The problems with the local network domain seem to be at an end: only one computer has need of the ASR operation. That is the white box, Oxford, that won't accept floppies into its A: drive. I will have to determine what's wrong there. Firstly, however, I need to install casters on the primitive box that it and the ML570 stand upon, and with at least 250lb of books contained on the shelves. That will help me work with the computers, because the ML570 has serious weight. It's not easy turning it on its side to open the case but it's much easier to work with the constituent parts when it's in that position. With space constraints in this room demanding alleviation, then a movable "table" will certainly help, but the casters need to be heavy duty. I shall go down to Preston Hardware: their stock is excellent, and I can trust them for quality.

The ML570 G Server, now the sole DC in the network, is to have a new adapter. Having gained an U320 LSI adapter on eBay, which is in transit, I am trying, from the service manual pdf, to find out if the cables will need to be replaced to suit the requirements. There is little that is mentioned about the yellow and blue SCSI cables that attach to the drive cages. One thing that I must do is back up all of the drives installed in the cages, whether RAID arrays or JBODs. I don't know whether the adapter will import designations made under the currently installed Adaptec 3200s controller. That will be removed and kept as a spare until needed elsewhere: the network slowly grows, and RAID arrays are needed for reliable storage.

Thursday, January 3rd., 2008: I realised that the A: drive connector on Oxford was probably reversed. That was easily fixed after I took under an hour to put casters on the wooden support box and replace Uncle Tom Cobley. Moving the book/computer 'stand' is now easier than it was, although there is serious weight involved.

However, XP Pro on the white box, Oxford, gave me page file errors and refused to start. Windows almost started and immediately closed down to reboot without allowing one to capture the screen or have time to read it. Shutting down and swapping all of the memory sticks cured that, and now I am performing an ASR on Oxford whilst I write this. Microsoft requested a report on a major start up fault. What it offered as a reason was inapplicable, so I told them what had happened and how I fixed it. Why not? Some people refuse to advise Microsoft, but then wonder why they can't find a cure later.

Friday, January 4th., 2008: GreatDeals00 indeed. The last two zeros imply something. Yet another 147GB U320 drive is giving me problems. I have bought too many drives to be fooled by thinking that the failure rate of this vendor's goods is normal. Four of eighteen of this capacity have now failed. Given my experiences with other drives, of all types, whatever this dealer is selling are fake goods.

Here is the email I sent to GreatDeals00 today:
The first two paragraphs are taken from the advertisement on eBay for a typical sales pitch by the vendor:

I had, late last year, approached eBay: their statement that anything they do must be kept private, given that this vendor's drives constitute a significant proportion of all of the U320 drives sold within their structure, means that the money they make from him clouds their thinking. The problem is serious: I cannot afford to have drives fail like this, for any reason.

Here is the email sent to me by eBay after my complaint:

Note the LSI revisions. All three adapters, one of which is the on-board chip, differ.

Now, it worsens: I removed the Leicester PCI LSI U320 adapter, because I wanted to determine if I could update the firmware on the computer's on-board chip. The machine would not produce video, although other activity was apparent. The cable and PCI card were reinstalled, and now the problem remains with no video apparent. Ridiculous situation, there are no beeps coming out of the machine, so it presumably believes itself healthy. Now what? Replacement is preferable, methinks.

Wednesday, May 21st., 2008: Well, it was not any of the adapters: the problem is the aging of the on-board cable. Because it cools and warms and because it has a really hard fold in it, which those of you who have such a machine should be aware of, it has perished. I took the recalcitrant machine, Leicester, down to CSH, and we played around with it. Ultimately, we discovered that the cable was faulty by putting the shop's cable into the computer. Immediately, everything worked as it should. So, I await the arrival of the terminating resistor, and when I place it in the cable that I have, then everything should work properly. It means that I should also replace the cable on the "good" Dell fairly soon.

This is the second time that this model made by Dell has acted as if it were a laptop. I must, repeat must, _always_ check the damned cables before doing anything at all to do with physical problems that arise on my computers. We had, at CHS, Computer Supply House, changed the motherboard, checked the connectors, and pratted about uselessly. When Dave suggested using the on-board cable on the adapter, which has two connectors, the problem continued, and was, it appeared, worse. When we placed the round workshop SCSI multi-connector cable in the Dell, then the LSI BIOS awoke and told us everything worked as it should. Wonder of wonders.

