As August draws to a close, here is a selection of random stuff I've learnt (or had to re-learn) as a Business Owner this month.

• Risk Management doesn't just mean Health and Safety - it means planning for the worst in any scenario
• Invoicing on time is really, really important
• Taking on employees won't magically free up all of your time to do more important things - in fact it will take up more of your time... initially, at least
• Understand that some suppliers simply don't understand good Customer Service - by all means register your complaint at their feckless behaviour, but don't expect them to respond to it - don't try to change them, simply don't give them your business anymore
• If an Supplier you've never dealt with before says they've got an item in stock on their web-site - don't believe them
• If an Supplier you've never dealt with before says they've got an item in stock over the telephone - still don't believe them
• Don't deal with Suppliers you've never dealt with before - unless they've been recommended to you by a respected peer
• If you've not put your prices up in the last twelve months, put them up today - it's the quickest way to increase profits without winning any new work
• Get your Engineers to carry spare USB, Ethernet, Modem and Power Cables in their work-kit and leave ample spares on client sites - when you're ultra-busy and have to waste 30 minutes travel-time in a round-trip to collect a £0.69p cable, this point becomes especially relevant
• Always copy the SBS Installation CD's onto the Server Hard Disk to save yourself a trip to site
• Never ask a client to put a SBS Installation CD into a Server CD-ROM - they'll probably end up putting in the Parallel Port, or the UPS, or the Toilet Cistern...
• Label every plug for future reference
• Never remove an unlabelled plug assuming it's a monitor - you'll undoubtedly find it's a server...
• When you're feeling a bit uninspired, aimlessly Facebook is not the place to look to for inspiration - read a chapter from a good motivational book instead
• You can't do it all on your own - don't be afraid to ask for help
• When you're feeling low, kind words from peers can be a real boost
• And remember that a kind word from you to a peer might help lift them when they need it too
• Don't work on a problem for more than an hour before asking someone for a fresh perspective
• Don't miss breakfast or lunch, and regularly get a good nights sleep
• If something is urgent, pick up the 'phone and call them instead of e-mailing them
• Been putting off making a 'phone call? What's stopping you from making it right now?

If any of the above seems bleeding obvious, then that's because it most certainly is - but I'm guessing you've got a similar story to share so feel free to leave comments with your stunning realisations, I'd love to read 'em. :-)

Had a head-scratcher today whilst migrating some data from a 500GB External USB HDD to a new 1TB External USB HDD, both attached to a client server.

Some of the data refused to copy across, throwing up a "Cannot copy file. The Parameter Is Incorrect Error" each time. Same error when the copy was attempted in DOS, RoboCopy or XCOPY.

Upon investigation, each of the problematic files were 10GB+ in size - and suddenly the realisation dawned - that the new external HDD was formatted as FAT32 and not NTFS, and thus suffered from FAT32's 4GB file limit.

A quick format to NTFS on the drive, and I was able to copy those large files across without issue.

Obviously, I have become so used to working with large files nowadays that sometimes I forget things weren't always this way!

If you're an uber-IT-geek, and I don't have to tell you that I unashamedly am, then you probably have a fascination with the history of Computing like me. That being the case, you might be interested in attending the British Computer Society (BCS) next Birmingham Branch Meeting on Tuesday 16th September, where Dr Mark Baldwin will talk about the Enigma machine of World War II fame.

Oh, and there's a free buffet. Geek Speak and free food? What is there not to like about that!? :-)

If you're a BCS Member, just e-mail chrisgreen430@hotmail.com with your booking by 5th September 2008 - that means if you intend to go along, fire that e-mail off NOW!

If you're not a BC Member and would like to attend as a Guest, no problem - drop me an e-mail and I'd be happy to make sure you're signed in on the day and have a friendly face to introduce you to others. Likewise drop me a note if you're interested in knowing more about BCS Membership.

Full details of the event below - and for completeness I've included details of the next couple of BCS Birmingham Branch events.

Hope to see you there!

ENIGMA, BLETCHLEY PARK & THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC

An illustrated presentation by Dr Mark Baldwin (www.enigmatixuk.com)

Tuesday 16th September 2008 - 18.00 for 18.30 - Lord Knights Suite, Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre, Pershore Road, Birmingham B5 7RN

One of the Second World War's most fascinating stories, is that of the Enigma machine, a portable encryption device widely used by the Germans, which they believed to be totally secure.  Nevertheless, by mathematical analysis and modern technology (and a certain amount of good luck), the Allies devised techniques for 'breaking' Enigma codes, and thus read hundreds of thousands of German messages, providing a wealth of reliable intelligence.

