Posts by kc0arf

Hello,

Your first major mistake was to upgrade your computer without making a backup. I bet you will learn from this, and not make this mistake a second time. Backups are the lifeblood of your data. Also, had your data been on a different partition, you could re-format C: and not caused a problem with your data on D: I realize this does not help you, but it may inspire you to take better care of your machine.

If this box was sent to me for repair, I would take the hard drive out, and put it into a second computer as a slave hard drive. Boot that one up, and then copy the data files off of it. Then, I would be in a position to re-partition the broken setup, reformat the drives, and setup the machine and then setup a backup strategy. If you try this, make sure you set the IDE jumpers accordingly for primary and slave.

If you have a network available, you might try booting Knoppix or a different linux that is all contained on a CD-ROM. You can then see if it will access the NTFS volume, and then let you copy the data to a server.

In the end though, I think you are going to end up starting over from scratch with the FORMAT utility, and rebuilding from square one. It is my personal expierience that trying voodoo repairs and other tricks with the registry and that are …

Hello,

Welcome to DaniWeb. Please do not hijack other people's threads... your problem is different and unique, and you are welcome to start your own discussion.

Powerbooks require the C button to be held down to boot from the CD-ROM, whereas your iMAC is seeing the CD-ROM in the drive, and defaulting the restart from there.

Re-install the OS. Then, when the computer reboots, hold down the mouse button when you hear the chime-bong-boot tunes. This will eject the CD, allowing the system to boot from the hard drive.

Let us know if this works for you.

Christian

Hello,

You GOTTA be kidding to edit the hosts files on all the machines. NO! By doing that, you loose all flexibility of managing the name if it should change down the road. Unless there would be a way to do it via group policy, don't even try to do that.

DNS is the way to go with this project.

Christian

Hello,

It may be the video card, or it may be the video card's driver. I would remove the switch, and expirement with it that way for a while. A messed-up video card can really send your computer for a slide.

Christian

Hello,

How do you have this wired? USB to a case, and inside an IDE drive? Wondering if you have USB / Firewire setup properly, and if inside, if it is an IDE drive, did you change the jumper to make it MASTER?

Christian

Hello,

For the others reading the thread, you may wish to tell us HOW you did it. Giving back to the forum is almost as fun as asking things. :)

Thanks,

Christian

Hello,

It could be the video card, or perhaps the switch itself. You did mention that the BIOS POST was looking funny -- and that is outside the control / influence of Windoze. Do you see the same behavior when the monitor is connected without the switch?

In my switch at my house, I do get shadows on the video when the switch is present. In my case, the switch is not properly shielded, so there is some cable cross-talk. Yours is far more superior.

Christian

Hello,

I would run an anti-virus scan, and would then run an adaware scan. You can also check to see if IE is at fault by downloading and running Firefox. If Firefox works just fine, you have a gremlin in IE.

I suggest you try AVG Antivirus, as it is a nice free product, followed by AD-AWARE from lavasoft. You can also try to post problem in our Virus forum, and go from there.

Christian

Hello,

You need to tell your router's configuration that anything coming in on the WAN port for TCP 3389 needs to be sent to the IP number of your XP box @ port 3389.

For example, 24.123.132.13:3389 needs to be sent to 192.168.0.10:3389

Also, if your XP box is running Windows Firewall, it needs to be made aware of this connection attempt.

Christian

Hello,

Is the Firewire drive enabled for sharing? I have not tried something like this before, so do not know if you even have to enable it or not. But there might be a setting somewhere in the disk properties that regulate sharing or not.

Christian

Hello,

It sounds like a problem with OS X. Try rebooting in OS X and seeing if it works now.

If not, first go to the System Profiler, and make sure that the OS sees the Optical Drive.

If it does, go to the Disk Utility and do a scan of the disk to ensure it is healthy. Then do a repair permissions to ensure that the filesystem -- which your CD-ROM is a part of -- has the proper permissions.

Let us know,

Christian

Hello,

Ah. Hypercard! I remember those days. Very useful document format.

I looked around Apple's site, and found:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/spotlight.html

Which talks about how Spotlight works, and inner details about it, but it did not mention Hypercard as a supported file type. It did leave links on how you could write your own import scheme. Not sure if you are a programmer or not, but this might be of interest to you.

Christian

Hello,

I am wondering about the details -- if the drive was cooked, and unusuable, I am surprised he was able to get data off of it. it is possible for the boot / OS part of the drive to be corrupted, and yet have the data survive, but fried can mean a bunch of things.

If you have the OS 9 disks, you can install and make it yours again by yourself.

You might wish to consider a second drive, and go from there. All depends on how comfortable you are with computers, and if you have the know-how to go in and install the hardware and get it going again.

I don't think Tiger caused your grief. There was something else lurking out there.

