Easier said than done, because there’s no uninstaller.

Well, of course there is an uninstaller, but it’s not in Add/Remove Programs where you’d expect it. Even if you show updates.

Of course, many uninstallers are kept on the machine in the c:\windows\ folder, in cryptic $NTUninstallKBxxxxxx$ folders which relate to the update Knowledgebase number. Naturally, you have no idea which of these is the correct one and nothing in the many folders gives away the contents. You could search the internet for each and every number, but that’ll take forever.

Thankfully, there’s an easier way – use the registry.

Navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Updates\Windows PowerShell 1.0\, and there you’ll find some keys relating to the SP level of Powershell you have installed. In my case, it was SP2. There’ll be a key called “UninstallCommand”, the value of which is the full path to the uninstaller exe. For me, this was C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB926139-v2$\spuninst\spuninst.exe, and running that uninstalled Powershell. If you’ve SP1 or SP3 rather than SP2 then yours will be in a different location, but is still referred to in UninstallCommand.

I also had a Windows Powershell 1.0 MUI set of keys in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Updates, again with an UninstallCommand – this time pointing to C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB926141$\spuninst\spuninst.exe. I ran that just in case too.

Of course, then I came to order it and the only places online that had it in stock wanted a billion pounds (well, £300) for it. Bah.

On Monday I needed to buy a new external hard drive for my Wii (an exciting story for another time) and, when I went on eBuyer’s website, they had the DS211j not only back in stock, but also for £129 – almost £100 cheaper than it’s RRP when I was looking previously.

So, after my wallet was molested to the cost of the Wii drive, a DS211j and two 2TB hard drives to fit inside, my NAS was on it’s way.

I’ve had it a few days now, and love it. It was stupidly easy to set up (put drives in, attach to network, turn on, run setup app on CD, done), and everything past that point can be controlled through a web browser. Not that you’d know it was a browser – it feels more like a remote desktop session!

This is the welcome screen that comes up when you log in through your browser. The little down-arrow in the top left is like a Windows Start button and there’s a control panel and (context sensitive and very useful) help button on the “desktop” and almost every app window.  You can even make your desktop “persist” between logons, which is useful.

These are some of the apps that come with the NAS, and there are a few more available from Synology’s site and elsewhere (as well as a few others built in that aren’t activated by default). The Audio Station is a full music player that streams any audio files on your NAS through a nifty player – no client software required! The file browser lets you up and download files through the browser, and File Station lets you access chosen files and folders without the need to log into the full NAS system.  WebDAV is also supported, as is FTP.

Another great feature is Download Station. It’s a full Bittorrent/NZB/eMule/RSS/HTTP download client. It’s great for setting stuff off to download without it tying up you main computer, meaning you don’t need to leave a computer on overnight to get those huge files. It has all the speed throttling, scheduling and priority settings you’d expect with a “normal” downloader too, and will email you when downloads complete (or fail).

Other things it can do include updating your DDNS settings with your DDNS provider (such as dyndns or no-ip – something I really needed since the no-ip client is flaky under Snow Leopard), running a webserver (including php and mysql support), Time Capsule support (my main reason for needing it!) and serving photos.

Of course, it also acts as a file (and print) server, and even does one-touch backup for USB devices when you plug them into it. Pretty impressive, yes?

It doesn’t stop there. It’ll also backup to other devices, can have it’s storage increased by adding a USB drive, and supports RAID and multiple partions. It can even beep at you when it’s broken, or something has finished downloading. And act as a mail server. And you can administrate it via SSH if you’re a command line pervert.

But that’s just what comes out of the box!  As an iPhone owner, I was impressed to see there’s a set of complimentary (and free) Synology apps for it.

DS Finder (above) shows some stats about any Synology NAS devices it finds or your LAN (or configured over the internet). It will display drive usage, connection details, running temperature, and so on, and you can also make it beep and flash remotely so you can locate it in a sea of other devices if necessary. You can also remotely shut down or restart your NAS with it.

Useful, but not exciting. This, however, is a bit more interesting:

It’s DS Audio – an app that streams all the audio files from your NAS to your iOS device. Even over the internet. And it supports playlists and shuffle and artwork and runs in the background and everything. Lovely!

There’s also a nice front-end app for File Station, and another for your photos. In fact, the main Synology DSM website works quite happily in Safari on the iPhone anyway, but these apps just make the experience a bit more pleasant.

In terms of its operation, the DS211j is quite quiet, although heavy disk activity does increase the noise, as I found out when doing my first Time Machine backup to it. I think much of the sound is from the drives, rather than the fan, though. It runs cool too (again, this might be mainly due to the types of drives I put in it), being barely warm to the touch even after a solid 12 hours backing up.

DSM software updates are done directly on the device through the web interface, and can be set to download and install automatically if necessary. Extra software modules can be installed through this interface too.

Is that everything? Pretty much everything I’ve poked at so far, anyway. Except one thing – did I mention it’s also multi-user? Yes – you can set up multiple users and it even appears to be possible to authenticate with LDAP and other user databases. What users can access can be easily fine-tuned too, meaning you could, in fact, use the NAS as your network server if need be. Amazing!

Overall, I’m very impressed. It’s well made, has a slick, configurable interface, has millions of great features and functions, and works. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a cheap and flexible NAS.

EDIT: Oh yes – one more thing! You can also share your media on the NAS via the iTunes protocol, meaning your NAS music shows up in iTunes as a shared library!

EDIT 2: And another! (It just keeps giving!) The DS211j can also serve media to other media clients. For example, your Xbox 360 or PS3 (or any other DNLA supported device) can stream media directly from the NAS. Useful, I’m sure you agree.

