Supporting Technology

Much to my surprise… One of my thoughtful clients nominated me for the OpenDNS SysAdmin award… and I won! I won the “Shoestring Budget” award specifically. Thanks Mark Sanger! You can see more about his company here: WSIC Radio Station

He’s a great guy… If you need some on-air coverage, make sure you give Walter, his sales guy a call. They will really work with you for whatever you need.

Mark, thanks again for your thoughtfulness. It’s been a pleasure working for you.

For any small business owner - as most of my clients are - do yourself a favor and go buy yourself a book. The book I’m recommending is E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. You can buy it here: Amazon.com for 11 bucks!

It basically talks about how to turn your business into a system that works instead of a place that breaks as soon as you walk out the door. I’m trying to figure out how to create a system that performs in the way my clients and vendors (and wife) anticipate. I’m sick of everything revolving around me. I leave; I’m working. I get home with a ton of emails, tickets, and phone calls to return. Something is really broken, but I, though I love to fix, don’t know how to fix this one.

Anyway, enter E-myth. Nothing magic, just good, practical advice and education. It’s good reading for any small business owner.

That’s my recommendation for the day.

Now get to work!

Ok, got a call this morning from a user saying she couldn’t print. I mentally went over the obvious, and decided a service call would be in order. This user is on Windows XP. Here is what I found:

To start with when the print spooler was started either from Run -> Services.msc -> Print Spooler -> Start / Restart OR from a command prompt with “net start spooler” you would get an error message within 20 seconds or so saying:

After some troubleshooting, I saw that the error logs revealed that the error was coming from a file called ZSDIMF.DLL. I searched the computer for that file and saw that it was related to the user’s HP LaserJet 1022 (I HATE HP DRIVERS!!). See the screenshot:

So here’s the solution:
Make sure the print spooler is stopped. You can even go to the task manager and kill the process called “spoolsv.exe.”
Go here: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers\Printname and find the printer with the offending driver. Right click and delete. Note that a registry backup may be a good idea if you are unsure of what you are doing.

Now you can go to to Control Panel -> Printers & Faxes and go to File -> Server Properties. Go to the drivers tab and delete the offending drivers (in my case this was HP Laserjet 1020 series drivers). Now go to the manufacturers website and download new ones and reinstall your printer.

Quick Update
I did get the error again after the first reboot. I deleted all the temp files, including the prefetch, and searched the computer for the offending file again. No file found. After another reboot, everything was fine!
That should do the trick!

Ok, I’ve been having this problem on a user’s workstation only with certain word documents located on an external web server. I couldn’t quite determine what caused some to do it and others not to… but here’s the symptoms and the resolution:

Symptoms
A user clicks on a link like this: http://www.somedomain.com/somewordfile.doc and either saves the file to a local location or IE will say “404 not found” if IE is configured to open the Office documents in the same window.

Resolution
Install Office 2003 Service Pack 3. Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85AF7BFD-6F69-4289-8BD1-EB966BCDFB5E&displaylang=en. That fixed the problem for me!

By the way, if you are wondering how to get Office documents to open in Internet Explorer, go to My Computer, Click Tools, Folder Options, File Types tab. Go to the doc file type (or xls if that is applicable in your case). Click on the “Advanced” button. Check the box that says “Browse in same window.” That should do it!

Best wishes!

Well, after replacing a bad hard drive in a client’s server today, the server would show the array as “rebuilding” for about 60 seconds. This was an array configured as RAID 1 on a Dell Perc 3/DC raid controller.

The machine wasn’t under warranty, and I wasn’t sure what to do, other than make sure we had a good backup - because obviously we had lost the redundancy that the RAID 1 array was giving us.

I ended up meeting this guy who had worked for Adaptec and he suggested checking for a firmware upgraded for the RAID controller. I thought, “yeah great idea!” I went on Dell’s website, and check and sure enough there was a firmware upgrade. I downloaded and installed, and after a server reboot, and removing the “new” drive that the server was showing as failed, the controller started an array rebuild and all was well.

Thank the Lord for bringing people across our path at just the right time!