Thursday, May 22nd., 2008: One should double check before closing the case: I checked the properly working Dell, Monmouth, today, to see what condition the on-board cable was in. It seemed fine, in a lot better condition than the faulty one in Leicester. When I replaced the connectors, I thought that they were properly fastened. This proved wrong, since one of them was not quite tight. This produced lots of errors with the computer. I had to shut down and go over every SCSI connection once more, and this did the trick. Only one LSI adapter is shown, nonetheless.

Saturday, May 24th., 2008: New terminating resistor for the cable attached to the on-board LSI on Leicester works as required. Only one of the LSI chips is needed, since the cable takes more than the number of drives in the machine. That means I have a spare LSI 53C1030 PCI-X card. I tried to use it in the ML570, but it is not compatible with the drive cage installed therein, which is U160 based. The machine kept starting up into MS 2003 R2 Ent and then rebooting: not too good. So, back to the Adaptec 29160n, and that works well enough. 

Tuesday, May 27th., 2008: A moderator, Sorinso, on the Petri Forums, mentioned that he uses Minicom KVM. I have been looking at their products on their site, and they have what is called Smart IP Access, which includes CAT5 IP cable connection. That means, I think, that I could use their equipment on my two Domain Controllers that currently cannot be used with ordinary KVM switches. Something to think about.

Wednesday, May 28th., 2008: I have been having perpetual synchronisation with off-line folder problems with Outlook. I have tried everything that I have found through various forums, including removing My Documents settings. Nothing has worked, so I have installed Thunderbird, which imported most of my settings and all of my email folders. I have been having problems setting up the securemail settings. If that is completed then I shall not be using Outlook any more.

Somewhere there is a flaw: I can access the MyHosting WebMail applet with the correct password. I can open Outlook and it will receive. I cannot make Thunderbird accept the password, even though opening Outlook and resetting the password worked therein.

 



The Account settings are almost identical to those in Outlook. The inability warning messages are shown above, too. Can't figure out the problem. I have set and reset the password in Thunderbird tens of times this evening.

With regard to KVM problems see this on the HP forums: ML570 G1 array config utility. It refers to the inability to have the ML570 BIOS seen by the KVM software, even those that use IP via CAT5 cable, such as items available from MiniCom.

Thursday, May 29th., 2008: The problem was simply that, unlike in Outlook, one does not check the Use secure authentication in Thunderbird allied to the port change. When I unchecked that in the relevant accounts, for which see the third image above, everything worked.

Friday, May 30th., 2008: I have installed/updated MS Office to 2007. Immediately after starting Outlook it asked me to install Instant Search. I decided not to, because I think that that may have been the culprit. We shall see. I had to hard reset the computer after returning from today's journeying. The clock had remained frozen at the time early this morning that Outlook 2003 had begun synchronising, and was still doing so and preventing any other action on the computer from executing. That at six in the evening. Hence I have been updating to Office 2007 on all, but one, of the relevant computers.

I am just writing on another page, and up comes a statement from the task bar that Outlook has completed a data check? What? It means that it thinks somewhere there is a problem in a .PST file. Scanpst.exe to the rescue?

Saturday, May 31st., 2008: Crossing my fingers slows my keyboard typing, but perhaps I need not. Outlook seems to be working properly again. There is a bar on the main page that irritates me: it wants me to install Instant Search. I don't think so: I would rather use the OS version, that I have returned to the Windows 2000 style. That was done to facilitate efficiency, because the latest style is all show, no knickers.

Sunday, June 1st., 2008: Outlook has remained operational, although when typing a message it often hangs. One has to wait before it becomes usable once more.

I shall have to obtain a round U320 cable for Monmouth, this double-headed box. I had trouble with the flat cable working itself loose under pressure and creating problems with one drive in particular. The cable is stressed because there is no straight run throughout, which means that its strength works against maintaining proper connections. The first two drives are 68-pin, and are followed by three SCA items. The connectors do not remain in line, and any knocks on the case, or other matters, will produce the results I had. When I had moved one of the drives to another slot, and given it the PCI-X LSI instead of the on-board chip, and put the other drive onto the on-board connector, everything started up as normal.

The latest Excel, version 2007, that I am now using instead of 2003, is a real dog. The warnings that persist, even after one has chosen to override them, and the replacement of files that one is using when using Save As, are totally frustrating. In Excel 2003 one could save the .xls file as .htm without bother. Now, one has to click further on in the mess and it replaces the file that was being saved. Then, when one opens that file, data warnings appear once more. It is not natural to use, is Excel 2007, and that is ridiculous.

