January 26 2010 How to disable the BEEP sound in Terminal Services
In the following scenario:
- Using Microsoft Terminal Services (Windows 2003 or 2008).
- Sound redirection disabled at the server or turned off at the client
Certain system events will still cause the system to ‘beep’ out of the system speaker. Turning off Windows Sound Schemes doesn’t stop the notification beep. Note this is sound is NOT out of the normal soundcard/external speakers but will be out of the internal speaker on the motherboard. If you’re having this problem, you’ll know how incredibly annoying it is. After hours of digging online and trying different scenarios, I stumbled across a fix and have documented it here.
On the terminal server, open Regedit and navigate to the following key:
DisableBeep Registry Entry
Tags: terminal server, terminal services, Win2008
January 17 2010 The quickest way to install Joomla 1.5 on a LAMP server
So I was going to setup a website for my wife’s new gig on my web-server. I created the MySQL database, FTP account and configured Apache accordingly. After downloading the Joomla 1.5.15 tarball and starting the FTP upload to my web-server, I went looking for the Joomla quickstart guide. To my astonishment, the “quickstart” guide is a full 49 pages long. Awesome, to say the least…and not too quick.
Here’s another one of those blog posts that’s mostly self-serving but hopefully helps a few other Joomla hopefuls.
To install Joomla 1.5 on a LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) server:
- Download the tar or zip file from the www.joomla.org website
- FTP the contents of the file to your web server
- Browse to the URL of your web-server (the URL of where you uploaded it)
- Walk through the wizard, enter all information as needed.
- Once you’re at the ‘Congratulations’ page, reconnect via FTP and delete the ‘installation’ folder from the server.
- That’s it! You can now manage your Joomla site by going to the http://sitename.com/administrator address.
What’s great is that with the newer versions of Joomla, the admin console actually connects to your web-server using FTP to make changes to your config files and to upload Themes/Plugins, etc.. No more chmod’ing files on your web-server!
Tags: how-to, joomla installation, lamp
November 28 2009 How to select which IP version to ping
If you’re trying to ping something by hostname but only want to ping the IPv4 IP address, you’ll sometimes need to specify this when executing the PING command. Example on Win2008 & Vista (pinging the IP server.domain.com)
To ping and IPv4 IP:
ping server.domain.com -4
To ping an IPv4 IP:
ping server.domain.com -6
November 28 2009 Disable IPv6 on Win2008
Ever tried to remove IPv6 from Windows 2008? It can’t be done through Network Connections. You can uncheck/unbind it from your NIC but to completely disable IPv6 functionality, you’ll need to set this registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6Parameters\
Create DWORD32: DisabledComponent
Value: FFFFFFFF
November 16 2009 Win2008/IIS7 + PHP5 FastCGI = 404 Error Messages
Hopefully this saves someone some time. I spent hours working on a resolution before I came across it.
Background: Installed Win2008 + IIS7 + PHP 5.3 using the FastCGI method (used the Windows installer to configure IIS7).
Symptoms: PHP worked fine in my Default Site but when attempting to execute any scripts in Virtual Sites or Virtual Directories, every single PHP file would yield a 404 error message.
Solution: The problem ended up being that the ‘open_basedir’ config variable from the php config file is applied to ANYWHERE that PHP is run…regardless of what the actual home folder should be for a site (PHP picks up the basedir during installation and statically enters it in your php.ini file). The default ‘basedir’ will be whatever the root of your ‘Default Web Site’ in IIS is (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\). If you comment out this line (enter a semicolon before the line) and restart IIS, it will solve the problem. If you’re running PHP as a FastCGI module, you’ll actually have to rename (or copy) the php.ini file to a file named ‘php-cgi-fcgi.ini’ in the same folder as your php-cgi.exe executable. Be sure to restart IIS!
July 20 2009 Jailbreaking my iPhone 3G…not rocket science
I’m posting this here as a reference for myself and for anyone else who might be scouring the net looking for the easiest way to jailbreak their iPhone. I found some other guides but the utilities either crashed on my machine (Windows 7 beta), or the download links were broken. I watched this video, then downloaded the utils from his links, then watched again and jailbroke my phone while I followed his example. Worked like a charm….
Check out the video on YouTube
I’ve got some hacks that I’ve put together for a very specific purpose. I’m sure they’ll be useful to others but I can’t share them yet. I’ll post back here oneday when sharing them will be constructive :)
Tags: hack, jailbreak iphone
July 20 2009 Business Contact Manager on Terminal Services (Successful)
One of the many services I provide is hosted applications and managed, dedicated servers. A client that I recently picked up had a need for sharing his Microsoft’s Business Contact Manager database with several geographically separate associates. I’ve setup more than a handful of servers as Terminal Servers using both Citrix Metaframe (now XenApp Server), and pure Microsoft Terminal Services. One of my most recent deployments was for a medical practice and uses Windows 2008 w/Terminal Services and the applications deployed with the RemoteApp functionality. It worked like a charm for that client so I jumped at the opportunity to do it again for this new one.
So we setup the OS, installed Microsoft Outlook + Business Contact Manager and started to setup users…then we hit the brick wall. When we started setting up the users’ e-mail accounts to point to our Exchange Server (another hosted service I provide), we learned that, according to Microsoft, you can’t use Outlook in ‘cached mode’ on a terminal server. The whole concept of cached mode seems like it wouldn’t be necessary on a terminal server anyway since you would likely have the TS in the same datacenter as your Exchange server (which we DO). In our case though, we needed to enable cached mode because Business Contact Manager REQUIRES it to function.
