The letters used are easy to remember because they are related to the share's content. Most of them have been used for over 7 years. Changing them would make things unnecessarily difficult for the users.
Z: seems to be temporarily mapped by the login process, X: is the CD ROM drive (an old habit, so it doesn't move when adding drives/partitions), W: is the the CD Writer when there is one. In short: several are already used.
The lower letters are used by "net use *//server/share", and that makes these temporary * shares easy to find.
Whatever letters are used for other stuff, if someone once used a letter (say U:) for that USB drive, and U: is later mapped, re-inserting the drive will cause the problem.
This is really a Windows bug, and should be solved. There is no really good workaround.
"This behavior occurs if you map a network drive to the first available drive letter after the drive letters for the local volumes and CD-ROM drives. When you install a new device or volume, Mount Manager, which assigns drive letters to volumes, does not recognize the mapped network drive and assigns the next available drive letter to the new device or volume. This causes a collision with the existing mapped network drive."
Indeed, I have exactly the same problem in a WinXP - Samba server environment, so this seems completely unrelated to Novell.
When a user plugs in a USB drive, in some cases Windows will try to take a drive letter from a mapped network drive and fail. This is documented in a KB entry at MS, but without a solution.
Admins can use diskmgmt.msc to assign another drive letter, but normal users or even power users are not allowed to use the disk management console.
I have not found a solution to this problem, and MS doesn't seem to really think it's a problem either.
Eudora is by far the most administrator-friendly software I know.
- No install required. Just copy the directory to some folder, and create a shortcut.
- All configuration in an.ini file (for the younger/. crowd who may have spent too much time with XML or the Windows registry and doesn't quite understand: this means you can compare 2.ini files with your favorite diff tool, edit them with your favorite editor and/or your favorite scripting language, add 12 similar email accounts with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V in your editor, search for a specific setting or value with grep/your editor/whatever, etc.)
- Data is separated from the program, and can be moved anywhere. Just start Eudora with "c:\path\eudora.exe d:\path\to\my\eudora" and it works. Move the folder elsewhere, you only need to change the shortcut to give the correct folder as an argument. 10 years ago, I set it up in a company with shortcuts pointing to "...eudora.exe \\server\%username%\eudora", and it Just Worked, even for Windows 95 clients.
- The icing on the cake for an admin is the settings through clickable <x-eudora-option:xx=yy> links. Instead of guiding someone on the phone through the menus, you send an email template and tell the user to click the link(s). If only Firefox and Thunderbird had that, it would be so much easier to support in a corporate environment.
And as user, I'm actually still on Eudora myself, despite the limitations (bad HTML support, and worst of all: no UTF-8 support), because no other email client I have tried had such powerful and easy to use search and filtering. It even supports regular expressions. I have not used it often, but the few times when I did, no other email client would have found what I was looking for.
After being bothered with the requirement of a Passport account, filling out stupid forms, click a link received in a confirmation email, you finally come to Server Too Busy which shows:
Server Error in '/SHOP' Application.
Server Too Busy
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: Server Too Busy
Source Error:
An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.
Stack Trace:
[HttpException (0x80004005): Server Too Busy]
System.Web.HttpRuntime.RejectRequestInternal(HttpW orkerRequest wr) +146
Version Information: Microsoft.NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2300; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2300
So it looks like we may have to wait for Beta 3...
They don't seem to have the Beta 2, but I noticed on left side of the screen a few gorgeous women who just happen to live in my area! I'm off to get in touch with them... They look much better than some unfinished computer program.
"Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 or later required for Outlook 2007 users."
So they are still trying to lock everyone into Exchange?
I predict this will not work. If the email in Outlook 2007 doesn't get much better IMAP support, I will push harder in my network to abandon it and replace it with Thunderbird or something else. And if the Outlook calendar doesn't fully support iCalendar for import, export AND remote WebDAV/CalDAV calendars, then it will not be hard to convince users that the limitations of Outlook are much worse than the bugs in Sunbird or Google Calendar.
This site has temporarily exceeded its connection limit. Please try
again in a few minutes.
Yet another unusable pre-alpha release
on
Acme for Windows
·
· Score: 1
This looks like yet another non-working pre-alpha release of something, with a twist: it's not even clear what it is...
