Archive for category troubleshooting
BOUML – Free UML Tool
Posted by Bloggylife in Applications, troubleshooting, windows on February 18th, 2010
I usually draw my UML diagrams using Microsoft Visio. But recently I was refered to this free tool, BOUML.
BOUML is a free UML 2 tool box allowing you to specify and generate code in C++, Java, Idl, Php and Python.
I downloaded the Windows version, had problems with getting an uncorrupted executable, I had to choose a different mirror site, I chose Japan 
After the successful installation, my AVG resident shield, detected the below as threats. The site has already warned about such thing if you have (AVG or Ikarus)
If you go to the Resident Shield Manage Exception, you can add that specific file.
I still haven’t used this tool and don’t really know my way around it. But I’m always a fan of free software that promise fast performance and doesn’t require much memory (link). I’m going to whip up some tests to see how well my UML diagrams are transferred to Java classes.
Hardware vs Software
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, thoughts, troubleshooting on February 11th, 2010
I decided to call them that! Hardware and Software people/approach. Two people can attempt solving a problem in different ways.
Imagine this scenario, PC, cable and another system/gadget. The cables is used to drive data from PC to system. If the PC suddenly says cable problem when you are trying to push the data to the connected device, how do you solve the problem?
Hardware people start off by touching the cable! Making sure that the cable is properly connected at both ends and maybe replace it with another cable just to make sure that the cable is not the cause and go on from there to solve the problem.
Software people start with restarting the application and maybe re-install/update the driver. They may even examine the cable settings from the PC, the bit rate, connection type, device type, etc. and go on from there to solve the problem.
Both might end up solving the problem, it could’ve been a loosely connected cable or improper settings, two different mind sets with the same aim.
My Mug
Posted by Bloggylife in personal, troubleshooting, windows on January 27th, 2010
Isn’t this funny I doubt anyone will talk to me if I was holding this early in the morning 
On a completely different note, I noticed if I open the jpg I can rename the file from within the windows explorer and it will be updated in the jpg picture header! I didn’t know that so this was a cool discovery.
I tried it for txt documents, you can alter the name after opening the document but it won’t reflect on the opened document so if you save it, it’ll create another txt document with the old name.
Other applications like word, PDF, won’t allow that as it known.
Publish Bug Update:
So it seems the problem is solved, I managed to publish the previous post after using the Preview option, what happened is the “Contact Form 7″ plug-in installed an update so maybe this was causing the problem! Not entirely sure. Anyway I scheduled this post, so if I don’t add anything further, then that worked too.
Network Issue: I Know Why!
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on January 5th, 2010
So I know why the IP phone in my room is not working on this port. That particular port is not configured as part of the voice network. Should I call up the IT department and give them the socket label and tell them to include the switch port to the voice network. I can simply suggest to switch cable connections on the switch side or just give me the keys to the building’s data room and I’ll do it It’ll be a bonus, I’ll see the data room, switches, configurations, cable management, cable types, cabinet layout, physical security, all in all, it’s a win win situation
It so much simpler when you are in charge 
Wordpress Publish Bug
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on January 5th, 2010
How do you update your wordpress? Me automatically, I don’t read what’s new most of the time and I don’t read the bugs and fixes. What I notice are the changes and what I’m looking for are the fixes to the bugs I faced.
I use chrome browser mostly and I know there are many hiccups, simple fact of checking hotmail or not being able to play some online games, I sometimes have trouble uploading photos to flickr and have to use firefox, even viewing pictures. I just upgraded my wordpress to 2.9.1 and still I have the same problem with chrome.
Keep in mind that I use chrome.
When writing a post, I use the preview option to open another tab to view my post, if I want to publish it, I can not, the publish process seems to go on forever, I have to stop that and click edit from the Posts menu to view all the posts and then edit that particular post and click Publish. It seems if within the same Edit Post page if you have clicked Preview, you can not publish the post by clicking Publish.
That seems to affect the publishing of a post by Scheduling, all my scheduled posts seem to fail.
I’m scheduling this post without using the Preview option first. Let’s see how it goes.
UPDATE:
So it seems scheduling works if I did not use the Preview option before within the Edit Post page!
PC Infected: kbppsysguard.exe
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on November 25th, 2009
My laptop got hit! I was down for most of the day with a trojan that I don’t know how it got installed, I just entered a cooking site, leqafa, and then stuff started popping up!
It disabled my Antivirus and everytime I opened my task manager, it closed it.
