Windows

Blackberry Professional SRP Status Not Connected

Happy New Year! Just dropping a quick one in case anyone has run into this simple issue.

I recently installed Blackberry Professional Server / Blackberry Enterprise Server on a new system for a client of mine and everything went well but for one exception. Upon opening the Blackberry Manager and checking the status I noticed that the SRP Status was “Not Connected”. A quick check of my firewall showed blocked connections originating from the BPS/BES server on TCP port 3101. After creating an allow rule for that port outbound, I restarted the Blackberry services and everything is working properly.

–Himuraken

Certificate error: Outlook 2007 & Exchange 2007

This one is from a while ago. I originally used this back in May of 2009 and just realized that I hadn’t posted the link and info. Basically, shortly after migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2007 in-house, we purchased an SSL certificate for various reasons. Long story short, Outlook 2007 clients starting throwing certificate errors upon opening. So, our outside clients now trust the Exchange box, but the inside clients do not. I went round and round trying to resolve this on my own before searching the internet for a solution. Finding the solution was not easy at all, but I eventually located this link. After following the instructions, everything was up and running as one would expect.

I didn’t really think that this would have been such a PITA, but maybe thats what I get for naming a mail server Newman.

–Himuraken

Disable Opera’s Torrent Handling

Firefox is a great browser, it really is. But I find that Opera just works better. I know that it isn’t open source, but it just has the features that I want. Plus, anyone that does research owes it to themselves to use Opera.

Although Opera tends to have sane defaults, I find its built in torrent handler to be useless. I poked around numerous places and never figured out a way to disable it. I hadn’t even took the time to Google for a solution. Well this morning I found it and man was it easy.

In your address bar enter in opera:config and press enter. Expand the BitTorrent section and then uncheck Enable. Done.

–Himuraken

Microsoft SQL: A few helpful queries

Let me start by saying that I am not a DBA, nor would I ever pretend to be one. But with that said, all of us at some time or another will need to assist someone with SQL. If you have ever landed a client with a SQL server based application, you have probably been put in a situation where you have had to learn right then and there. That is pretty standard when you are playing the part of the out-sourced know-it-all. Hopefully a few of these will help you along the way.

*Note*: Use common sense when working with anyone’s data, especially databases. I always backup before running any queries that may compromise the data in anyway.

1. Consistency checking. You may be receiving various Backup Exec errors indicating that a consistency check has failed in database x or maybe you just want to check just to be sure. Select the database that you want and then click on New Query. On the right hand side/pane, enter in DBCC CHECKDB and click Execute.
This will run a consistency check on your database and report any problems that may be found.

2. Allocations errors. After reading through the results of your DBCC CHECKDB query, you may find allocations errors. You can try nullifying those nasty little bastards with another easy
query: DBCC CHECKALLOC.

3. Table errors. Once again you may run into these and you have a few options. Start by creating a new query containing: DBCC CHECKTABLE ('theNameofYourTableHere', REPAIR_FAST);. From there you can run a full repair by executing another query containing: DBCC CHECKTABLE ('billheaders', REPAIR_REBUILD);. It is worth noting that these two queries/commands do not harm data, that is to say, they do not allow or consider data loss to be acceptable.

4. A sledge hammer to crack a nut. Sometimes when all hope is lost, and you are CERTAIN that you have a backup of the database (damaged or not) that you are working on, you can try a repair with data loss. Im not sure about the exact rules of when you should and should not use this query, but I am fairly certain that the SQL God’s of ole’ role over in their graves everytime you execute this query. Anyways, here is it: DBCC checkdb ('yourDatabaseNameHere', repair_allow_data_loss);

5. Exclusive lock. Some of these queries require that you have SQL in Single User Mode. I spent longer that I wanted searching for a way to do this. Most of my Google searches turned up solutions for starting the entire SQL server or instances in single user mode. But I didn’t want to do that. In fact, I could not do that to the production SQL server while it was in use. Use this query to put a single database into single user mode: alter database yourDatabaseNameHere set SINGLE_USER. Once you are done with your checks and queries in single user mode, you need to get the DB back up so everyone can access it. Use this query to send the DB back into multi user mode: alter database yourDatabaseNameHere set MULTI_USER

6. SQL version. You may want to determine the version and update level of your SQL installation. Run the following query to find out: SELECT @@VERSION

I am certain that there are hundreds of other useful queries, but these are the ones that I found myself using the most. Hopefully they will help you out as well.

–Himuraken

Backup Exec error ordinal 450 and urlmon.dll

While opening Backup Exec 11d to check the backup this morning, I got a slew of errors which related to urlmon.dll. After starting all of the BE services which were down, I started receiving this error “The ordinal 450 could not be located in the dynamic link library urlmon.dll”. I ran a couple Google searches and really did not find anything, this seemed like a new issue.

Being that BE relies on XML and IE quite a bit, I attempted to open Internet Explorer and it would not open. It didn’t generate any errors, but it would just open and close immediately. Figuring that this was related to a recent update to Internet Explorer 8, I decided to reboot the server, which worked! After logging back onto the server after the reboot, I watched as the IE8 preferences were loaded and I was then able to open IE8 and go through the first time wizard. Backup Exec also appears to be working properly now.

This is an annoying little issue that is simple to resolve as long as you don’t have to reboot during production hours.

–Himuraken

Dell Control Point Connection Manager and Sprint Mobile Broadband

Many of my clients are getting the newer E series Dell Latitudes. The laptops seems pretty decent but they all come with the Dell ControlPoint software. The ControlPoint software aims to centralize the management of the systems settings.

While I am unfamiliar with the overall usefulness of the ControlPoint software, I do know that the ControlPoint Connection Manager is terrible. Just about every end user that I have worked with on these newer laptops asks me to uninstall ControlPoint.

Generally speaking, all that you need to do to get a decent running system is to uninstall the Connection Manager portion of ControlPoint. Just open up Add/Remove Programs and uninstall Connection Manager. After the uninstall and reboot you will notice that the WWAN card will no longer work as you no longer have an app to control the device. The link below is the for 5720 model of WWAN cards which are very common in these Dell systems. The download installs the Sprint Mobile Broadband utility.

Link is here.

–Himuraken