I thought it was (or could be used as) a text editor in Windows, so I wanted to try it out.
It said somewhere to right click "Acme" for documentation.
Starting acme.bat opens a window in which you can indeed right click "intro" to see a man page about an obscure OS or something called Inferno. Unfortunately, right-clicking "acme" just gives "File not found".
To illustrate my comment, I wanted to copy stuff from these windows, but there doesn't seem to be a copy command: No copy menu, right-click doesn't give a menu, Ctrl-C doesn't seem to do anything. Ok, so the copy command is something else. This thing might have a much better way of copying text than what we are used to, but since the man page for Acme is "File not found"...
There may be great ideas hidden behind this thing, but I will never find out.
If an experienced IT professional and occasional programmer who is using Windows, Linux and Macs daily can't even see what this thing is suposed to do and can't read some documentation, then what's the point?
I remember reading 1 or more years ago (here on/. ?) a very similar story about a new lens. It was thought to be used in mobile phones and such, being a very small lens, with no moving parts, focusing being only done through the voltage applied.
Would someone still have a link to that old story?
Because people insert random CDs and USB keys, and they check their personal email through webmail, etc. (and someone infected his brand new laptop on which the AV was not installed yet, with an exe in a password protected zip, which he got from his private webmail acount! Yes, they do that sort of thing. At least once)
I don't scan my own machine regularly either, and also just "keep things sane" and occasionally scan a virus out of curiosity to see what it is.
You obviously don't have much of a clue about managing random business users.
Last year, I replaced an old NT4 server with Linux in a small business with around 20 XP clients. I hoped to find a Linux solution to manage antivirus and replace the very expensive Symantec Enterprise licenses, but I didn't.
I do have ClamAV scanning incoming emails, but it is still necessary to have a local AV on the machines. I don't like Symantec and find it too expensive, but I must say it really works. So I did a fresh minimal install of Win2K on the old server box, and setup Symantec Enterprise on that. You can install the AV on the clients from the server, and it keeps them updated.
The licenses were just renewed, because I still have not found something else.
The problem is that, to manage the clients, the server needs to be Windows. Samba does not offer remote registry access to the clients, and it's RPC capabilities are not sufficiently developed for such tasks.
But you seem to have a Windows AD server anyway, so I would say go with Symantec. (And either find an acceptable deal with Symantec, or cheat a little on the number of licenses: the server doesn't seem to mind if there are a few more clients).
An alternative would of course be to switch all machines to Linux and/or Mac, but...
Firefox is being simplified in order to appeal to the greater market. You know, the ones who make up 85% of the market
You completely misunderstand who makes up your 85% of the market for a new web browser. It is NOT the 85% of the end users. When 85% of the market uses one browser, it is because someone pre-installed it for them. Until now, it has been MSIE, installed with the OS, or re-installed in a customized way by network admins using various deployment tools.
So, to increase "market share", what needs to be done is to make installation, upgrades and maintenance administrator-friendly.
For Firefox, this would mean an easy and well-documented way to deploy an installation to 10, 100 or 1000 machines, including preferences, extensions, toolbar configuration and bookmarks.
And of course, it should not require complex MSI installer hacks and not rely on Active Directory. Our Samba servers don't have AD and shouldn't need to.
Ideally, I would install and configure it on my machine, and just copy the install to wherever I want it to be on the client machines. Adding an extension should be as easy as copying some files into the right places.
'Would you like a drink first?' asked Colin. 'I've finished my pianocktail and we could try it out.'
'Does it really work?' asked Chick.
'Of course it does. I had a hard job perfecting it, but the finished result is beyond my wildest dreams. When I played the Black and Tan Fantasy I got a really fantastic concoction.'
'How does it work?' asked Chick.
'For each note,' said Colin, 'there's a corresponding drink - either a wine, spirit, liqueur or fruit juice. The loud pedal puts in egg flip and the soft pedal adds ice. For soda you play a cadenza in F sharp. The quantities depend on how long a note is held - you get the sixteenth of a measure for a hemidemisemiquaver; a whole measure for a black note; and four measures for a semibreve. When you play a slow tune, then tone comes into control too to prevent the amounts growing too large and the drink getting too big for a cocktail - but the alcoholic content remains unchanged. And, depending on the length of the tune, you can, if you like, vary the measures used, reducing them, say, to a hundredth in order to get a drink taking advantage of all the harmonics, by means of an adjustment on the side.'