Much of this work was carried out at Bletchley Park, today open to the public as a museum site, which explains and illustrates the history of the of the attack on Enigma, initiated by the Poles in the 1930s and later perfected by the British.  The intelligence gained was of immense value to the Allies in virtually every theatre of war, but nowhere more so than in the Battle of the Atlantic, that gruelling conflict which lasted nearly six years at a cost of over 60,000 allied lives.  Dr Baldwin uses the Battle of the Atlantic to exemplify the importance of code breaking in winning the war.  The efforts to break Enigma and other German codes in the 1940s are also historically important as precursors to the modern discipline of computer science.

After the lecture, the audience are invited to take part in a hands-on practical demonstration of one of the few surviving Enigma machines.  Only about 200 are known to survive worldwide; of these, only about a dozen are in public collections in Britain. There is no other machine on tour, so Dr Baldwin is providing a unique opportunity for the audience not just to view, but also to operate, an original 4-rotor Enigma machine, made for the U-Boat service in 1944.  This is of particular interest, as there is no working machine on permanent public display anywhere in England north of Bletchley Park, and nowhere at all in Wales, Scotland or Ireland.

Agenda

18:00 - 18:30 Light refreshments (tea or coffee with biscuits)
18:30 - 20:00 The Enigma Machine Presentation
20:00 - 20:30 Questions & Answers
Please contact Chris Green, chrisgreen430@hotmail.com, by 5th September 2008 if you intend to be present at this event, so we can advise the caterers of the correct numbers requiring refreshments.

=====================================================================

                                      BRITISH COMPUTER SOCIETY
                                           BIRMINGHAM BRANCH
                  PRELIMINARY MEETINGS PROGRAMME 2008 - 2009

All our meetings are open to BCS members and non-members alike.  Refreshments are available before all our evening meetings from 6pm.  The presentations normally start at 6.30pm.

As non-BCS members are very welcome to attend our meetings, please feel free to pass this information on to friends and colleagues who you feel might be interested.

There is no charge for attendance at our evening events.

All our meetings are assessed for Continuing Professional Development as "attendance only" at the rate of 0.5 CPD Units per hour.  We are no longer issuing CPD certificates as BCS members are now being encouraged to complete their personal Career Builder logs online.  See http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.1119 for more details.

Wednesday 15 October 2008 - "Agile Software Development: A framework for better software creation" - Mike Sutton, Agile Mentor/Coach, Certified Scrum Master & Practitioner, Wizewerx Ltd (http://www.wizewerx.com), at Trophy Suite, Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre, Pershore Road, Birmingham B5 7RN - 18.00 for 18.30.

Booking requested, please contact Peter Crouch, pccrouch@bcs.org.uk or 0121 523 6756, by 3rd October 2008 if you intend to be present at this event, so we can advise the caterers of the numbers for the buffet.

Thursday 12 February 2009 - "Working and Managing in a Multi-National Organisation" - Steve Goddard, Global Infrastructure Director, TRW Automotive, at Trophy Suite, Tally Ho Sports & Conference Centre, Pershore Road, Birmingham B5 7RN - 18.00 for 18.30.
We hope this will be a joint meeting with the Birmingham Branch of the Chartered Management Institute.
Booking requested, please contact Peter Crouch, pccrouch@bcs.org.uk or 0121 523 6756, by 2nd February 2009 if you intend to be present at this event, so we can advise the caterers of the numbers for the buffet.

For the most up to date information and more details on our meetings and other activities please visit http://birmingham.bcs.org.

For information on the BCS itself please visit http://www.bcs.org.

Offline files within Windows XP is a pig - make no doubt about it. Don't get me wrong - what is supposed to be a nice feature, allowing laptop users to amend documents "offline" and then see them sync to their office server when they connect to the LAN, does work... albeit 90% of the time. That other 10%? Expect tears before bed-time.

Back in the day I debated the short-comings of off-line files with many a MSFTer, with the response from more than one Microsoft employee being a hushed "don't tell anyone I said this, but off-line files is not a reliable feature". You only have to look around at the number of blogs and web-sites dedicated solely to resolving end-users off-lines file woes to realise things aren't right. Of course, Vista has come along now so everything is ok - but what about all those people still using XP - or to put it another way, what about 90% of Windows users out there?

I can't recall the amount of times when I've had a 'phone call from a user who had spent hours working on a document on his laptop, then found that document mysteriously disappeared when he synchronised his files on-line.

One such situation occurred today when a client 'phoned me to ask where two of his files had gone to - they were there one minute, but as soon as the computer had finished synchronising with the company server - they weren't to be found.

The files had gone, sure enough, and although we could restore the last best copy from either on-site or off-site backup, the work the user did on the files since he last synchronised seemed lost.