It's late Sunday, and Outlook is locked again. What is it this time? Same or different? I have no clue. But it can't continue: I shall have to look for a different email programme, this is ridiculous. To have one's main workstation locked periodically in the past two or so weeks, when it never happened before implies that an update might have caused this, but how would I know which one? And, why would it affect both Outlook 2003 and 2007?

Wednesday, June 4th., 2008: Of late, Outlook has been working well, except that when it starts to check for emails I worry whether it will complete or stall. Paranoid, what?

I have had a few emails about Great Deals, run by that guy Jas. Failing drives, etc. The thing is, I thought that he had vanished, but his name is on lots of 73GB U320 drives for sale on eBay. I had thought that he wouldn't be back, but he probably thinks that he can continue to sell this ModusLnk/Fujitsu product with impunity.

Friday, June 6th., 2008: Spoke too soon: Outlook solidly locked the email computer again: cannot access it through the network either. Hard reboot required. Will have to think about a decent replacement for it, but not Thunderbird.

Monday, June 9th., 2008: The problem with Monmouth, the Dell Precision 650 that runs Outlook, may have been cured. It would seem that memory demands clash between Outlook and Firefox. The latter, of any version, has known memory leaks should one leave the programme running for noticeable lengths of time. Outlook has really heavy memory demands and it would seem that this could be the reason the computer eventually freezes. When that happens one cannot enter the three-fingered salute to determine how memory is being used: one cannot do anything. I have Firefox 3 RC2 running on other computers, and I hardly ever shut it down. It continues to work normally, but not on Monmouth alongside Outlook. QED.

Thursday, June 12th., 2008: Well, it's not Firefox with Outlook that seizes/locks Monmouth, it is Outlook alone on its usual send/receive signal, where it decides its had enough work for the day and goes on strike. Bloody thing. This after yesterday's monthly MS update, which was mainly security for XP. I do not at this time want to update to Vista and see what if anything would change. If this is a flaky computer, which I doubt however, it won't be improved with merely an OS change. But, Linux? No, thanks.

Tuesday, June 17th., 2008: Yesterday, I opened a support ticket with Microsoft: after having the techie in India control my computer for a while, we determined that I could under Tools, Trust Center open the Add-ins. This for the first time for me: it had stuck on this push button every other time I had tried: I thought that that indicated there were no such things active.
We cleared every check mark, shut down Outlook 2007 and re-opened it. Then we had to clear the 'Exchange views' in Add-ins again.
After checking the drivers for the NICs in the machine, we found that there was no recent driver for the 3Com NIC I use for Internet connections.
I, this afternoon, went and bought a new NIC. This was installed and I went through MS Updates, Custom whereupon it installed the latest Realtek driver.
So far, it looks as though Outlook has been cured: I shall run it for a few days without shutting it down to determine the truth of the matter.



The techie advised me that most of the problems with Outlook, because it is picky and dependent on graphics, arise because it needs a good NIC driver. This has, for his department, been the major cure for seizing problems/send and receive, etc.

Outlook 2007 has been working well now for about a day, and this implies that it is cured. The Add-ins block in Trust Center is shown above. Note nothing is enabled. The Apple Bonjour dll was renamed to prevent that from activating. And, as I say, so far so good.

Wednesday, June 18th., 2008: Unfortunately, having left Outlook and Firefox running overnight, the computer again seized when I tried to use the former this morning. Hard reboot once more. This does the computer no good.

Thursday, June 19th., 2008: Yes, still worried about Outlook 2007. However, it is still working after another day, which I believe is related to the fact that I did not have Firefox active. IE 7 was active, but that does not leak like Firefox does, it would seem. Will have Outlook constantly active and wait.

So, after being out and clicking on the Outlook icon on the running application bar, it opened and seemed to be working. Except that clicking on an email promptly made it hang. Eventually, after a couple of three-fingered salutes the machine came back to life. This is the first time that a stall has not required a hard reboot. Maybe I should copy the pst file over to another machine and make that the Outlook box to see what happens with it. Will decide about that in due course.