Christian

Hello,

HAve them determine if it is a hardware error, or software. A fried drive implies hardware problems. If that is the case, prepare to purchase a new one, and get your backups ready.

Christian

Hello,

Boot the computer holding the shift key down. This will boot the computer without all of the extensions running. Let it go for a while -- hour or so. If you don't have any freeze up there, then it looks lilke you have an extension conflict.

Christian

Hello,

There is a system patch to go from 9.0 to something like 9.0.4, or perhaps, even to 9.1 You should move your OS up the path to get to 9.1 if possible.

CHristian

Hello,

I believe iPhoto is an OS X only application. I am not sure though. Are you sure you are running OS 8 / 9?

Christian

Hello,

In my experience, you need to be the admin/supervisor to install an environment, such as Tomcat, or Apache, or things that interact at the higher level. There are some scripts out there, such as yappa-ng that a user could install, and run from his own area. BUt things that require tweaking of the firewall, or the opening of a port, or various levels of IO are saved for exclusive access to the root/supervisor accounts.

Christian

Hello,

My servers are on 24 x 7, and I tend to be on them anywhere from 2 - 4 hours after work. Sometimes I run with the laptop, and watch TV or a movie while surfing or whatnot.

Weekends? Rarely. And not on Friday night.

Christian

Hello,

I would clarify. What brand / type of rice? Wild Rice? Cooked or uncooked? :)

Sorry. If I had to guess, I would say 1/2 gram.

Christian

Hello,

Any picture of Pluto is a bright dot. Not even the Hubble Telescope can resolve the planet clear enough to see if there are clouds there, or ice.

Pluto has the interesting fact that it has a moon, Charon. The two orbit each other around a central mass point somewhere in space between them.

I have to wonder what name they propose for the object.

Christian

Hello Rich,

I would like to help you work on this, but need a graphical network diagram to sink my teeth into. If you can make a drawing and scan it, and attach it as a .pdf or something, I would be happy to look.

Christian

Hello,

The quietest device I have seen is the Apple Mac Cube. No fans. The quietest device I have ever owned is my Palm.

Maybe you should look for a tower to put under your desk, or perhaps a computer to put in another room, and then use remote control utilities (winterm) to connect to it.

Christian

Hello,

I am a firm believer that administrative accounts are for administration. Looking at security principles on computers, it is good medical advice to leave privelage accounts alone, and use them only when you need them. I do this on my home machines, along with the work machines.

Why?

Because if something were to run amok on the machine, if I am the administrative user, then the whole computer's filesystem is exposed and open to attack. Or if I mis-type a command, and tell the computer to delete files, and the whole things is gone.

As a normal user, you are protected by the computer from such wild mistakes, or exposed threats. As a normal user, you cannot get into the file system and kill off critical files that make the system work.

Christian

Hello,

I am not certain if it is hardware or software, based upon what you are saying.

What I would do is disconnect the monitor, and reboot the server. Remote Desktop into the server, and see if it is stable. If so, you can think about monitors and video cards, and see if that is the case.

If remote desktop won't connect, I would guess that the problem is Software.

You could also boot into safe mode, and see if the problem continues.

Christian

Hello,

I am sure that it is possible to setup a mail server using Windows XP. Probably not the best suited environment for it, but it should work out.

The larger question is if someone else is going to be able to receive your email effectively. More and more places are scanning email messages, and killing off anything that comes from a dialup or DCHP-based email server, such as what your box would be. You wouldn't have problems sending email to various accounts that you control *internally*, but anything that hits the open internet could be blocked just because some turkey ruined the road before you.

This happened to me; I was using linux to do email services for some club newsletters, and AOL and Road Runner started blocking the emails. The solution was to go to a non-dhcp gathered address and use that for the mail server instead.

Christian

Hello Bonnie,

I will be writing next week a BLOG about BPL, and why it could be good, but more importantly, why it will be a disaster.

Christian

Hello,

I am sorry that I did not catch this post earlier. Missed the radar screen.

Windows Profiles are user specific, and very easy to corrupt. They store everything unique to the user -- the IE shortcuts, pieces of MS Office, the color of your desktop picture, bunches of internet temp files, and other neat things.

Profile re-creation happens once in a while for all of us.

Now, I do have to ask you why you are using the Administrator account for what appears to be normal daily tasks? That is like giving the master key to a building to someone who just needs to unlock the bathroom once a day. You would be wise to create a power user or a normal account, and use that for your day to day activities.

Christian

Hello,

The L2 cache effect will really all depend on what you are doing with the processor. If you are playing a game that has continual refreshing, new graphics, then your utilization of the cache memory is probably not so good (thus no benefit). If you are doing something in photoshop, where you have a continual algorithms executed over time, using the same code, then the larger cache will assist your experience.

It really boils down to the OS, how it handles the code, and how the program was compiled to operate.