'It's a bit complicated,' said Chick.
'The whole thing is controlled by electrical contacts and relays. I won't go into all the technicalities because you know all about them anyway. And, besides, the piano itself really works.'
'It's wonderful,' said Chick.
'Only one thing still worries me,' said Colin, 'and that's the loud pedal and the egg flip. I had to put in a special gear system because if you play something too hot, lumps of omelette fall into the glass, and they're rather hard to swallow. I've still got a little bit of modification to do there. But it's all right if you're careful. And for a dash of fresh cream, you add a chord in G major.'
'I'm going to try an improvisation on Loveless Love,' said Chick. 'That should be crazy.'
'It's still in the junk room that I use as my workshop,' said Colin, 'because the guard plates aren't screwed down yet. Come in there with me. I'll set it for two cocktails of about seventy-five milligallons each to start with.'
Chick sat at the piano. When he'd reached the end of the tune a section of the front panel came down with a sharp click and a row of glasses appeared. Two of them were brimming with an appetizing mixture.
'You scared me,' said Colin. 'You played a wrong note once. Luckily it was only in the harmonization.'
'You don't mean to say that that comes into it too?' said Chick.
'Not always,' said Colin. 'That would make it too elaborate. So we just give it a few passing acknowledgements. Now drink up-and we'll go and eat.'
dd is slow, since it copies even unused disk space. I have had good luck with Knoppix and ntfsclone over the network, using this method.
However, all the machines were identical, so I didn't even use sysprep.
And BTW, I even dropped the pipe through gzip which was suggested in the examples, since it didn't make things any faster. The Gigabit network helped, I guess. Maybe with 100Base-T, gzip is good.
you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window)
Not really the best example, since you can also use the login name with the Windows messaging protocol, and it pops up on any or every machine on which that user is logged in. Or you can use the workgroup/domain name, and it pops un on every machine.
(Used to be a handy simple tool in LANs, until spammers found they could use it to spam boxes directly connected to the net, and MS stupidly disabled it in some Service Pack. You can re-enable it, but when you send "Going down for maintenance in 5 minutes" on the LAN, there are always some machines on which it hasn't been re-enabled, or has been re-disabled).
I leave my kids go out. This "predators" hysteria is ridiculous indeed, and I think it would be very hard to kidnapp my kids anyway.
BUT, they often complain there was nobody to play with, and come back!
My eleven year old daughter sits in front of the computer at some chat games, because that's where her school friends are, not outside on the lake shore...
I'm still not sure whether they do that because other parents don't let their children out so much, or just because they think that's what is cool, or probably some combination of both...
I keep hearing mentions of myspace.com, so I went to see what it actually is.
On the main page, there is a link to Learn More, leading to "Step 1: Create your FREE profile". There, my choices seemed to be Next or Sign Up. Since I didn't want to sign up but did want to learn more, I clicked Next to go to page 2.
Here is what I learned on page 2: (in the familiar formatting of the standard MSIE error pages, even though I used a better browser)
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact
the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found. Internet Information Services (IIS)
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr),
and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages.
Slashdot Mirror
Many reasons:
This is really a Windows bug, and should be solved. There is no really good workaround.
New drive or mapped network drive not available in Windows Explorer:
Indeed, I have exactly the same problem in a WinXP - Samba server environment, so this seems completely unrelated to Novell.
When a user plugs in a USB drive, in some cases Windows will try to take a drive letter from a mapped network drive and fail. This is documented in a KB entry at MS, but without a solution.
Admins can use diskmgmt.msc to assign another drive letter, but normal users or even power users are not allowed to use the disk management console.
I have not found a solution to this problem, and MS doesn't seem to really think it's a problem either.
eudora because of familiarty
.ini file (for the younger /. crowd who may have spent too much time with XML or the Windows registry and doesn't quite understand: this means you can compare 2 .ini files with your favorite diff tool, edit them with your favorite editor and/or your favorite scripting language, add 12 similar email accounts with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V in your editor, search for a specific setting or value with grep/your editor/whatever, etc.)
