Stephens’ Blog

Well yet again I haven’t updated this site for well over a month and with that I have decided to write about what I have been upto recently. So with that little bit out of the way lets get straight into it.

Facebook update

Bar a brief spell of an evening I have not been on Facebook since the end of November. The brief spell was to the clear down my wifes farmville whilst she went to midnight mass on Christmas eve.

I haven’t missed it and I don’t believe I am missing out of any events or what my friends are doing.

Remote Apps Via Remote Desktop / Terminal services

One of the customer at the company I work for uses the Remote Apps feature of the Remote Desktop role in Windows 2008. I had been asked to add a new remote app server into the farm.

This was of a great interest to learn something new and I can say that I have learnt on this project once this project is finished I shall write up some of the things I have learnt.

New look Photo Website

A while back I registered a domain to host my photos and stuck coppermine in the webspace and just left it without doing much. Well this has now changed it is running wordpress with a builtin gallery. The idea behind this is to host my photos whilst writing tutorials on what I am learning and reviews on items I have brought. There is a link to this site on the left marked “My Photo Gallery”.

I did it, I finally did it. I managed to pluck up enough self control to deactivate my facebook account and what is better is that a week later I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would.

Was it hard ?

In all honesty I should have done it weeks ago when I first thought about it but I waited. I don’t quite know what I was waiting for. Was I in search for the next great game, A friend request I from someone I have thought to already request or just because I didn’t want to let go..?

What am I doing instead?

Spending time with my wife and two children, starting and finishing jobs around the house reducing the amount of time I spend in front of a PC. Although some time has now been added to play on wii fit and bonding on the xbox360 with the eldest.

Am I going back?

I really hope not. Although there are some times where I end up at the front page they have only been for a spilt second usually because it was my most visited page my browser was trying to be helpful. I feel if I go back I have failed at something and this is one thing I don’t want to fail at. If that day came where I am sucked back into the website called facebook would be a very sad day.

Well I have been using Windows 7 of the last couple of days so I though I would write a review of on how I am finding it.

First of the version of Window 7 I am using is “Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit”.

My machine has a 2.79 GHz Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU with  4GB of RAM and a PNY Geforce 8400 graphics card with 256MB Memory 64-bit. This machine scores a 3.5 and that is due to the Graphics component.

One of the good things is the ability to view which machines you are recently connectrd to via Remote Desktop. Another good feature I have found is the preview with Internet Explore version 8 where you can see all tabs.

I shall write about some more of the features I have found usual later on.

I have had a google android mobile phone for a while I have missed not being able to use my mobile as a modem when out and about.

That has all change now that I have found proxoid for my HTC Magic. http://code.google.com/p/proxoid/wiki/installationLinux. It took me 30 minutes to download everything and setup things up as per the instructions. Everything seemed to go swimming well until it came time to active the forward the my device but my device wasn’t showing in the command “adb devices” so a quick reboot of my laptop and still nothing so I started searching the Internet for any sort of ideas on how to resolve this I couldn’t find anything to help so I rebooted the phone just to see if that would help and bingo. After a very slow but satisfying test I am now happy that when I am on call I am able to go out and not have to be too close to home.

My next article will be added online later this week.

One of the issues that seems to come up a lot is that newer printers don’t work on a server when connecting via terminal server without having to install the printer drivers on the server. Bring in Windows Server 2008 with this new operating system come Terminal server easy print, this will redirect your printer jobs on the terminal server to your printer on your local machine without having to install any extra drivers on the server.

There is some required software to get this to work.
for Window XP you need to following

* Windows XP Service Pack 3
* .Net framework 3.0
* .Net Framework 3.0 SP1
* Remote Desktop Client version 6 (Comes with Windows XP SP3)

For Vista you need

* .Net framework 3.0
* .Net Framework 3.0 SP1

Once these requirements have been meet log on to the server load up gpedit.msc under the heading

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services\Terminal Server\

enable “Printer Direction” .

Disconnect from the remote desktop session and reconnect and viola you can now print to your local print without installing any drviers.

Well I know I haven’t written much about the type of computing I have been doing recently,  well that is about to change.

As I work on a support desk having to do technical support and new service provisioning. I spend a lot of time working on helping our users troubleshoot issues they may have.

Recently I have been building a virtual exchange 2007 server server a virtual machine with Icewarps merak mail server. once I have the whole thing configured and built I shall do a write up on provisioning the setup.

Today I have been setting up a MS FTP 7.5 server which allows connections of SSL. The main instructions for the service were obtained from iis.net but I then encountered some problems being able to connect to the service from the Internet.

As my office has a direct VPN connect to the servers it was difficult to test the connection. what we found for the Internet was the passive connection could not be established after the initial FTP connection.

We found after reading Configuring FTP Firewall settings also from iis.net and applying the firewall rule

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="FTP for IIS7" service=ftpsvc action=allow protocol=TCP dir=in

and adding the passive connection ports to the Windows Firewall the issue seems to be resolved.

One thing I must add is that if you are using the ftp server for yourself and just want to encrypt the traffic a self signed certificate is OK but if you are opening up the server the clients, suppliers, partners or any one else I would suggest a certificate from a recognised certificate body like Thawte or Verisign and other certificate authorities are also available.

So it is only Tuesday and what a fun week it has been. The weekend brought lots of chaos.

first off my brakes stopped working. The cause of this little disaster was the brake switch deciding to fail. After  a quick phone around of the local suppliers I could only get hold of one on Monday. So I was without the use of my car over the weekend. SO I get the new switch on Monday and follow this great guide http://forums.vwvortex.com/zerothread?id=1158315 which show you exactly how to replace the part.

In other news this week I have been playing with my htc magic and I must say that it is a great phone.

I shall write more later this week

Well the last month has rushed past me a bit quick. first with the new member of the family turning up late but welcomed.

This young man arrived on the 8th of May at 13:03

He not yet camera shy but let see if with my new camera we can make him.

The Sony A200 is a nice entry level camera which I find very easy to use.

The buttons are well placed and the auto setting just works with no real missing about. I have taken stupid amounts of photos with it but I am yet to upload them to my photo gallery site

The camera battery life is nice and long which means I only have to charge it every couple of weeks.

Now that May has rushed past and the evenings are beginning to turn into some sort of normality  I shall be able to upload photos and continue with the computer projects I have running and maybe get one completed.

I have also joined twitter and will post some useful things on there. If you wish you follow me please checkout the about me page for details on how to get hold of me.

Well it has been a while is I have updated this much to my own dissatisfaction. I have been up to a few things in recent months and will try and write about everything now but I may well miss somethings.

So what have I been doing?

Ice Skating -

I have still been going fairly regularly and I am not improving at the rate I was but still a nice rate, my personal fitness could do with a lot of work but it isn’t anything to be worried about.

Computing -

1. I have been trying to setup shrewsoft VPN client to allow me to my office systems without using my desktop, this means that when I am on call I can be out and about without having to worry about staying too close to home.
2. I have also been playing the sirens game at hack3r website I am currently on level6 trying to gain access to level7 and I hope to have that done at some point tonight.

Photography -

1. Having played with my samsung trying to get the best pictures I could I decided to upgrade to the sony A200k entry level digital SLR. ( I shall write some more on the camera by the end of the week).
2. I have a photo I have taken with it up at “My Gallery” and there will be some more photos added shortly.

I thought I had better post some information on the camera I am using at present to take the photos. It is a Samsung Digimax A400 4 megapixel camera.

Samsung Digimax A400 specifications

This information was taken from dcviews.