Saturday, June 21st., 2008: Another hard reboot day. Outlook opened when clicked, started to open the emails that had arrived overnight and then slowed down. Nothing on the task or application bar would open, neither would anything on the desktop. Mouse could be moved around but couldn't do anything. Three-fingered salute failed to complete. Button pressing time. Then, when the computer, Monmouth (one of the two Dell Precision 650 computers here) was up Outlook started fine, but did not seemingly require a pst check. This is strange, since every other hard reboot has resulted in Outlook checking the file for errors.

I have emailed the MS support team, and related to them that a Petri Outlook reference page has proved useful, but the problems with this important programme have not disappeared. I have also opened a forum posting on the XP pages on the Petri site. It's beneficial to have others helping, because I don't want to give up on this significant snafu.

Monday, June 23rd., 2008: This is strange, the programme is working, and has done for almost two days now. Also, other programmes, including Firefox, seem to be more responsive.

Firstly, one thing about MS updates is that one has to be an administrator; and the updates often turn that to debugger status. That occurred on my white box test machine during the previous update Tuesday (XP Pro SP3 like the Precision).

Given that had happened, I checked the permissions on the C drive on the Dell, and discovered that they were a set of letters and numbers, indicating another user. I have seen this many times before.

I removed those and set permissions for two administrator types. Checking the other drives on the Dell, I discovered that the C drive was the only one so affected. Very strange.

Immediately thereafter, Outlook 2007 ran quicker, and whilst slow on graphic download compared to Outlook 2003 and earlier, has not failed again.

Sometimes the simplest thing? Not that I am totally sure of it just yet.

Tuesday, June 24th., 2008: Additional information that means something is wrong in the Dell arena.

I copied over the .pst and entered all of the necessary information regarding email users, inboard and outboard settings and started the programme in my white box. This has an Athlon 64 dual-core nominal 2GHz, and 4GB Crucial RAM. Hard drives are a mix of ATA and SATA.

The programme has been running flawlessly, with its old NIC, the same model that I replaced in the Dell Precision, a 3Com. Graphics appear a little quicker, but, most important, after disabling only the Exchange add-ins, Outlook has not given me any problems whatsoever.

So, what was wrong? Possibly the Dell, a workstation, not just a cobbled together white box, should work better?

It is designed as a whole, with all of the necessary parts. I wonder whether it is the hyperthreading, but doubt it, because writing this using Firefox, on the Dell, has not stalled as it did when Outlook was running. There must be a conflict?

Well, on the white box, I have also been running both IE7 and Firefox 3 RC4, and nothing untoward has happened. On the Dell, I have been running my normal mix of Office programmes, and nothing has shown a glitch.

Presumably, I should have tried this before, but what I can conclude is that Outlook 2007 is picky, and one should go through the trouble of using other computers, if available, to doublecheck.

Thursday, July 3rd., 2008: First day in some time that the recalcitrant computer still works in the morning. I removed the U320 LSI PCI adapter yesterday, and also one hard drive, since the cable won't take five drives. Having checked the physical connections I restarted the machine and it has worked without fault for twenty-four hours. Really odd, and perhaps having two LSI U320 chips loaded caused problems. I hope it was that, and that the computer continues to run properly. Time will tell, indeed. I shall, eventually, return the Outlook PST file to the Dell, just to see if it will perform without seizing again. If that's the case, then I found the cause of all the recent freezing that caused so many hard reboots.

Friday, July 4th., 2008: Well, I don't think it was the LSI, because the same halting, stumbling performance kept on coming. But, having installed Acronis software, there were, in consequence, two services installed that came along. These I have disabled. Since then, nothing untoward has happened. It may be only a few hours, but I really think that this is a significant step. Firefox 3 RC 4 crashed on Leicester, the other Dell Precision, which is a change, and on the Telegraph newspaper site, which isn't. Peculiar, what?

Friday, August 1st., 2008: The only problems lately have been with the boot drive on Rutland. Trying to defragment each drive on the computer, the only problem arose when the programme informed me that there were file problems on the boot drive. This was repaired about a week ago and nothing seems wrong so far.

Sunday, August 3rd., 2008: Vista problem: I thought of upgrading my white box XP Pro SP2 machine. When I booted up on a restart, there was no option to upgrade. When I restarted the computer, and then tried to run the executable from there, the message arose that the setup.exe was not a valid Win32 application. No idea why that occurred, but given that it worked on the booting up method, then I think that I shall have to buy a new hard drive and install Vista Ultimate on that. That way, if it doesn't work properly, all I need to is reinstall the old drive. We'll see.