Eudora is by far the most administrator-friendly software I know.
- No install required. Just copy the directory to some folder, and create a shortcut.
- All configuration in an
- Data is separated from the program, and can be moved anywhere. Just start Eudora with "c:\path\eudora.exe d:\path\to\my\eudora" and it works. Move the folder elsewhere, you only need to change the shortcut to give the correct folder as an argument. 10 years ago, I set it up in a company with shortcuts pointing to "...eudora.exe \\server\%username%\eudora", and it Just Worked, even for Windows 95 clients.
- The icing on the cake for an admin is the settings through clickable <x-eudora-option:xx=yy> links. Instead of guiding someone on the phone through the menus, you send an email template and tell the user to click the link(s). If only Firefox and Thunderbird had that, it would be so much easier to support in a corporate environment.
And as user, I'm actually still on Eudora myself, despite the limitations (bad HTML support, and worst of all: no UTF-8 support), because no other email client I have tried had such powerful and easy to use search and filtering. It even supports regular expressions. I have not used it often, but the few times when I did, no other email client would have found what I was looking for.
So it looks like we may have to wait for Beta 3...
They don't seem to have the Beta 2, but I noticed on left side of the screen a few gorgeous women who just happen to live in my area! I'm off to get in touch with them... They look much better than some unfinished computer program.
So they are still trying to lock everyone into Exchange?
I predict this will not work. If the email in Outlook 2007 doesn't get much better IMAP support, I will push harder in my network to abandon it and replace it with Thunderbird or something else. And if the Outlook calendar doesn't fully support iCalendar for import, export AND remote WebDAV/CalDAV calendars, then it will not be hard to convince users that the limitations of Outlook are much worse than the bugs in Sunbird or Google Calendar.
So Word 2007 introduces yeat another obscure acronym?
What the hell is XPS?
Google says X-Ray Photoemission Spectroscopy. That is it's ony result, and it is taken from the place I would have gone next: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPS.
Looks like he already got all the page hits he could take:
This looks like yet another non-working pre-alpha release of something, with a twist: it's not even clear what it is...
I thought it was (or could be used as) a text editor in Windows, so I wanted to try it out.
It said somewhere to right click "Acme" for documentation.
Starting acme.bat opens a window in which you can indeed right click "intro" to see a man page about an obscure OS or something called Inferno. Unfortunately, right-clicking "acme" just gives "File not found".
To illustrate my comment, I wanted to copy stuff from these windows, but there doesn't seem to be a copy command: No copy menu, right-click doesn't give a menu, Ctrl-C doesn't seem to do anything. Ok, so the copy command is something else. This thing might have a much better way of copying text than what we are used to, but since the man page for Acme is "File not found"...
There may be great ideas hidden behind this thing, but I will never find out.
If an experienced IT professional and occasional programmer who is using Windows, Linux and Macs daily can't even see what this thing is suposed to do and can't read some documentation, then what's the point?
And here is the /. story about it from 2004:
Philips Develops Fluid Lenses
Now let's see how this is different...
I remember reading 1 or more years ago (here on /. ?) a very similar story about a new lens. It was thought to be used in mobile phones and such, being a very small lens, with no moving parts, focusing being only done through the voltage applied.
Would someone still have a link to that old story?
Why do you need "a local AV"?
Because people insert random CDs and USB keys, and they check their personal email through webmail, etc. (and someone infected his brand new laptop on which the AV was not installed yet, with an exe in a password protected zip, which he got from his private webmail acount! Yes, they do that sort of thing. At least once)
I don't scan my own machine regularly either, and also just "keep things sane" and occasionally scan a virus out of curiosity to see what it is.
You obviously don't have much of a clue about managing random business users.
Last year, I replaced an old NT4 server with Linux in a small business with around 20 XP clients. I hoped to find a Linux solution to manage antivirus and replace the very expensive Symantec Enterprise licenses, but I didn't.
...
