Real World Computing

These days, it seems that just about everyone feels that they have the right to update your computer automatically and for the least important applications. But the questions need to be asked; Exactly how critical is the update and what will happen if I don't do it? How much testing has been done on the impact of this update on the applications I like to run? What is the update doing to my startup? Who gets to decide the timing and what warning is given? What will the application do to my network? I'm not going to attempt to answer these questions in this post. I'm basically just going to whinge and then post updates as I get my policy in order. At the moment, I don't know what the best answers are. The Microsoft Whinge Microsoft used to provide only important security updates as "critical" but they are now putting out all sorts of unwarranted updates, like Internet Explorer 7, via the automatic distribution system. The really annoying thing about Microsoft...

Last week my neigbour accidently pressed the format button on her camera. After all, format usually means something quite different in non-computing language. To her horror, her camera quickly counted up percentages and then responded with "Card is Empty". She had not backed up any of her photos and was quite upset because the manual said that they were gone forever. Now I had heard that it was possible to unerase files on these cards, but I wasn't so sure about formatting but I tried a few things and presto.. well, actually quite a while later because recovery of over 1000 images took almost 3 hours, the photos came back. Here's how to do it... A Few Important Notes 1. Get yourself a card reader. This is really important, Stop connecting your camera to your computer. Those USB cables carry POWER as well as data. You don't really want to be putting power in places where you camera doesn't expect it do you? The USB card readers are about $20 these days an...

After obtaining some older hardware yesterday, we attempted to proceed with the Windows NT Domain Controller installation. Once again, our attempts ended in failure as we found the same problems as before (the network card needed service pack 3 or greater before it would install). Eventually, we ended up installing Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 server but not as a domain controller. We then used a product that we found on the Internet called UPromote to convert the server to a Backup Domain Controller. It worked, and our domain infrastructure is now safe for the moment... The one caveat with UPromote is that it prevents existing NT domains from being upgraded to active directories. I am not concerned with this limitation however as active directory should be designed and implemented from the ground up, not migrated from an existing NT domain.

Background Our company will shortly be moving office and as part of our pre-move testing, we need to give all of our servers a cold start. This doesn't guarantee that they will start at the new location but at least it proves that they have recently been able to cold boot. All of our servers, except one, are Microsoft Windows 2003 server. The one exception is a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 server which acts as our Primary Domain Controller. We used to have a backup domain controller but when we were asked to move everything to Windows 2003, we lost the device. Windows 2003 server cannot provide Windows NT Domain services. If you need login services in Windows 2003, you are required to run Microsoft active directory. It was always our intention to put Microsoft active directory on our servers at the earliest possible opportunity and to remove the Windows NT server entirely. Unfortunately, we never got around to the job due to other work commitments and the amount of planning requi...