Monday, August 4th., 2008: TechNet Subscription sign in problems occur constantly using IE 7 or 8 on any computer on my network. If I use FireFox 2 or 3 nothing untoward happens.  The image below shows what normally comes up with IE.

MFTM help files or a search on Microsoft fails to show an error like this.

Wednesday, August 13th., 2008: Problems, yesterday evening, trying to open http://mattoid.com using Web Expression. Came down to IIS problems on the hosting end, but took an age to have it corrected. An apparent read lock error.

Here are the emails sent and replied to regarding the problem. Note that the first reply has nothing at all to do with the error. Neither does it read grammatically or logically regarding the subject. The second reply cured the problem with regards to accessing the site.

On 2008-08-12, 20:08, Paul Dickins (paul@mattoid.com) wrote:
Name : Paul Dickins (Website Owner)
Email : paul@mattoid.com

Subject: Web Expression problem

Message:
Hello,
No access to http://mattoid.com using Web Expression from any computer. Any of my other sites are accessible using same programme.
Ping, tracert work from any computer on network. I can open site using any browser.

Can you determine problem?
Regards,
Paul Dickins

RE: [Case #: 305206] Support - Web Expression problem mattoid.com
Greetings,
Thank you for the email. Impression Web does not sue the HTTP protocol to connect to the server, you must use FTP. So try ftp.mattoid.com?

If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our 24/7 support team at support@myhosting.com.
Thank you for choosing myhosting.com as your web hosting provider.
Regards,
Jim
Customer Support
http://myhosting.com
http://mail2web.com
http://softcom.biz
Keep up to date with news and announcements at http://blog.myhosting.com  and http://blog.mail2web.com

On 08/12/2008, 21:17, Paul Dickins (paul@mattoid.com) wrote:
Name : Paul Dickins (Website Owner)
Email : paul@mattoid.com

Subject: IIS error

Message:
Hello,
Further to my last email, Web Expression gives the message when trying to open http://mattoid.com that there is a server error:
Could not get a read lock for Microsoft Internet Information Server cached information.

My other sites are fine, and, as I mentioned, I can open my sites and ping and tracert, including mattoid.com.

Regards,
Paul

RE: [Case #: 305232] Support - IIS error mattoid.com
Greetings,
I have refreshed your site in the IIS server. I was able to connect using Microsoft Expression Web in testing.
If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our 24/7 support team at support@myhosting.com.
Thank you for choosing myhosting.com as your web hosting provider.
Regards,
Peter M.
Customer Support
http://myhosting.com
http://mail2web.com
http://softcom.biz
Keep up to date with news and announcements at http://blog.myhosting.com  and http://blog.mail2web.com

Friday, August 15th., 2008: I have installed Windows Live OneCare for the third time on Leicester, the XP Pro Dell. Problems arose concerning the running of the programme in trial mode. Right now, as I write this, it is scanning the box, and has taken several hours to reach 75%. There is another problem. Firefox wouldn't open URLs. The OneCare Firewall (same thing as the Control Panel Windows Firewall applet) was on, caused by the OneCare using its base parameters. This meant that I had to turn the firewall off, because even though it was an allowed programme, nothing worked. Odd, and restarting FireFox had no effect.

Furthermore, even though the white box runs XP Pro, it wouldn't work with OneCare because it has the boot disc set as a dynamic drive. Note that all of the other drives in Leicester are dynamic, but that does not matter as long as the OS boot info rests on the (sole) basic drive. The boot and installation drives do not coincide on several of my computers.

Wednesday, August 27th., 2008: Well, this is the first time after three days that I have been able to access this site to edit or add anything. The crossed purposes statements passing between me and MyHosting Support were the cause.

Until early this morning I had not known that MS FrontPage Server Extensions has a 2GB limit for total site file size. The hosting limit for each of my three domains is 10GB, and that caused the confusion. Expression Web still uses six years old Microsoft FP Extensions, with the implicit limit. That only holds when using http://mattoid.com to access the site, because the extensions code demands that all the files are loaded. I wish that the techies that had previously handled my complaints had been more precise, or had even been aware of what the problem actually was. Absolutely frustrating to handle with such apparent ignorance, to be polite.

If, as I am now doing, one uses ftp://mattoid.com then there are no limitations. Except that themes are unavailable now, and that is spoiling things. One good thing is that my chat with the techie early this morning resulted in a free month for this site. Nice.

