. At first, the sharing of DLLs and other files seemed to make sense. You did not have duplicates of the same files which saved room and allowed file cleaning programs to work better (not correctly just better). What someone forgot to contend with is that newer versions are not necessarily always downwards compatible, or, downwards compatible to a certain extent. Therefore apps are in danger of not working whenever we load or unload certain files or programs. And as we can see, this problem does not pose a problem for legacy applications but to more current programs. One has to wonder if a governing body for software standards is not just around the corner?
Simian Man
His comment that a governing body for software standards maybe just around the corner I think would have some people answering that we already do, and that self imposed governing body is Microsoft.
***
Installed the Power Chute software, which came with my APC
Back-UPS Pro 280 on my NT server. Communications between the UPS and the server
via link cable was not working on com1 but would work on com2.
I scheduled a shutdown and the server shutdown properly.
Startup was another matter which I expected. The case I built this server with
has a power switch on the power supply which is not all that helpful these days
as motherboards are controlled by Power Management which we tell to put the PC
in power off or power on mode by pushing the power button. It is interesting how
when I turn on the power supply switch my printer cycles cause it receives a
signal when power reaches the motherboard, but the PC does not power up. The PC
will only power up if I push the power button which tells Power Management to
put the system in power on mode.
I powered the server down and tried putting a jumper on the
power switch posts which resulted in the PC starting a POST test then seconds
later powering down. I then reconnected the power switch and opened the manual.
The motherboard is an ABIT BH6, which from what I can get from the users manual
no matter what you do some form of power management is always on which makes any
UPS which could bring my server backup after a power failure pretty useless. At
least when the UPS powers my server down I won't lose any data or corrupt
anything due to a power failure ungracefully shutting my server off.
The power management on my Abit BH6 mother board has
several ways you can configure it to put the system in power up mode, Resume by
LAN, Power on by Ring, Power on by Alarm and PM Timer Events. I tried turning on
all but PM Timer Events but the UPS would not communicate to the server with
this configuration. I then switched to only enabling Power on by Ring hoping
that the UPS may simulate the ring of a modem to wake the server. This
configuration allowed the UPS to communicate with the server only after I
switched the cabling for the UPS to com1. A scheduled power down then worked
fine again, but power up failed again as I had to once again push the power
button to bring up the server.
I then turned Power Management control by APM off and disabled Power on by Ring, and had to switch the UPS link cable back to com2. Tried another scheduled shut down which worked but once again server does not power up again when the UPS is ready again.
One problem with these scheduled shut downs is that the UPS requires a minimum 6 minute shut down according to the software which wastes alot of my time.
I wonder if there is a BIOS update of some type which may
change the way the Power Management is controlled? I looked at the Abit
web page and there is a BIOS update but it doesn't help me at all. I think the
next time I decide to build a server I need to look at a motherboard which is
designed to be used in a server.
Enough time spent on this tonight. Time to move on.
***
I liked the way the batch file I made for my mother did her backup that I made one for myself to copy my data to my CD-RW. The following is the first generation of the batch file.
@echo off
cls
@echo on
@echo --- Please close all applications ---
@pause
@echo off
cls
@echo on
xcopy f:\appsdata e: /s /e
@pause
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
The problem I had yesterday with having to change com ports constantly while testing the UPS shut down feature, one of resources. When I checked for available ports in Control Panel I only found com2. Prior to working with the UPS both com1 and com2 were available. The Event Viewer showed problems with resources on com port 1. After a bit of experimentation I ended up manually configuring com port 1 & 2. Now I get a clean boot and the UPS communicates on com port 1 showing statistics on the UPSs status. I can now repeatedly have PowerChute plus shut down the server then manually restart the server and have the UPS communicate with the server without having to change the cabling to a different com port each time.
After discussing yesterdays fun with the UPS with a friend we decided to see if trying to use Power Management as a tool instead of just turning it off would have any affect. So on my workstation I started by enabling the pre-configured minimum Power Management setting and ended up with neither of my NICs wanting to work anymore. As soon as I turned off all power management I got the use of both NICs back again. So it seems that on my workstation anyway Power Management causes hardware problems.
