Monthly Archive for August, 2008

Things I’ve learnt as a business owner this month

Published on August 29, 2008 in Advice for MSP's and Advice for Small Business owners. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

ChalkboardAs 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. :-)

Cannot copy file. The Parameter Is Incorrect

Published on August 28, 2008 in Computers and Internet. 3 Comments

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!

Enigma, Bletchley Park & The Battle Of The Atlantic

Published on August 27, 2008 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments

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.

Recovering Offline files in Windows XP

Published on August 21, 2008 in Computers and Internet. 5 Comments

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:WindowsCSC. 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:WindowsCSC and then executed the command

CSCCMD /EXTRACT:\servernameshare /TARGET:c:temp /recurse

… where <servernameshare> 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:WindowsCSC.

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… :-)

System Volume Information

Published on August 20, 2008 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments

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…