Reset a lost Symantec Corporate Edition password!

I had to find this today the hard way, so I figured I would post it up. Thanks to this guy for originally posting this info, it worked FINE on NAVCE 9.0.

Change this key in registry
HKLM\SOFTWARE\INTEL\LANDesk\VirusProtect6CurrentVersion\ConsolePassword

to value 1084A085DC6BD2D755D4D6A7726

The new password is now 'symantec'

Path size limitations in Windows

In 10 years of IT employment, I had never seen this before. A client would try to copy his data to the server, and mid copy would get an error, "Unable to remove directory" (which is a really odd error when you are COPYING) and as I researched it, it was indeed due to a path longer than 260 characters.

Meaning if you create subfolders that are 50 characters each, you will only get 5 subfolders deep before it will not let you create any more! I tested this out:

I created the folder structure to mimick the problem, and it cuts off the last folder at 35 characters.

So C:\temp\123456789012345678901234567890123456789012 34567890\12345678901234567890123456789012345678901 234567890\1234567890123456789012345678901234567890 1234567890\123456789012345678901234567890123456789 01234567890\12345678901234567890123456789012345

is 248 characters long, but not 260... Why? Cause it leaves room for an additional 12 characters so an 8.3 name can still fit and be exactly at the 260 char limit.

Microsoft Licensing for Small Businesses

Any IT consultant will tell you piracy lives on rampantly. Any good consultant challenges his clients to get legal or stop working with them. It can be extremely hard to do, but it is in your and your client's best interests. So once you get them to see the light, the next question is how to move from their current licensing to something better.

When I say current licensing, I mean anything from none whatsoever, meaning all CD's are clearly CD-R's with keys sharpied on, all in one binder somewhere to "sparse" licensing, meaning they own legitimate retail copies, but have obviously installed them more than one time (often WAY more than one time) Then you have the occasional oddball client who plays favorites. Because one piece of software has a hardware dongle, they own all of that, but to make up for that expense, they pirate everything else!

For small businesses that are accustomed to pirating (it's such a simple and easy to save money in a start-up business!) it is very difficult to swallow the pill of a huge software order. For most of my smaller clients, I recommend only using OEM licensing on operating systems. Purchase the OS with the system, and in 3 years when the hardware is fully paid for, the OS will be in need of an upgrade as well and you can replace both at once. For companies that are over 5 seats, volume licensing with upgrade assurance is the absolute best way to go. You get the software, and depending on the length of the agreement, you get any major upgrades as well. So if you bought 10 volume licenses with software assurance of Office XP Professional when it was the current version, you would have gotten the Office 2003 Professional suite for only the cost of new media. I am speaking very Microsoft-centric here, but other major software manufacturers have similar licensing programs.

One thing to clarify is that some manufacturers have a 10 user minimum, others have point minimums that need to be met, not necessarily seats or copies installed. Please check with your vendor for details

Also, to soften the initial cost of getting legal, almost every vendor allows you to lease software. Obviously, this is subject to finance charges, but for a client to hear $1400/mo compared to $30,000 and be immediately legal on everything you are purchasing.

Like I said, it's never an easy pill to swallow, especially if your company has grown and now the cost to change is high, but the risk is exponentially higher.

MBSA Setup detected another installation?!

Took me a while to figure this out. But when you install MBSA 2.0 on a machine, you can sometimes get an error that there was another installation detected and you cannot install it at all.

Unregistering the scrrun.dll seems to do the trick:
regsvr32.exe %windir%\system32\scrrun.dll

SOHO users - Finally, a simple email backup solution!

Did I mention it was also FREE? Check out Microsoft's free download of the Outlook 2003 Add-in: Personal Folders Backup. It only works with Outlook 2000 or newer, and you can set it to backup your PST(s) every XX number of days to an alternate disk drive, or better yet a network location that gets backed up to tape drive for even better protection from data loss in email!

Recovery and Restoration - Good backups only take you so far!

This past week I had a client lose their only Domain Controller. The cause was most likely a hardware failure, and the vendor worked hard to get us replacement parts. A new motherboard, processor, memory, power supply, and new drives later, we had a machine that performed as we would expect it to. Luckily, we had a backup of the System State taken from before the machine was completely down, so we had very little data loss to be concerned with, but the most invaluable part of the recovery was my own documentation of the server. I had documented when I rolled out the server every piece of software, all configurations, IP addresses, everything. Having this data available made it possible for me to have the machine back to normal in a much quicker fashion than if I had to "discover" each of these items. Lesson learned here, documentation, albeit one of the most hate portions of the job for many IT people, it can make a disaster recovery run so much smoother.

Sometimes, you need to think low tech!

Well, today I made myself feel pretty dumb. After spending all morning working on a high end server issue, I went to a client who had an odd issue. Every so often, with no real timing or reason, Windows Media Player would launch. I did Spyware scans, anti-virus scans, cleared temp files, cache, uninstalled applications that were unneeded, NOTHING. Then finally, I sat back and noticed that the Logitech multimedia keyboard was on a tray under the desk. And pretty much every time you put some weight on the right side of the tray, it would angle up and hit the "Media Player" button on the keyboard, launching the default player. I felt pretty dumb having not noticed it, but the user probably felt even worse, as they had been complaining for at least 4 weeks about this issue.