Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

I'm willing to tolerate some comment spam, as long as it is moderated so I can say 'yes' or 'no' if the content seems a bit 'off'. I've got a great set of mod_security rules that have been catching 99% of the spam comments anyway, so I'd much rather have it be easy to leave me a comment without hassling with CAPTCHA stuff

For those that have no idea what CAPTCHA is, it is the 'enter in these hard to read letters into this box so I know you are not a robot' form that you typically see on a lot of websites now.

Actually, Wikipedia has a great description here.

I'll admit that my LCS 2005 skills are a little rusty, with most of my usage dating back to before RTM and before SP1. A lot of the test, at least the test I took, focuses on what was added or changed in SP1 and also touched upon a lot of Office Communicator and Office Communicator Web Edition. I think the last day to take the beta exam is May 10th, and the message that printed out at the end of the exam said not to expect results for up to 8 weeks after the beta period ends.

I'm hoping they can get through the test results faster than that, but I'm just impatient on stuff like this.
Looking over the documents again, I can see I missed a few questions, but it also looks like I got a lot of them right. This exam seemed to be very trick in spots and it was easy for me to confuse Access Proxy and Proxy.

There were 74 questions overall on mine. The computer, ironically, crashed about 4 times during the exam so I kept having to relog into the Prometric exam program and continuing where I left off. If anything, I should be given a few brownie points for putting up with all that because it definitely broke my chain of thought. The first time it happened, I was afraid I was going to have to start the whole test over.

It is a shame LCS 2005 relies so much on the NetMeeting backend, which in turn, practically requires a VPN connection for clients if you want to use any of the whiteboarding or other 'cool' features. I have a feeling I'd be installing many more LCS 2005 boxes if it were more NAT friendly. SIP isn't very NAT friendly either, unfortunately.

Due to all the test crashes, I started the test at 1pm and ended the test at 4:30pm or so, probably closer to 4:45pm. It was frustrating but at least it was free, outside of my time to take it. I had sort of expected/hoped to be out of there by 2pm. That didn't happen!

Some programs unfortunately rely on this piece of software and I don't believe that MS can distribute it anymore, but here is a good source for the last versions of the JVM before development was halted. I'd advise not installing it unless you have a non-functional application. I'm sure there are security issues with it that are unknown.

http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/java.php

The current hard drive seems to like to 'fall asleep' from time to time but the good news is a new 160GB hard drive is inbound for the server, thanks to Ken Barnum.

I'm hoping to get it in there sometime this month before the current hard drive goes down for the count for good.

In the past month, I've bought a red car that has 666 in the VIN and now we have a black cat. I don't know if that is bad luck or not.

Installed a new build of Windows Live Messenger. The install program wanted to seppuku apparently. This one is almost as funny as "Error: The operation completed successfully".

If my schedule allows, which I hope it does, I'll be down there to see the demonstrations on May 16th. It looks like they will be talking about wireless security, network intrusions, and Vista. Since I plan on putting out 802.11x authentication when we move into the new building, this seminar might help out with that process.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2006/05/02/427068.aspx

To register for the event:
http://www.technetevents.com/mhester

Google is suing MS about MS making MSN the default search engine in Vista. Personally, it makes no difference to me, I typically don't use defaults on much of anything.

You can read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01google.html?hp&ex=1146542400&en=76dac6927c261199&ei=5094&partner=homepage

I am upset about one thing from the article though. It is a sad day for America if we really are this incompetent, due to the following:

"Google counters that claim with a study it sponsored that was conducted by Tec-Ed, a research firm. It found that only a third of users could master the four-click process to change the default."

We really need to improve our schools if we are going to be competitive in a global market. America needs a good kick in the pants overall. One of the more interesting things I've noticed with all the debates about immigration is that it might do America some good if we had a little fear of deportation of our own people. If you compare the work ethic of most immigrants and the work ethic of the average American, it is shameful. I'm not saying everyone should be working 14 hour days, but just take a look around and you will probably notice it too.

