Work Journal
For Week of August 23, 1999
Page Updated Wednesday, December 22, 1999 10:01 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have bits and pieces of computers and have decided that a good project for the day would to build another PC for a project I have been thinking about. I have a socket 7 motherboard with a Pentium 90 CPU on it, and extra AT case etc. which will build-up into a good enough machine for my project.
http://www.motherboards.org/search/wais.cgi is an good resource if you have an old motherboard and don't know who the manufacturer is. Enter a motherboard model number in the search field and check the data base for the manufacturer so you can lookup BIOS updates etc. on the manufacturer's web site. I found this useful in finding that the motherboard I am using was made by Atrend. The bad part is like many technology companies they do not put information on old products on their web page. My next resort was to email my friend who I got the board from and hope that he still has the configuration documentation for the Atrend ATC 1020 motherboard.
The problem I am having is that the motherboard does not detect a keyboard. I have tried two different AT keyboards with no success. I also tried to use a serial connection with no success. The motherboard has pin-outs for PS2 but I do not have the correct connector for it, but I did try attaching a serial port connector to it with no success. What I am thinking is there maybe a pin setting on the motherboard to switch from an AT keyboard connection to PS2. But without documentation I have no way of knowing if this is the case.
Since my cobbled together PC is not working for the moment I took the hard drive I put in it an put it in my Exchange server which I am not using right now. This will get me going, but in the long run I will need my Exchange server operational again.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
It turns out that the motherboard I was given may have been defective before I got it. My friend is not sure but thinks that maybe the reason the board was not in use but sitting in a box was that it was not functioning properly.
The Discovery Channel is airing Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History of the Internet: Networking The Nerds this week. I caught a bit of part one this evening and it is definitely worth watching if you enjoy learning about the history of computing from the people who made what we now call the Internet.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
The quality of service some companies are providing via the web is at times very poor. A particular driver I have been trying to get from 3Com has been unobtainable for the past two days cause the page where it is located has not been available. I also got a modem driver off the old Digital site today which requires you to use an install program for the driver. The install program for the driver locks NT 4 Workstation up tighter than a drum forcing me to power down the laptop I am working on. After several attempts to install the driver I broke down and used the standard modem driver that comes with NT. By no means a perfect solution but the only workable one I have at the moment.
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I watched part two of "Nerds 2.0.1 - A Brief History of the Internet: Networking The Nerds" tonight. It was very interesting to learn how companies like Sun, Cisco and McAfee were started.
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A project I have slowly been gearing up for is to see how Windows 2000 and Novell 4.11 work together using ZENworks. I would have until recently chosen to do this project with SMS but for reasons I don't care to make public I am going to use ZENworks instead. My current problem is that there is no publicly available Novell ZENworks client available for Windows 2000. In the short term I am going to work with NT 4 Workstation, and when the client for Windows 2000 becomes available I will switch from Windows NT to Windows 2000.
For this project so far I have setup a Novell 4.11 server and one NT workstation. Tonight I am setting up a second NT workstation. One NT machine will be my admin PC, the other will be an end user PC. I would really like to have a laptop to add into the mix especially when I start working with Windows 2000, but I don't currently own a capable enough laptop, and buying or leasing one is not currently in the Silicon Patch budget.
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A trick I learned not too long a go is that the Product ID number you enter when installing NT or Win9x are interchangeable. So for example if you are doing an install of Windows NT and can't find the Product ID for it but can lay your hands on one for Windows 95, you can use the Windows 95 Product ID to install Windows NT.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I must be in some kind of a time distortion today. I often send emails to my home address with notes etc.. Well today I sent one note early this morning. Now at home I check my mail and see several notes I have sent myself and I have a hard time rationalizing that the earliest note was sent today and not yesterday.
Any way the first note was about a very neat driver written to work in NT with Digital HiNote Ultra 2000 laptops, which makes it so you do not need multiple hardware configurations to use a port replicator. The docking manager driver works in the background and if it detects that there is a port replicator attached, the NIC, mouse etc. connected to the replicator are all usable. This is the way laptops were meant to work.
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I found and interest registry hack for Windows NT today. To hide a NT Workstation or Server from network in Regedit go to:
HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
Create a new Dword called "hidden" and set the value to 1
Now your computer is not visible in Network Neighborhood. Your computer does not disappear from the list of available resources right away. I takes some time before all the polling is done and your computer is gone from Network Neighborhood.
I have started a registry hacks page. I will add the above hack to it.