Christian

Hello Bonnie,

Welcome to DaniWeb. I hope that you have a pleasent stay here. I think you are the 4th or 5th Ham here on the site. I am thinking of doing some articles here concerning BPL and other little snippets.

Take care, and enjoy.

Christian

Hello,

You are certainly open to trying a different brand of RW media. I know that certain CD-R in audio format will not work in my truck's player... but will work in other computers just fine. Just the animal at the moment I guess.

And if you are planning for the family situation, it might be less stressful to purchase and setup the laptop now, so that you do not need to be distracted while managing your family's distress.

If you are travelling, I would want optical backup with me on the plane, instead of magnetic with the scanners at the airport.

Christian

Hello,

It is possible that you can no longer open photoshop because of your program deletions on your hard drive. It is possible that Photoshop was using a chunk of hard drive space as virutal memory, and when you deleted programs and added some new ones, it is possible that the large contiguous space is no longer available.

Photoshop should work with 256 MB of RAM, but that is the root of your problem. More RAM means a happier computer (to a point!).

Try defragging your hard disk. That should open up contiguous free space on your hard drive.

Christian

Hello,

I am glad that you found your answer.

Yes, I am aware of what DFS is, but I thought it had to be on the server, and not on the client end. You said that your server was NT4, and I knew that NT4 did not support it.

I am glad that you found your answer though, and apologize for thinking down the wrong path for your solution. Thank you for returning here, and letting us know what you found.

As a side note, if your NT4 server could also run a SSH service, you would have SCP available, which is an encrypted file transfer format. You could then program a client to pull the data on a schedule over the internet.

Christian

Hi,

I would also have to say that the OS has some sort of role in the generation of this information.

Christian

Hello,

HERE HERE to lynx! I enjoy using that browser when on dialup, along with pine, to read my email. QUick and texty.

I am also glad that Dani minimizes the DaniCrap on DaniWeb, so that you can use an older browser to work things here.

Christian

Hello,

If your server is not in the default route path of the internet at your location, you can do everything possible to it, and it will not phase your audience, except perhaps to policy out IE and network settings, but someone who is creative enough can bring the required programs in on CD.

One thing that I liked to do with workstations that did not need internet access was to give them IP numbers in a subnet that would not route to the internet. WIthout a gateway and other materials, the computer would not know how to find the internet.

Christian

Hello,

Technology will not solve a social problem.

There are a couple things that you can do to force the issue of the game problem (assuming all are within the web browsers)

* A week before you implement, record the dns name of the various game sites that your people go to. Get a list of the top 10 or 20 game sites.

* Switch over your internet access to one that requires a login. This means an authenticated proxy service, or a firewall approach that requires login. Release with an official statement from HR that Internet Gaming is forbidden, and tell them about the logging, and let them know they are being watched.

* Have HR determine a firing decision on the gaming. If the people are caught a couple times at the location, then they get called in, and their seat is givien to someone new.

* Decide if your employees even NEED internet access. If they don't have a business functional need, then kill it off.

* Re-configure DNS so that the top 20 game sites your people visit all go somewhere else, such as to an internal corporate "your game site is down, and we have recorded your attempts" location.

NOTE THAT YOU will have to have some key people on board: HR, the CIO, your Boss, and others in the organization that may have the power to weaken your initiatives. It sounds to me that …

Hello,

I have no experience burning with RW from my Mac. I have never had a problem with R or DVD-R though.

It is possible that you are ejecting the disks before the burn is committed to them. OS X allows you to setup the burn before actually committing it to disk. Maybe you are getting the disks out before the burn is done.

In the meantime, I would make a CD-R NOW of your software, as if I read your posts, you don't have anything else.

Christian

Hello,

The Mac was trying to protect itself from you installing AOL. AOL is a bad thing.

Seriously, the flashing question mark indicates that your system folder under OS 8 has been corrupted. That, or it cannot find a hard drive.

When you reboot your computer, hold down the mouse button. It is possible that the computer is trying to boot from the AOL disk. Holding down the mouse button during bootup forces the computer to eject the CD-ROM.

If the AOL disk is already out, then boot with your Mac OS 8 CD-ROM, or from your Disk Tools floppy disk. Check your system folder to see if it is "blessed" meaning, if the little system icon is showing on the folder. If the folder is blank and boring like any other folder, then your System Folder needs some attention. Open it up, and drag the finder out of the folder. Close the folder. Drag the Finder back into it. See if the computer "blesses" it.

You can also run Disk utilities at this point to see if there are other problems with the disk.

Christian

Hello,

I would install a second hard drive @ 160 GB (probably make it 180 GB second drive, as drives are not exactly sized, and your second one has to be at least as large as the first one) and I would mirror the partitions using the Disk Administrator.

I would also change your title to reflect on what you are seeking, instead of how badly you need it.