One other thing that I have discovered: don't open recent files, from the drop down File heading on the toolbar, that have http in front of them. They won't be alterable. The read lock error that arrives implies that the server extensions are screwed because your site is at the limit. My other two sites can still be used with http file access for editing/adding because they are relatively smaller than this one. On the other hand, since ftp is used the total size of the site denies use of FrontPage Server Extensions, all of the hit counters and similar functions that depend on the extensions do not work after saving the file under the ftp usage. Neither do themes, although one thinks one can by copying page details from another page: but that attempt fails. And try to find hit counters for Expression Web: seemingly impossible, because Microsoft has assumed that one's site will remain small. I will have to find another web designer programme.

In fact, these two small images show what is currently wrong: no background and no hit counter. The left hand image is from a browser. The right hand image is what is seen using Expression Web: the counter is there, the background blue grid is present, too. The email10.gif works.

Monday, September 1st., 2008: Well, well, deleting a large folder, after copying it to http://mattoid.ca has allowed me to open this site with Expression Web in a format that allows the server extensions to work. I have moved the BMW short films series over there (732MB): they are in the education section. Well, morally one should not have a high performance car, nicht wahr? Perhaps, but a vehicle is handy when one becomes old?

It would seem that having a set of files in excess of 1.7GB screws the Server Extensions 2002 code. That means that I shall have to redesign all of my sites and use a programme that will allow me to have dynamic objects that FP Server Extensions should have been able to handle. A list of components requiring FP 2002 Server Extensions can be found by following the link. One thing I must do is to find a background similar to that on this page. I find that the faint blue grid softens viewing. If pure white, then glare and harshness in general rules. My opinion of course, but that rules on my sites, what?

Tuesday, September 2nd., 2008: I downloaded the trial version of Microsoft Live OneCare AV software. Utterly useless. Cannot remove a simple virus that occasionally arises and is well-known. Will try Kaspersky 7.0 for a while, and see if that's any better. I came home to find Windows Live OneCare is still finding something that it has supposedly cleansed.

After installing Kaspersky, it has seemingly disinfected the particular files. But, seemingly is the correct word: it is doing the same damn thing that OneCare did. It's disinfected, but no it isn't. I had to delete a massive folder and now things have quietened down. Eventually I think that the machine is free of problems, except for the idiotic messages about 'learning' that Kaspersky continually shows for the same event.

Thursday, September 11th., 2008: Most of the day spent updating my back-up domain controller. There was a problem that crashed the system, so I removed two hard drives and replaced them with two double the size. The two separate drives, including the boot drive are now 73GB nominally each. The four drives on the Adaptec 3200s were made into a RAID-5 system. It took several tries at removing the array, reinstalling the driver, and other stuff before the RAID array was seen under Win2003Ent R2 SP2. Now, having made the respective main Office folders and extracted the SP1 Office files into the particular updates folders, I am in the process of installing Office 2007 Ultimate. Then I shall renew the Domain Controller relationship. Plus, all the other things necessary to make a machine more easily usable.

Sunday, September 14th., 2008: The Adaptec Storage Manager installed on Lancaster, the BDC, does not see the array, although it can read the situation in the I2O Adaptec boot programme. This is one of two weird items. The other is the inability to use the Start Menu. I cannot open anything after any period has elapsed after booting up. The menu is unusable after any time period. There is no ability to expand folders, there is a momentary flash and nothing appears. I have looked all over the web but nothing appropriate has been discovered.

Just discovered that nothing can be opened in Event Viewer. That's bloody useful, what? This is a clean install, so what can be wrong? Nothing useful discovered so far, except maybe it's time to retire this box and find a newer one that I can install 2008 Enterprise thereon.

I wonder whether it was worthwhile to pay for an update to Acronis backup/restore/clone software (the True Image stuff). The update won't update because it fails to recognise the valid older serial number. I am waiting for a response, but they don't seem to want to answer my emails begun on their support pages. Another idiocy is that searching on any subject on their support pages constantly fails, especially when I have to enter my again valid user name. What is happening with them? Faking every part of their business?

Sunday, September 21st., 2008: No reply of any worth from Acronis: I will be approaching the BBB tomorrow, and going elsewhere if that fails to produce a satisfactory result.

Tuesday, September 23rd., 2008: I tried BBB on the web: waste of time. There is no actual category available for this problem that I could discover. I shall use another approach to obtain redress from Acronis.