Step in CSCCMD - supposedly part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit. I say supposedly, because although version 1.0 of CSCCMD is indeed within the ResKit download - it doesn't contain an important feature - the /EXTRACT function. This can only be found in CSCCMD 1.1 - which is apparently harder to find than Rocking Horse droppings! I finally located a copy via this blog - kudos to the writer for making the file available himself. I've made sure you can now also find a copy of CSCCMD 1.1 here - if anyone knows an "official" source of this file, do leave a comment below and let me know.

What do CSCCMD do? It allows you to work with the off-line file cache - located (a hidden folder) at C:\Windows\CSC. If you browse to that directory directly, you'll see a list of numbered folders and suitably mysteriously named files within. CSCCMD allows you to extract those files into a readable format using the \EXTRACT function we spoke of earlier. In this case I dropped a copy of CSCCMD.EXE into C:\Windows\CSC and then executed the command

CSCCMD /EXTRACT:\\servername\share /TARGET:c:\temp /recurse

... where <servername\share> is the off-line folder location you're trying to recover, /TARGET:c:\temp is a temporary folder setup as a suspense location for the extracted files, and /recurse is a switch that makes sure that CSCCMD extracts all files in all folders found within C:\Windows\CSC.

Minutes later, CSCCMD had ran its magic.

My advice to the user going forwards? If you're working on a very important document or making lots of changes, save a copy to a USB key-disk before returning to the office - I didn't specifically say off-line files under XP wasn't to be trusted, but he got the idea.

Now cue a ton of e-mails and comments telling me off-line files is infinitely better within Windows Vista and the user is a fool for sticking with XP... :-)

Sods Law dictates that as soon as you take steps to rectify a potentially disastrous situation, such as ordering new hardware to replace an aging and creaking server, that things will start going terribly terribly wrong as a consequence. Or so it feels, anyway.

We're awaiting delivery of new hardware to replace a clients old SBS server, a server that has been running without too many difficulties for some time but was looking a little long in the tooth and so we felt was prudent to replace. No sooner had we placed the order with our suppliers for the new tin, than the existing server got wind of it's impending retirement and started acting the arse (anybody who says Artificial Intelligence will never come to happen doesn't know grumpy old servers such as this one).

One such problem we encountered was the C:\ drive running critically low on disk space. We took the usual steps - running Disk Cleanup, removing unused Local Profiles, deleting Temporary files and so on - we even stopped the Automatic Updates Service and cleared out the "Software Distribution" folder to clean that up, all saving a few megabytes of storage space.

But each day the problem returned - low disk space on C:\

After installing the excellent Treesize Professional from JAM Software the culprit soon became apparent - C:\System Volume Information.

What is the System Volume Information folder? Well there is an excellent write-up of what the folder is at http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/20/55764.aspx but in a nutshell, it's the place that stores System Recovery points, Content Indexing Files and the Volume Snapshot Service data. To put it simply - it's a very important folder and you should never try to work with it directly - don't delete files from it, don't make changes to it, nada!

On this server, Indexing had been turned off, and there were no System Recovery points, and so our attention turned to the Volume Snapshot Service - or in this scenario, how to move that data from C:\System Volume Information to another drive.

The process actually proved quite simple.

1. Stop and set the Volume Shadow Service to "Disabled" temporarily to prevent it from kicking in.
2. Open Computer Management.
3. In the console tree, right-click Shared Folders, select All Tasks, and click Configure Shadow Copies.
4. Click the volume where you want to make changes (in our case, C:\) and then click Settings.
5. In the Settings dialog box, change the "Located on this volume" (we moved it from C:\ to G:\ - which had ample disk space to accommodate the folder) and click OK.
6. Click Enable.
7. Set the Volume Shadow Service to "Manual" again and let Windows do it's thing.

Voila! 9GB disk space on C:\ immediately freed up!

Maybe that will give us enough time to gently ease the old server into retirement without it throwing another hissy fit! Fingers crossed...

Just a quick note to say "thank-you" to two readers of Tubblog, people who don't know me personally at all, but e-mailed me this week to ask how I am doing as I'd not blogged in more than a few days!

Does this make me the digital equivalent of the old man down the road from your home, who you've not seen at the newsagents in a while and are therefore worried is ok?

Seriously though, bless you both, I'm touched at the sentiment and it brought a huge smile to my face to hear from you. A smile that was well needed as the reason for the lack of posts is that I've been swamped with the move to the new office and working hard on building the business through long hours and tons of difficult (and not much fun) jobs.

Although I've got a load of things I want to blog about, I've got a lot of juggling of important tasks to deal with first - such is life. Sigh.

If you want to read my "mini-blog" aka, Twitter, you can do so by visiting http://twitter.com/tubblog - but rest assured normal Tubblog service will be resumed soon! :-)

Even on the smallest network, one of the issues every system administrator faces is that of getting a "clean" backup - a backup which doesn't show errors due to open files being locked and therefore unable to backup properly.