Christian

Hello,

You can get linux to do all that you are asking for: print server, mail server... but the integration of Linux into your environment will take a bit of experience, and I would not recommend it on your own, unless you have time to invest on learning it yourself. I would be calling in a consultant to take care of it for you, and can teach you how to do it successfully.

You can setup linux to work with Netware. Not extremely robust, but it does work. You can also have linux use Samba so that your WIndows computers can work with the fileshares too.

You will need 2 network cards if you want to work with an internal network, and an external network, and assuming that you want the linux box to also be your firewall. Do not forget to setup IPTABLES to properly firewall the internet connection.

For internet connections, you will need to use either SSH or VNC. SSH is encrypted, VNC is not. Both work really nicely. SSH for command line management and VNC for graphical management.

Don't forget to design in your backup solutions.

Christian

Hello,

I think the problem is that you no longer have an active partition on that drive.

Install the problem drive back into the computer, and have it be the only hard drive on line. Add the CD-ROM so that it can boot your Win 98 CD, or you can boot with a Win 98 DOS floppy disk. Get to the point of a C: and run FDISK /MBR

This should reset the master boot record. Then Reboot, and try to get into FDISK again, and manage your partitions.

Christian

Hello,

What I think you are trying to do is have the system go into stand-by mode and have it go to sleep while you are away. I am not certain you will find that on a desktop system. You can try to go into the properties of the taskbar (the grey bar on the bottom of your screen) and into the advanced part, and see if you can check a box with the standby option. I know you can do this for logoff...

Perhaps a better way is to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL once, and then click on Lock Workstation. Then turn your monitor off.

Christian

HI,

I would also make sure your computer is XP compatable. Go to www.microsoft.com and find out what the minimum specifications for XP are.

Christian

Hello,

It might be time to look at a dedicated server, either a Linux box with Samba, or a true Windows 2000 / 2003 Server. Why? Because workgroup sharing only allows 10 connections at a time, and with 15 at your location, you will run into a problem running out of connections available. You should also be considering the management of the workstations in terms of patches and updates. If you put together a server, consider SUS to do that for you.

Also remember that there are differences between share permissions and NTFS permissions. Make sure you configure them properly.

As you recently took this position over, I would also check the backup scheme, and make sure that things are working properly. Do some sample restores too.

Christian

Hello,

Sometimes you need to be patient on seeking answers. The people here are all volunteers, and posting a question in the afternoon / evening of Jul 26, and expecting complete answers within 48 hours, can be pushing it a bit. Hang in there. People will come around.

Looking at your problem though, I do not think that you are going to be able to do what you intend. As you know, network resources are created on the server by sharing the folder, and a client maps a drive to that sharepoint.

I think your desire to make backups over the network is flawed. If I were you, I would focus my backup energies on the server, and run the backups from there. Why? Because:

** Backing up from the 2000 box means all of the information has to go through the network. This adds time, and another layer of failure if the network were to go down.

** You will need administrator or backup operator status on the server in order to see all the files. If someone sniffs you, they will also see all the files.

** Physical security. What prevents someone from going to your 2000 workstation, and yanking the tape out before you get there? I am assuming your NT server is secured, but it is possible that your 2000 box is in a cube somewhere.

** Restoration. Are you going to setup the new NT server, and then …

Hello,

At the various companies that I have done contract computer support for, I have not had a problem with Dell. I have run into problems with Compaq desktops, but Dell has been responsive and there for me when we needed parts and drivers.

IF you decide to go ahead and build your own computer, please write down and keep a sheet of paper of what is inside your computer. I recently rebuilt a computer for a lady who did not have any information at all, and I had to charge her $$ for my time to find out what motherboard she had, the ethernet drivers, the video card. Yes, I made a new sheet for her, and burnt her a special CD-ROM with all of them on "for next time".

It is a true nightmare if you do not document this down from the beginning, and know where your drivers are located. And if you get these items from a special shop, and they close there doors, what then?

It is not a problem to think down the road.

Christian

Hello,

Information, such as your Operating System, would be helpful for us to help you out.

Christian

Hello,

There has to be something messed up on the settings of your computer. Perhaps you have a C: and D: drive, and are "looking" at the wrong one. Or perhaps IE was told to download files to your floppy / USB drive (if you have one). IT could also be a permissions issue (not having write permission), but XP Home appears to not care about permissions. Something to check though. If you are using a limited user account, it is possible that you are trying to write somewhere that you do not have access to. And if you are using an admin account, you should think of why you are using an admin account for your day to day things.

Christian

Hello,

Just for next time... as you saw that

Setup is inspecting your hardware....

message, this tells you the following immediately:

* Your boot order was fine
* Your IDE / ATA subsystem is fine
* Your startup disk loaded correctly
* Your RAM was counted and initialized properly

Lots of things can be determined by just noting where your system is at in the installation process.

Christian