Off to Google I went, searching for a solution. I found plenty of people saying it couldn’t be done who all ended up abandoning the idea altogether in favor of Microsoft CRM or ended up deploying PPTP VPN connections (which I avoid at all costs).
In the end, I found an article on David Overton’s blog that explains how to do it, although I had to modify the process a bit. I’m not sure if the changes were necessary because I’m using Win2008 whereas his article refers to Win2003 or not…but I got it working eventually. Here’s what worked for me:
My setup:
- All users were members of my Active Directory (AD) domain and in a group called “BCM Users”
- The terminal server (TS) is Windows 2008, is a member server, and has Office 2007 + Business Contact Manager installed.
What I did:
- Added the “BCM Users” group to the local “Administrators” group on the TS
- Logged onto the ‘console’ of the server using RDP from my client (Start > Run > ‘mstsc /v:ts.domain.local /admin)
- Setup the Exchange account in Outlook on the TS (Start > Control Panel > Mail > …..). The mail account setup wizard DID show the ‘cached mode’ box greyed out….ignore it for now.
- Launch Outlook and confirm that it can login to your account. You’ll probably get a warning that BCM will be disabled due to cached mode not being available…click OK and ignore this for now.
- Close Outlook.
- Open Regedit on the TS, navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\<OutlookProfileName>\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a
- In the right-hand pane, find the 00036601 key, double-click on it to edit.
- Change it to 84 19 00 00
- Click OK, close Regedit
- Remove the “BCM Users” group from the local “Adminstrators” group.
- Logout, log back in to the TS using a normal RDP session (i.e. not the console session)
- Launch Outlook.
- Business Contact Manager should work fine now!
Even after the steps above, if I view my Outlook account settings, it still shows that ‘cached mode’ is unchecked and greyed out. I think this registry hack just tricks BCM into thinking that it’s enabled but doesn’t actually enable it. No worries; it works for me!
Tags: bcm, business contact manager, exchange and bcm, outlook cached mode, terminal server, terminal services
July 16 2009 I don’t trust anyone’s cloud either. Screw it, I’ll run my own.
These days, pretty much everyone has their entire life online. Between Flickr and YouTube, plus other services like Google Docs and Gmail, everyone assumes there’s no reason to store anything offline anymore. But when some of the major players in the cloud computing space like Amazon S3, Google and Wordpress suffer downtime….more than once, it’s gotta make you wonder if the Internet-addicted public can deal with momentarily losing access to their precious data.
I spend a lot of hours online on a daily basis. Seeing as how I run an Internet Service Provider, it’s somewhat of a requirement I guess. Depsite this, I don’t use Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube or any of their clones to store my data online. I don’t recall ever making a conscious decision to stay away from them but never saw the need as it would mean that I have to login to umpteen different sites to access all of my data. If I keep it all on my workstation, with the magic of Remote Desktop and a broadband Internet connection, I can get to everything from just about anywhere.
But what about sharing the files with other people? Like sharing pictures of my kids with family? What about accessing my documents and Excel files without launching up my RDP client?
Instead of uploading all of my crap to all of these different sites online, I’ve decided to just setup my own dedicated server in our datacenter and run my own cloud. It’s pretty impractical for most people to do this, what with colocation space and server infrastructure being somewhat less of a commodity and all. But screw it….I’m not “most people”.
More to come later. I’ll do some homework on what apps/scripts I can use for Flickr-like functionality on my own server and post the results here for public consumption.
July 13 2009 Why does AT&T suck so badly
Ah, yes…the question of our time. Why does one of the largest and most recognizable brands of our time have the worst possible customer service and policies of anyone out there, and yet we STILL continue to give them our money. I run an Internet Service provider and we pay over $150k per year in service fees to AT&T for a multitude of services and still get treated like shit by all levels of customer service within their company. It’s insane and should be criminal.
Here’s what sparked this rant: I finally got fed-up with the fact that I pay over $50/month for each of my office telephone lines whereas I pay $26/month for the same exact calling plans & features on my home number. I decided to cut some costs and port all but one of our office telephone lines over to Broadvoice SIP trunks and just connect my Asterisk box up to them. The move will save me over $600/year for our company. I had to leave a single POTS line with AT&T so we could still have DSL service into our office for testing modems and for our 24×7 Torrent box.
After all of the lines being moved were ported to Broadvoice, I called to AT&T’s Business Customer service at the telephone number they list on my bill in-case I need to reach them. I was calling to get the additional calling features (Caller ID, Call forward, etc…) dropped since it’s only going to be used for the DSL connection riding on it.
Here’s what happened when I called; keep in-mind that I had my customer number and gave it to each person so it’s not like they don’t know who’s calling:
- The first person couldn’t find my account and said I must have dialed the wrong department so they transferred me somewhere else
- The second person said she found my account but it’s an ‘Industrial Account’ and she’s not authorized to help me, transferred again.
- The third person told me I’ll need to go into an AT&T retail store to make the change (What?! There’s no such thing as an AT&T ‘landline’ retail store)
- The fourth person told me I would need to e-mail my request into them: “I’m sorry sir but we don’t take orders over the phone for those changes.” My response: Are you fucking kidding me?! You’re a PHONE COMPANY!!
I gave up and decided to leave it for another day….or when I can delegate it to an employee to deal with. I wish there were a decent and affordable alternative to AT&T. NOW I see why the FTC (supposedly) trys to prevent monopolys from forming. Fucking christ…