True, backup applications such as Backup Exec have Advanced Open File options that allow you to overcome these issues - but if you're not using such an application, you're left in the position of politely reminding your users to logoff each night... again... and again... and again... and again...

The simple fact is, when the clock hits 1730 for "knocking off" - the last thing on a users mind is the fact that if they don't logoff then the server backup may be affected. More likely they are already in the pub ordering a cold one.

So how do you force users to log-off? There are 3rd Party applications to do this, but they cost money - money that the MD is unlikely to sanction spending ("Remind them again to logoff" is a more likely response).

There are also Group Policy settings that are supposed to force logoff's for you - but in my experience these simply don't work reliably.

Step in SysInternals PSShutdown. PSShutdown is a free tool, part of the PS Toolkit, that can be run from a command line to force logoff's and reboot's of remote machines.

Download the tool, extract the file psshutdown.exe to a folder on your server, then create a text file containing the names of all the computers you'd like to automatically logoff each night. i.e.

COMPUTER001

COMPUTER002

Save this file as COMPUTERS.TXT in the same folder as PsShutdown.exe

Then, create another text file and fill it with a command line something similar to this:-

PsShutdown.exe -e p:0:0 -r @computers.txt

The above command line simply says, run PsShutdown.exe and set the Shutdown Reason (-e) to Scheduled Maintenance (p:0:0) then reboot (-r) the computers in the file @computers.txt

The full command line switch list for PsShutdown.exe can be found here.

Save this new file as a Batch file called PsShutdown.bat and then use the servers Scheduled Tasks (Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks) to run this batch file at a convenient time, say 20:30, when all the users have left for the day.

Each night at 20:30, any users left logged onto the systems will now be "kicked" off and their machines given a clean-boot.

Your Backups should now be squeaky clean and free of any open-file issues!

I returned to the office on Tuesday and immediately got stuck into some work for a new client we're in the process of taking on-board. They needed some modifications to their Firewall, and I'd already used murky methods to deduce the Administrator password which the previous feckless IT Support provider had not made available to us. In fact, the previous IT Support provider had left zero documentation whatsoever - they weren't a fan of Karl Palachuk's methodology then.

Once logged onto the server, we logged onto the Router with ease. I say with ease because from the server console, Internet Explorer had cached the username and password for Router access. We didn't know the password, but we could still gain access to the Router to make our changes. It seems the previous IT Support provider was also not very security conscious - not a fan of Steve Lambs blog either then.

However, we were still faced with the fact we didn't know the Router password to enable us to logon from any other machine bar the server with the cached credentials - and therefore faced with the fact we would need to factory reset the Router and all it's working settings, just to enable us to change this password to something of our own choice.

Then a thought occurred. Internet Explorer has the password cached - surely there's some way of decrypting that information so it's readable?

There is - and it's a freeware package called IEPassView

IEPassView is a  small utility that reveals the passwords stored by Internet Explorer browser. It supports the new Internet Explorer 7.0, as well as older versions of Internet explorer, v4.0 - v6.0. There are also similar versions for Firefox - just in case you thought I was bashing Microsoft over Open Source alternatives.

Thirty seconds after downloading IEPassView, the Router password - and an incredible amount of other passwords (thanks for the logon to your Hotmail and Facebook account guys!) - were revealed to me, and I'd subsequently changed the Router password saving myself a heap of time.

Now I got a few e-mails bemoaning the fact that I was giving away "Trade Secrets" with my blog post on Magical Jellybean Keyfinder - but frankly, the above tale is a great example of two things - feckless documentation and an IT Professional (and I use that word sarcastically) believing that he/she were in control of the server in question.

Whilst convenient to use, Internet Explorer (or Firefox) Password Cache is not a secure place to store credentials as IEPassView proves. If you lost control of any of your clients servers, or even your own laptop or desktop, what information could someone else glean from it using freely available tools?

My first blog post in a few days as I've been away to the South-West of England to visit Newquay, Cornwall for a Camping Holiday with some of the lads. Did the fact we were in the middle of a muddy field in drizzling rain stop us using Technology? Hell no! An inverter on the Car, multiple cigarette lighter sockets, a laptop and good old 3G connectivity meant we could deal with the important business of updating our Facebook Status to tell everyone what we were up-to, every minute of every day!

Barter Town

What camping did do for me is allow me to come back to work with renewed enthusiasm. Not because the break gave me time to think, to devise strategies and plans... but because I'm determined to continue making Netlink IT work so I never ever EVER have to stay in the squalor of a British Camp-site and can instead continue to afford comfortable hotels with warm showers and lack of chilling winds and sleepless nights instead! :-)