I do have ClamAV scanning incoming emails, but it is still necessary to have a local AV on the machines. I don't like Symantec and find it too expensive, but I must say it really works. So I did a fresh minimal install of Win2K on the old server box, and setup Symantec Enterprise on that. You can install the AV on the clients from the server, and it keeps them updated.
The licenses were just renewed, because I still have not found something else.
The problem is that, to manage the clients, the server needs to be Windows. Samba does not offer remote registry access to the clients, and it's RPC capabilities are not sufficiently developed for such tasks.
But you seem to have a Windows AD server anyway, so I would say go with Symantec. (And either find an acceptable deal with Symantec, or cheat a little on the number of licenses: the server doesn't seem to mind if there are a few more clients).
An alternative would of course be to switch all machines to Linux and/or Mac, but
Firefox is being simplified in order to appeal to the greater market. You know, the ones who make up 85% of the market
You completely misunderstand who makes up your 85% of the market for a new web browser. It is NOT the 85% of the end users. When 85% of the market uses one browser, it is because someone pre-installed it for them. Until now, it has been MSIE, installed with the OS, or re-installed in a customized way by network admins using various deployment tools.
So, to increase "market share", what needs to be done is to make installation, upgrades and maintenance administrator-friendly.
For Firefox, this would mean an easy and well-documented way to deploy an installation to 10, 100 or 1000 machines, including preferences, extensions, toolbar configuration and bookmarks.
And of course, it should not require complex MSI installer hacks and not rely on Active Directory. Our Samba servers don't have AD and shouldn't need to.
Ideally, I would install and configure it on my machine, and just copy the install to wherever I want it to be on the client machines. Adding an extension should be as easy as copying some files into the right places.
Do you really need a $600 box with accelerated 3D graphics and sound to run Perl scripts?
Yes. Adding some funky Perl into the kids Playstations would definitely be fun...
Will it run Perl?
I also have the problem with TightVNC that the screen may not be refreshed correctly before some dexterous mousing is performed.
So I'm also interested to hear about alternatives...
Here is an excerpt, taken from this page:
It's after 3.1 so it has to be Debian 95 !
No, it will be Debian 3.11 for Workgroups.
Debian 95 will come later...
Redundant/Flamebait/Troll and all, yes, I know... but ...
Wouldn't it be nice to run the same system as everyone else you know
Don't know, but around 90% of the users seem to agree with you...
dd is slow, since it copies even unused disk space. I have had good luck with Knoppix and ntfsclone over the network, using this method.
However, all the machines were identical, so I didn't even use sysprep.
And BTW, I even dropped the pipe through gzip which was suggested in the examples, since it didn't make things any faster. The Gigabit network helped, I guess. Maybe with 100Base-T, gzip is good.
you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window)
Not really the best example, since you can also use the login name with the Windows messaging protocol, and it pops up on any or every machine on which that user is logged in. Or you can use the workgroup/domain name, and it pops un on every machine.
(Used to be a handy simple tool in LANs, until spammers found they could use it to spam boxes directly connected to the net, and MS stupidly disabled it in some Service Pack. You can re-enable it, but when you send "Going down for maintenance in 5 minutes" on the LAN, there are always some machines on which it hasn't been re-enabled, or has been re-disabled).
I leave my kids go out. This "predators" hysteria is ridiculous indeed, and I think it would be very hard to kidnapp my kids anyway.
BUT, they often complain there was nobody to play with, and come back!
My eleven year old daughter sits in front of the computer at some chat games, because that's where her school friends are, not outside on the lake shore...
I'm still not sure whether they do that because other parents don't let their children out so much, or just because they think that's what is cool, or probably some combination of both...
I keep hearing mentions of myspace.com, so I went to see what it actually is.
On the main page, there is a link to Learn More, leading to "Step 1: Create your FREE profile". There, my choices seemed to be Next or Sign Up. Since I didn't want to sign up but did want to learn more, I clicked Next to go to page 2.
Here is what I learned on page 2: (in the familiar formatting of the standard MSIE error pages, even though I used a better browser)
The page cannot be foundThe page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
Please try the following:
- Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
- If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact
the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
- Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.Internet Information Services (IIS)
Technical Information (for support personnel)