I booted in safe mode, F12, and scanned my PC and amazingly, neither AVG nor Ad-aware detected it. I booted back in normal mode and then my anti-spyware detected abnormalities in (…/AppData/Local/…) directory, so I decided to just delete it manually, but couldn’t do that while the malicious software was running, I couldn’t kill the process, thus I was not able to delete the executable.
I booted back to safe mode, it was located under (…/AppData/Local/ywuvh/kbppsysguard.exe) and deleted it, I deleted everything under Temp folder, I then searched my registry for entries (kbppsysguard) and deleted two. I didn’t empty my recycle bin, I’ll tell you why in a minute.
I restarted my PC and customized my scan settings and included the recycle bin and now it detected it! Weird!!
Anyway it took me almost all day to sort this out but thank GOD I managed to remove that silly infection.
I wasn’t able to browse and that seems weird because I successfully authenticated to the university network and got a public IP, but couldn’t browse … think what could be the problem ….
Checked my proxy settings on all of my browsers and it was configured to local host (127.0.0.1)! Removed that and happily browsing
Just A Question
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting on July 25th, 2009
Does “Connections” even if accompanied with “Stupidity” overpower “Hard Work” ??
TCPView for Windows
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, windows on July 19th, 2009
In any client server scenario, it’s hard to connect the process running on the server to the client on basic windows commands. Usually all processes will run under system account. This is an awesome tool that makes the task much easier.
TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, NT, 2000 and XP TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows. The TCPView download includes Tcpvcon, a command-line version with the same functionality.
Site: Link
Download software: Link
Increase Virtual Hard Disk
Posted by Bloggylife in technology, troubleshooting on June 15th, 2009
We’ve started with virtualization, I’ll talk about this beautiful sexy technology some other time. My hands are all over it.
When creating virtual machines, each seems to have it’s own hard disk and partitions, but in fact they all share a single storage to which the virtual server that manages the virtual machines points to.
I got one v-machine with 20 GB of hard disk space and I want to increase it. Through the setting of the machines you can increase the hard disk space. Back to the v-machine, go to computer management -> disk management, you’ll see the newly unallocated space, to partition and format.
I couldn’t extend my single primary partition with the tools available in windows, I think I’ll need third party softwares.
What I did, is clone my v-machine and as I was creating the new settings, increased the C volume space. of course, you’ll need enough space to be able to create this replica machine.
Don’t forget to, tick off the connected box in network settings, if you added a network, because you don’t want conflict issues, when powering on the new machine.
Will test it fully tomorrow, to make sure all is good. Give the same settings, IP, computer name, etc, to the newly created v-machine and shut down the original one. If all goes well after some time, delete the original one to free up some space.
Cont. Deploying Application Packages
Posted by Bloggylife in troubleshooting, windows on June 15th, 2009
I’ll share some of the issues we faced along the way, we already deployed WSUS into our network that pushes Microsoft updates according to your GPO settings on the domain level.
I came across another product, Microsoft System Center Essentials (link), which also includes WSUS technology but adds to that updates of third parties software, how cool is that 
If you have problems installing the management software from a media, go to Microsoft website and download it from there along with SP1 (link). That solved the first problem I faced.
Upon the configuration, it’ll ask you if you want to automatically create a domain policy, you’ll need administrative privileges and then go ahead search for computers and add manually or in a bulk.
One advice, when choosing the server, take care it has enough hard disk space, for all the software updates and deployment packages it needs to store.
Pushing agents to computers, is through the management console, where you select a computer and provide administrator credentials. You can create package from .exe or .msi files.
You can group computers and approve package installation. For msi packages you can provide installation properties, The executable program that interprets packages and installs products is Msiexec.exe. To see the list of parameters, run this on a command prompt window Msiexec, the below should appear.
On a single domain, you can have only one Microsoft System Center, it’ll give you an error if you try to install another System Center on a network already managed by one.
You can force end computers to communicate with the system center to check for updates or software that needs to be downloaded through running this command on end machines.
wuauclt.exe /detectnow
If indeed there is something to be downloaded, the yellow shield will appear next to the time and date, machines may face problems downloading, check this out:
- Windows update service is running
- All antivirus applications are up to date, because if they are not, they will block such activities. Check if windows defender is installed, that was one of the problems that caused download to fail
After the download is complete and according to your global setting the installation should start, to check the time of installation, check your local windows update settings, which can be access through the control panel or on the domain level settings.
This product offers so much more, details about the machines it managing through their agents, it triggers alerts, and generates reports.
But for now, I was really glad to be able to push third party packages silently to end machines and check the status as successful
References:
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