The Grumpy IT Admin

I read a few blogs and tech sites that started of as blogs (sometimes before the world discovered blogs) and the one thing that tends to strike me is that whilst the content is often very useful and informative the command of the English language of some bloggers is really quite poor. There are, perhaps, several reasons for this, things like lack of a spell checker in the built in blogging tools on websites, the need to blog there and then, phone texting and street language all spring to mind. Twitter is is prime site for poor grammar and misuse of words with too and to and your and you're seemingly being interchangeable and having no separate meanings. Whilst I can forgive the immediacy of Twitter and the like, Blogs should be a more considered place for one's writing and bloggers should be putting more effort in to their work. A recent post I read went something along the lines of "....suppliers were trying their up most to...". Up most, from the word upperm...

Had the pleasure of install our first 2008 R2 Domain Controller today. All went splendidly, after following through the various MS documents on how to do it and what to check beforehand. Adprep had been run over a year ago as the project was sidelined several times due to other things getting in the way. Only glitch was that after running DCPromo on the new DC it restarted and whilst I could logon I couldn't get a desktop just a normal blue wallpaper. Only option was Ctrl+Alt+Del and to log off, even task manager wouldn’t run.  A reboot to safe mode with networking and all was well.  So I had a look in the event logs and spotted the following error The Windows logon process has failed to spawn a user application. Application name: . Command line parameters: C:\Windows\system32\userinit.exe Lots of Googling lead me to a MS kb article ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970879 ) which explains that if the Interactive and Authenticated users were not in the Local Users grou...

Update and more info available in part 2   Hit a weird problem with our EqualLogics drives. The drives themselves are fine but replicas and snapshots of some direct attached NTFS volumes would mount onto a machine but would not get a drive letter automatically, I could add one manually but it wouldn't stick after a reboot and services like SQL would not run. I could copy the data off the drive and this was data was fine. I was able to delete a volume, create a new one but not format it, this is where I got a read only error. Trying another drive I found I couldn't copy anything on to it, I got the same error This caused a lot of head scratching till I noticed the word hidden next to the drive in Diskpart. A quick Google found a Microsoft kb article that described the problem and how Diskpart could fix it. After attaching the drives, go in to Diskpart and list volumes and you will see that the Volumes are given the Hidden attribute. To clear this...

Just to be clear on how much I don't like developers here's a question for you. Why does sliced bread never fit in toasters? Because designers never use them. Its the only explanation I can think of, if they used them in the real world with loaves of bread brought from Tesco they would realise that normal sliced bread is 2 or 3 cm longer or deeper than the meager slots they provide. Developers are much the same, they never seem to test anything in the real world with real users. That is why even nowadays you come across so many applications that assume the user is in the local admins group and can write to the Program Files and Windows directories. If they tested these things properly they would pick these things up and wouldn't need to rely on Admins to fix it so their programs can actually be used. Web apps are supposed to be the answer to this. They can be run anywhere by anyone. Or can they? If the use ActiveX then no, we are talking windows only and you nee...

We use SAP and when moving from the 710 client to the 720 we came across an odd error. We install using the a SAP server distribution point and then change the SAPLogon.ini file in the Windows directory so the user get the correct links available to them depending on their role. This worked fine for 710 but on some systems users were getting the default settings only and it seems that sometime the install defaults to looking for the saplogon.ini file in the user's Appdata\Common\SAP folder. this in itself is a good thing but a bit of a nightmare to mange across several hundred PC, before we would just copy an ini file to the windows directory and all users on that PC got the same things now we potentially had to manage that ini file in multiple users accounts which gets bit more involved on teh scripting side. I then came across an article that mentioned the SAPLOGON_INI_FILE system variable. You can set this so that it looks at a central location on the PC and then your life ...

Did I mention about Windows CALs for printers? Well not printer specifically but those all in one big photocopier, come printers come scanners. Often referred to as MFDs or multi-function devices. If they scan stuff and copy it to a network share on a Windows server you need to have a server CAL for it. I wouldn't be surprised if you need a CAL if something on your network is doing DNS lookups or claiming a DHCP address. I am not particular lover of Linux but there more I learn about the more restrictive licencing practices Microsoft are in to the more I yearn for a simpler life. CALs are probably the most irksome form of licencing known to man. It is shame that the EU and US justice system seem hell bent on removing useful bits of Windows for some imagined slight on providers of free software but do nothing about onerous licencing practices that are hidden behind an impenetrable forest of words that are at forefront of mumbo jumbo legalese. Plain licensing terms in plain E...