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I now have Novell Client32 installed on one of my project PCs and am working on installing support pack 6 on the server which is required for the install of ZENworks 2.0. The support pack is easy to install, just copy an executable file to the sys volume on the Novell server and run it from a DOS prompt. The file extracts files and builds a directory structure of the new files which will be installed using the install utility to the appropriate directories. Well the install utility would not recognize the install file on the server. I think the fact that I did not have long file name support installed my have had an effect on my results. I installed long file name support, and started the process over again.
Still no dice. I have installed support packs before with no problems. I will look at this again tomorrow when hopefully my brain will be functioning a bit better than it is tonight and I can get this install working.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I found a newer version of support pack 6 for Netware 4.11 and downloaded it. I deleted the extracted files from the previous version I was working with last night and then extracted the files for the newer version of support pack 6. This version has the same problem, it will not install. I have yet to find copies of the older support packs but have found support pack 7 which I am downloading and will try to install.
Its time like this that I am glad that I have a cable modem connection to the internet. These support packs are 35 Mb for version 6a and 47 Mb for version 7. With downloads this is size a cable modem is the only way to go. Tonight I am getting download speeds of 85Kbps. This makes these large files downloads of several minutes instead of hours.
I just noticed that the two support packs I have tried are called Localized Netware Support Packs while version 7 is called just a Netware Support Pack. I didn't notice the difference in names till now. Possibly there is a difference I am not aware of!
I may have found download heaven as far as working on my Novell server goes. http://support.novell.com/search/ff_index.htm is an index of Novell downloads. Under beta I found the Windows 2000 beta client.
Well version 7 did not do the trick, the install program says it cannot find the install file it needs to start the installation process. If I intentionally enter a fictitious directory I get the same error message as when I use a valid directory. This make me think that something somewhere is not installed correctly or is corrupt. I may do a fresh Netware install on the weekend to see if things get any better. Mean while I am installing ZENworks 1.1 to see if it will install correctly without any upgrades being required on the server OS first. Well version 1.1 installed without any problems. I'll start working with it on the weekend.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
For those who browse sites which make use of PDF files and you use IE5 you should look into upgrading to Acrobat 4. Version 4 integrates into IE5 much better than version 3. In many cases you will not even realize that you are using the Acrobat plug-in in IE5 to read a PDF file.
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Even though I now have a working install of ZENworks 1.1 I have decided to rebuild my Novell 4.11 server before I proceed any further. So I have fdisked the non-DOS partition which Novell created and deleted the nwserver directory off the DOS partition and started the install process.
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Lets say you have a server and a workstation but they are not setup to work with each other. This is not a very useful situation. You wire the server and the workstation together with a couple of Network Interface Cards ( NIC ) and connect them with a hub and Ethernet cable. Well now they are connected but they sit can't communicate cause there is no mechanism in place for them to communicate with even though the Ethernet cable provides a physical medium to communicate over. Now you install IPX or TCP/IP on the server and workstation and now there is a common medium for the two computers to communicate with. Well if you used TCP/IP and you can ping each computer you have verified that communications are working.
Now in this day of computing the majority of us are using a Windows based computer so to be able to do more than ping the server, say read and write files to the server we need a way to log onto the server. The common method to do this by is to install a client on the workstation and configure it to allow a user with a valid user ID and password to logon to the server. Once logged onto the server the end user will have access to a variety of resources on the server such as printing and file storage.
Now if you only have one PC to connect to your server it is not a problem for a network administrator to physically visit the PC and configure the client software with the proper server or domain name etc. so the end user can logon to the server. The problem is when you have many PCs to configure to connect to the server, this can be an over whelming job for the Network Administrator.
This brings us to the first part of my Windows NT 4 Workstation, Novell 4.11 networking project. How to simplify the configuration Windows NT and Novell's client software to allow the end user to logon to the network with minimal work by the Network Administrator.
Now there are two ways to approach this, install NT then install the Novell client, or do a combined install of NT and the Novell client. I am going to start off with doing a combined install of NT and the Novell client software.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have a case where I try to keep all the driver disks for the various NIC cards I have. Today I need the driver disk for a 3Com card which I know I have used recently. I look everywhere and cannot find it. Then it turns up still in the floppy drive where I used it last.
I copied the contents of the floppy to the driver directory on my NT server so I will always have a copy of the drivers if I can't locate the floppy again.
I dug up an old boot disk which is setup to connect to a Novell server. I copied the floppy so I don't make a mess of my original disk. On the duplicate floppy I modified the net.cfg file to reflect my servers name and set the first network drive to F:. I then copied 3C5X9.com to the nwclient directory on the boot floppy, and modified the autoexec.bat file to load LSL, 3C5X9, IPXODI, VLM then change to drive F:, and the execute the login command. I boot my test admin PC with the floppy which successfully connected to the Novell server and prompted me to enter my login name.