We have a programmer that was having a lot of problems with his XP machine that started around the time that the April patches came out. It acted much like XP acts when it has the April updates along with either a bad nVidia driver or bad HP package. We ended up swapping hard drives so he could keep working and I set aside some time to dig into what was going wrong.

Long story short, a month or so ago, he installed OpenLDAP on the machine and had it setup to start as a service. I'm not sure how or why the system would boot up correctly previously and maybe the April patches changed the order in which various pieces of the OS came online. Either way, when you would try to log in to the machine, you would be stuck for an hour or 2 at 'Applying user settings..."
After it times out, many services failed to start up and OpenLDAP was hung in 'Starting'.

I understand why now - OpenLDAP had stolen the default LDAP ports and effectively killed any useful Active Directory activity. Disable OpenLDAP in safe mode, and the system is happy as a clam.

I'd call it an experiment overall. I put a few AdSense ads on the right side of the blog which is down below where most people read most of the time. I did it on purpose since I was curious how much traffic the site was getting according to Google, outside of the normal Goole Analytics metrics. Over the course of a few weeks, the site generated a grand total of 3 clicks.

If I were out to make money with the site, I'd be closing shop at this point, but that isn't the intent of the site anyway. I originally started the site due to gentle prodding from my wife and Wendy Stidmon at Microsoft. I've often wondered if anyone really reads this, but as I've watched traffic logs trending over the months, and a few e-mails here and there from random people, I've come to realize that people seem to enjoy it.

I mainly use it as my own world-wide Knowledge Base. If others get some good information out of it along the way, all the better.

It gives me an excuse to act like a mini-ISP without any server level agreements to make me fret about downtime or dataloss. If anything, it has been a great learning tool on remote management, web servers, security, and everything else that goes with hosted services.

I'm in a hurry but here are some useful links for anyone taking the 70-262 LCS 2005 exam (currently known as 71-262 since it is beta):

Preparation Guide:
http://www.microsoft.com/Learning/exams/70-262.asp

Microsoft Skills Assessment (essentially a practice test!):
http://assessment.learning.microsoft.com/test/launchassess.asp?pid=1064

Check High Scores of the practice test (much like an arcade hall):
http://assessment.learning.microsoft.com/test/home.asp?pid=1064

Don't forget the TechNet virtual labs either! They are there for your (ab)use.

Bruce Nicholls helped find these resources, so he deserves 99% of the credit for this entry.

I mentioned previously that the new Beta 2 build allowed you to turn on the system tray icon again, but left out the details of where. It is under Tools under Options. I've also included a quick screenshot. I would have before but I was stretched for time then. I'm not doing much better today but I figured I would post this since I am working with Defender at the moment.

I typically try to avoid the VZAccess software whenever I can due to the special Venturi software likes to mangle the TCP-IP stack/helpers from time to time. Another blogger has a step by step instructions on avoiding the software.

Basically, under any OS, as long as you can get the PCMCIA cards exposed to the USB layer to provide the USB serial interface, dial #777, use xxxyyyzzzz@vzw3g.com for your username, replacing xxxyyyzzzz with your mobile number. Password is always 'vzw'.

You can also 'drop down' your connection speed depending on what init strings you send to the 'modem', unfortunately a lot of those are card specific. One primary use of this is to force 1xRTT mode when you are in a fringe area.

More info here:
http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2006/04/30/426857.aspx

KB 910362 has the fix. I haven't seen it firsthand but sometimes anything helps when debugging a hard Citrix/TS problem.

KB 910362

User Profile Hive Cleanup may cause this error to pop up more frequently due to the nature of what the program does, but I don't have any evidence to prove or disprove it at this point. Any TS server should be running User Profile Hive Cleanup anyway.

I wasn't aware that something like that could happen.
I practically slept all day, unintentionally, and woke up right before SNL's TV Funhouse marathon.
Now I'm awake and really should be sleeping, but the stuff coming out of me is nasty.