Thursday, March 18, 2004
Rebooted one of Chris's computers to force Sophos to update—worked. Linkchecking. Investigated VPN issues. Made live small changes to Licensure pages for Cindy. Checked in with Ena about her Win XP upgrade—all is well for the most part. I forgot to set up printers and restore bookmarks in Netscape—which I fixed today. A few other small problems remain—I spent more time on them but couldn't resolve them all. They'll have to wait until next week. Chris C's laptop: ensured virus defs were up to date, scanned for viruses. Backed up Kristina's computer in preparation for her Win XP upgrade today. Used Google Local (beta) for the first time today. I don't know when it was released, but within about a minute I knew it was gold. It's intuitive, pretty accurate (from a few quick searches I did), and fast. Google does it again! Today was a bunch of problems that I couldn't get fixed. One was Chris C's laptop—he brought it in for a backup, but I couldn't get it connected so that the server could see it. I tried direct IP but Retrospect's cursor just spun and spun—wouldn't recognize it. Disabling McAfee firewall did not help. I thought I'd try joining it to our domain, but the button to join a domain was grayed out and I could not figure out how to enable it. (Yes, it's Win XP Pro, not Win XP Home.) Another problem was PharmAdMIT 2004 for Ena—double-clicking it gives a beep from the speakers and nothing else. When I'm logged in with admin rights on her computer, it works fine, so I know it's a rights issue. But I manually assigned her rights to the entire folder and that did not resolve it. Another problem on Ena's computer: When attempting to print to a network printer, the following error message appears: "A policy is in effect on your computer which prevents you from connecting to this print queue." Q319939 solved it for me—I disabled "Point and Print Restrictions" in gpedit.msc > User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Printers. I was also successful at resolving a problem I could not figure out since August 18, 2003. PROBLEM: After upgrading a computer from Windows 2000 Workstation to Windows XP Pro Workstation, it no longer appears in the Sophos Anti-Virus Administration tool called SAVAdmin. Sophos tech support and I went back and forth on the issue and they could not figure it out. Eventually, they said I needed to consult with Microsoft (which I never did do because Microsoft would likely refer me back to Sophos saying they don't why Sophos programmers wrote their code so that it wouldn't work after upgrading to Windows XP). Today while digging for an answer, I stumbled across /Security/Win_Security/Q_20782059.html at experts-exchange.com which helped me resolve the problem. Q_20381634 didn't have the complete solution, but it gave me the idea to compare the registry key mentioned in it with that of a computer where it was working, and that gave me the answer. Michele M at Sophos came very close to giving me the right answer, but she didn't. She referred me to the correct registry key, but she neglected to tell me what permissions for what object name were required on it. She said to me in e-mail on October 20, 2003, "To allow SAVAdmin access, grant the relevant permissions to the user running SAVAmin on this key and all child keys." (Why couldn't she tell me what the "relevant permissions" were? My guess is that she simply didn't know.) SOLUTION: On the computer that no longer appears in SAVAdmin, log in with administrator rights. Open regedt32.exe. Select the key for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ SecurePipeServers \ winreg. Choose Edit > Permissions. Add the object name called LOCAL SERVICE, setting the permissions on it to Allow Read. Go to SAVAdmin and refresh—the problem computer should now report data as expected. Student Diane N dropped off her computer—she uses PacBell dialup and all websites work fine for her except those in the ucsf.edu domain—weird! Hosts file was normal, but she had 2 hosts files—one called hosts (which was empty) and another called Hosts (which was normal—127.0.0.1). I deleted the empty one, problem still remains. The problem also remains even after disabling McAfee firewall. Next week I'll install DUN settings for my ISP Sonic and see if it's specific to PacBell. I'm guessing it's her computer, though. It's Win 98, and when I ran Ad-Aware it blue-screened with an error in VXM VMM(1). Ran scanreg /fix and scandisk /autofix—problem still happens. Dinner with Patrick and Melissa at San Tung. We all had something to celebrate. Patrick found out he got accepted to the SFSU MA program in TESOL—Teaching English as a SecOnd Language. Melissa celebrated the end of the admissions cycle. I celebrated my victory over SAVAdmin. We ordered steamed dumplings, breaded fish chunks (I can't remember the name of the dish), black bean sauce noodles with five spice cow, chicken with green string beans, rice. Tea and water all around. Patrick had a bottle of Tsing Tao. Everything was great except the fish chunks were spicy even though the menu did not indicate that it was. I complained but our server seemed reluctant to repair the problem. He even brought us the menu thinking that there was a chili pepper symbol next to the item's name, but it simply enabled us to prove to him that he was wrong. I told him to just bring us the dish again—not spicy—and we'll pay for it. He left, and we all promptly agreed we would never return to San Tung (415-242-0828,1031 Irving Street). My fortune: You will meet an important person who will help you advance professsionally. Melissa's fortune: Go with your instincts in both business and romance. Patrick's fortune: Confucius says: To err is human, to rub it in is divine! After we got home, Patrick went to bed and I coded more of Lodestar.