The idea was to see if I could get Power Management setup so that when I shut down Windows NT the PC it would power itself down. This works on my Compaq EN 350 but not on my home built machine. One good thing did come out of this though. One Power Management feature is of use, Power Button Override makes the power button work much better. I press and hold the button for four seconds and the PC shuts off. By holding the power button for less than four seconds the PC goes into stand-by mode. When I push the power button to turn the PC on again it works properly. This could not be said before as sometimes the power would come on for a brief second then turn off. Only by cycling the power supply could I get the PC reset so that the power button would work again.
I did some web crawling looking for information on APC UPSs and found little information on rebooting a PC or server after the power has been restored. Some of the high end systems have a serial card which goes into the computer and another card goes into the UPS to control shut downs and reboots of the computer.
Either there are UPSs that can communicate via serial cable to a computer that it should go into Power on mode, or most computers have Power Management which can be set so that when power is reapplied after a power outage that the computer can restart. Without one or both of these options a UPS that only keeps your PC running during short power outages or shuts it down during long outages is only doing half a job in my eyes. If when the power returns the computer cannot be returned automatically to a running state, the whole reason to me for having a UPS is partially lost.
I downloaded the latest ROMPaq, Diagnostic and Setup software for my Compaq EN 350 to see what changes to the system it would make. I didn't see anything new, and maybe my memory is playing tricks on me but I seem to recall the Power Management having more options. I also thought I could recall at one time being able to configure the Power Management so that simply by plugging in the PC the PC would boot. I can't seem to get it configured that way now.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I ran my backup batch file last night and it worked smooth as silk. It is so much faster and simpler than having to manually select the directory and drag and drop it to the CD-RW. I also don't have to worry about dealing with messages about overwriting files as xcopy take care of everything for me. Alternately I could delete the old data from the CD-RW then copy the new data which is what I had been doing lately till I wrote the batch file.
***
I got a call this morning from a friend who I do computer support for. The old P120 I gave her was giving a CMOS battery error. I found this very strange as I had put a new battery on the motherboard before I gave her the PC. The old battery was not strong enough to maintain the current time and date. I solved the problem by putting in a new battery. Now the new battery has been on the motherboard for less than a year. I hope this is just a case of a lemon battery. My friend lives out in the country so I can't just run over and change the battery for her, so I gave her a few instructions and she will change the battery herself.
***
After working on the Compaq EN last night I am in the mood to do more with it. So I deleted all the partitions except for the diagnostic partition and then booted from the CD for the newest release candidate of Windows 2000 Professional I have ( build 2072 ). The previous version had no problems with this hardware so I don't expect any this time either.
I like the basic install of Windows 2000 as it requires very little user intervention. I do a few things like identify that I want the partition to be NTFS and the install completes while I work on other things.
The install went with out any problems as I expected it would. USB works and my Microsoft Sidewinder Freestyle Pro USB game controller was detected during the install.
I went into Device Manager in System Properties and all the system devices show no errors except that com port 2 shows up twice with one of them flagged as a problem. I deleted the extra port and let the system reboot. After the reboot Windows 2000 did not try to install any new hardware and when I checked Device Manager the extra com port had not returned.
Under Users and Passwords in Control Panel there is an option that users do not have to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to login. By default Ctrl+Alt+Del is selected, I deselected it to see what happens and had to reboot. The result is that the login screen comes up right away so you don't have to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to get to the login screen. The claim in Users and Passwords is that it is recommended that you require users to press Ctrl+Alt+Del before logging in as it ensures password security. Unless there is something buried within the Ctrl+Alt+Del action I cannot see how this affects security other than stopping a passing stranger from seeing a user ID. If a PC had just been booted and was sitting at the login screen, I can certainly see how some environments would want to protect users IDs since having a valid user ID puts a hacker one step closer to breaching a networks security.
***
With my current employment coming to a close on the 20th I spent part of the afternoon checking the net for job opportunities. I also have online resumes with a few job search sites which I updated.