Thursday, September 25th., 2008: I had opened an incident with Microsoft concerning the Lancaster BDC box. Spent a couple of hours on it last night with a phone call from India. Today, an Active Directory guru phoned me from Delhi and we were able to run dcpromo twice to remove AD and then reinstall it. When it was removed, the machine could run everything.

When the guru ran the box, using RDP, from the PDC, Rutland, he could operate it as normal. As soon as he had closed the ticket, I discovered that the problems with opening programmes and using Event Viewer, etc., returned. Using any administrator account changed nothing. I ran dcpromo once more, to discover that, as a standalone server it works properly. For example, I reinstalled Adaptec Storage Manager Pro and it now it recognised the Adaptec adapter and the drives installed. That was impossible prior to this date, after I had installed the programme when I ran the clean installation of W2003Ent on the machine.

I could also, can also, open any programme in any normal fashion.

I would infer from this that there is a befuddlement in user rights somewhere, but I cannot discover it, because using administrator rights should enable one to install, open, uninstall any programme or service with impunity.

Today, Acronis sent me two emails advertising VM backup, cloning software which relate to the two accounts that I have with them. They have not, however, answered my emails or my phone complaint, with regard to the upgrade that seemingly is not allowable anyway from 9.1 to 11. What a ridiculous situation.

Friday, September 26th., 2008: A further chat with Acronis via the tool on their web page elicited the statement that I could download the latest update to True Image Workstation, still the 9.1 version, for no cost. That I have done: the blurb was about 11 Home, not Workstation. Mea culpa.

The problem with my ex-BDC has elicited the remark from the techie in Delhi, that they have never had such a problem before. Well now, that's interesting enough to make me want to upgrade at least one of the two main servers to 2008 Enterprise. Will have to think long and hard about it.

Saturday, September 27th., 2008: When Lancaster was acting as BDC, FireFox wanted to update itself to version 3.0.2. Now that it is not a BDC, I started up FireFox to discover that the update had failed and it needed to correct that. This is another odd thing about the working status of the BDC, similar to the experience for Adaptec Storage Manager Pro, which failed to discover the adapter and its drives. It would appear that there are some strange security factors, but I cannot determine the particular offenders, and given that I cannot open Event Viewer items when it's a BDC, how would I ever be able to fix things?

Tuesday, September 30th., 2008: Went off to the CAA office to put some money on my Visa card. Then down town to check the sales in the library basement, a coffee, the store and back home. Attempted to use IE8 beta to register for the one-day Ottawa Microsoft TechDay scheduled for late November. This was an early bird offer, and IE8 failed twice. Using FireFox 3.0.3 the application worked immediately. Therefore, I assume that IE8 has a flaw in using https pages. I have reported this to both the OWSUG boss and to the Lenos financial arm.

Further, on the old DC, Lancaster, FireFox has told me that 3.0.3 updates have failed twice even though it seemingly was successful prior to that. Odd computer behaviour, which further pressures me to retire it for a more modern machine: Oh, for an HP DL785 G5!! Or three, because I would like two of them for workstation use, because these beasts have eleven PIC-Express slots and can be allied with up to 512GB DDR registered DIMMs.

Thursday, October 2nd., 2008: After trying to register using IE beta 8, used FireFox 3.0.3 and was able to book attendance at Microsoft TechDays Ottawa, in November. That's good, because it is a local event and will result in some decent software being given to all those there. The included 6-month TechNet subscription provides a problem, however. According to what I have discovered, one cannot use it to prolong one's current subscription. That is a marketing mistake, although I understand that MS wants to increase the number of people in the subscription database. Doesn't help those like me, who have advertised to friends what the day out will provide.

What is wrong with Expression Web? I tried to upload four files. It fails with a message that web site cannot be found on Port 80. So, I try again and again. Then, I try the smallest file and it asks me if I want to overwrite the file. Yes, and boom, it's there. Close the folder, press View, Refresh, and all four files are there. How strange.

Tuesday, October 14th., 2008: Only just, it is nearly midnight, as the Harper minority government returns, after the waste of money yet again. What price stupidity at the top?

Point is, one drive on Rutland gave errors, and the ease of ntbackup and a spare drive enabled me to return to normal very quickly. Nice to have a few spare drives hanging around. The errors arose after a reboot following an ITunes update.

Thursday, October 16th., 2008: I can recommend Kaspersky antivirus software. After a few weeks usage, the computers are all running fine and Internet access gives no worries. The learning process for PC and Server machines works differently in each case, as does scanning, but I now feel that the software was beneficial. The server software is a full version 30 day appraisal, which I intend to make permanent. It is a lot cheaper than some other firms offerings.

Saturday, October 18th., 2008: One learns by doing, I find. I could not upload largish executables to this site using http. There was a constantly occurring Port 80 error. So, I thought to try opening the site as ftp, and, lo and behold, the upload worked first time. Now I know what to do. And I'm glad, because a drive that I bought came with a win32.parite virus, and infected my whole network. Therefore, I decided to replace all the executables on my web sites that were infected within my Win 2003 network.

Sunday, October 19th., 2008: I have emailed Kaspersky about the problem with a virus saved within the System Volume Information on several drives on an XP Pro machine. I had received a drive and installed it, and even though it was formatted, it had a virus that wasn't deleted. The virus transmitted itself through the network. I have used Kaspersky products, both PC and Server versions, to clean the drives: there is one odd problem remaining, that is shown in the image below.

Note that if one deletes the file it goes to backup. What is that? This is an executable file in a hidden RPxxx folder within the System Volume Information folder on the NTFS drives. There are no files of that name discoverable in a normal search: and that's because these executables are restore points for XP in each of the folders and they relate to particular dates. What's going on here?

So, how does Kaspersky remove this? I have been advised of several instances of this virus, during any and every day since installation of the software, in one of the RPxxx folders, announcing themselves through the pig squeal that Kaspersky uses. This is the result using the latest PC version 7.0.x of Kaspersky.

Using the Kaspersky Server version for Windows 2003 (the OS on my servers), the problem is absent, repeated scans give no affected files. I have now finished with deleting and replacing all of the executables that were/are on my web sites, conforming to the list I had made of the previously infected files.

Monday, October 20th., 2008: I updated the Kaspersky software on one PC to see how it works. If this version, 2009, works well, then I will update the other PCs as well. Early days.

I went on to the chat page at Kaspersky: no answer regarding where the back up goes. There was a request by the techie for me to run the programme with a deep scan. Well, one tries, but it won't work. It hangs every time on the F: drive's System Information File (hidden contents) and shows infection by the Parite again and again in different folders. See above for the 'Full Scan' box and its attendant 'Threats have been detected': click either to reveal details. It continually sticks on the 1% completed state.

An update: the scan is progressing, it says, except that nothing but the clock is running. Everything is stuck on 1%. After nearly 4 hours suddenly the scan moved to 2% and things are quickening.

Tuesday, October 21st., 2008: The Kaspersky PC version finished a full, deep scan at 08:00 this morning. I shall be interested to see whether the report that everything was disinfected or deleted is correct. With the previous version, that was not true, since it could not apparently remove the parite virus.

Given my experiences of late, I believe that my network is now clean of malware, viruses, trojans and the like, given that I have updated the PC version of Kaspersky's Internet Security. I have received an email from them offering the chance of having 3 years' protection for the price of two. If nothing untoward occurs, I shall probably take up the offer.

I came back at 15:00 hrs from seeing the doctor about my hip, and after visiting a couple of other places. No virus activity apparent from Kaspersky activity. I can now believe the network is finally clear of this pest.

Thursday, October 23rd., 2008: OWSUG meeting this evening: the ins and outs of Exchange 2007. Quite interesting, but I shall need a 64-bit server to play with this major Microsoft product.

Friday, October 31st., 2008: Apparently, this is a known problem, but I can not download anything from the TechNet site using Windows Server 2003. The file transfer manager gives errors. However, using XP Pro PCs there are no problems. So, it's a pest, but it is just a memento.

Wednesday, November 5th., 2008: I have had troubles with Firefox: hanging, especially on javacscript and flash pages. One thing that was necessary was to disable a line in about:config (you know what that is? Ensure that this is how it looks on the particular line: network.protocol-handler.external.javascript ; false which means that it's the Firefox javascript that is enabled, not anything else. It took me some time to discover this was important.

Sunday, December 14th., 2008: I have Web Expression 2 on DVD, but have not yet installed it: procrastination.

One thing about Outlook, the latest version with all updates: it is totally inconsistent. I try to stop all of the persistent casino emails. They are constantly altering the originating email account. However, Outlook does not always place them in junk mail by any stretch of the imagination. It happens that these particular emails can number in the hundreds on some days. That is ridiculous, and I wish they would cease, but Outlook is of no use.