It’s not even the first time something like this has happened with Lenovo, as they’ve been utterly useless in the past.

If only!

Posted via email from deKay’s posterous

Rebooting the host server fixed it for a while, but then it happened again. It’s odd, as another VM running on the same VMWare (2.0.2) server was seemingly fine.

Anyway, it turns out the issue is due to VMWare not liking the fact the host server had two network card (each 1Gb) “teamed” in combination to the guest OS network being configured as “bridged”. For some reason, it causes the network to randomly drop out – especially if the network cards are Broadcom, team managed with with Broadcom software. Guess what we’ve got?

The solution appeared to be counter-intuitive, but somehow actually works. For each of the teamed NICs (not the team itself), you need to disable the VMWare Bridge Protocol. We didn’t even need to reboot – It Just Worked(TM).

And why did the other guest VM work fine all the time? It used Shared networking, not Bridged!

As is usually the case, I “hit up” Google (as the kidz are wont to say, I think) and after a bit of trawling I found the solution:

1. Open Terminal and as edit the file /etc/services (as root)
2. Add a line at the bottom: secret-ssh 43539/tcp # secret SSH port
3. Edit file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist and replace the code:

   <key>SockServiceName </key>
   <string>ssh </string>
   

   with

   <key>SockServiceName </key>
   <string>secret-ssh </string>
   

4. Change your port forwarding configuration on your firewall to route port 43539 instead
5. Open “Sharing” control panel and ensure that “Remote Login” is checked off (if not uncheck it). Then check it again to start with the new configuration.

I got this information from this page here, and, if you look in the comments there, you’ll see it’s the exact page I’d come across originally. Here lies a lesson: bookmarks!

1. Learn how to spell “Microsoft”.
2. Don’t say you’re “an avid gamer” in your list of personal qualities, especially if it takes up half of your list.
3. When you print out your application form, don’t include all the alterations mark-up.
4. Remember to fill in all pages of the form.
5. When asked to only fill in the form and don’t provide a CV, remember to fill in the form and don’t provide a CV.
6. If you are referring to your new boss by name, please don’t call them “Holly”. Unless they happen to be called “Holly” of course, but even then, try to be a little less personal.
7. “Keeping abreast of new technologies” does not mean “can install Windows 98″.
8. If emailing the form in, please remember to attach the form to your email.
9. If applying electronically, using Word, please pay attention to the red squiggly lines under every third word you’ve typed. Perhaps make use of the F7 key.
10. Don’t apply twice, giving different details on each application form. Surprisingly, we will notice.
11. “Successfully configuring” your World of Warcraft client to connect to Blizzard’s servers is not a skill we require.
12. Creating your own website is admirable, and by all means tell us about it in your personal statement. However, don’t provide a link to it when your server was taken down three years ago. In addition, a customised Facebook page != “your own website”.
13. Including the @ sign in your email address is advisable, just in case we decide to contact you.
14. When listing the operating systems you are familiar with, System 7 and DOS are not pre-requisites for the job, especially if you also forget to mention anything newer than Windows 2000. Similarly, well done for knowing what FoxPro is, but what about Access or SQL?
15. Being a “lifetime computer user” when you’re 18 isn’t really a unique selling point.
16. Most importantly, when applying for a job as an IT Technician, it is helpful if somewhere on your form you mention some of your IT skills, qualifications or experience. Or even mentioning computers at all would be a good start. Having “good communication skills” and being “a team player” just won’t cut it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a folder on the network that people could just drop video files in, and then go to another folder to pick up the WMV version of the same file? Just like that? That would, undoubtedly, be the greatest creation of all time.

I’m sure a pre-made solution already exists. Indeed – Windows Media Encoder goes some way towards it by doing the conversion for you. Sadly, WME lacks support for all sorts of file types, is slow, and doesn’t seem to monitor folders. DropFolders, which works in conjunction with Handbrake, looks like it does exactly what we need, except it won’t export WMV files.

The solution? A combination of the command-line video encoding tool ffmpeg and a free utility called Watch 4 Folder.

On the server, I created two folders: “To Be Converted” and “Converted”. I put the ffmpeg exe on the root of c:\ (although anywhere in your path would work), and created this batch file:

for %%a in ("E:\Path\To Be Converted\*.*") do (
move /Y "%%a" "E:\Path\Converted\%%~na%%~xa"
C:\ffmpeg.exe -i "E:\Path\Converted\%%~na%%~xa" -b 1500kb -vcodec wmv2 -acodec wmav2 -y "E:\Path\Converted\%%~na.wmv"
del /F "E:\Path\%%~na%%~xa"
)

“E:\Path\” being the location of the To Be… and Converted folders, of course. This script basically lists all the files in the drop box folder, and one by one moves them, encodes them to WMV, then deletes the original.

If you want, you can just leave it like this, manually running the batch file on the server each time files are dropped into the To Be Converted folder. Of course, to be automated, you need to add another bit to the process…

Install Watch 4 Folder on the server, and tell it to watch the drop box folder. The “event to monitor” option you want is “File Create”, and the Action is “Execute a program or batch file” – point this at the batch file created above. Click the Start Monitoring button, and that’s it – videos go in, WMVs come out.

There are, however, obvious flaws here. Firstly, if you dump a load of big files in the folder at once, they may start converting before they’ve finished copying. Watch 4 Folder waits until the file has finished copying before triggering the batch file, but the batch file converts all the files once triggered for one. Also, files with the same name but different extensions will cause problems when converting as they’ll overwrite. In addition, things go “a bit wrong” when you put folders in the drop box These are things I can live with for now, though.

One partial solution would be to ignore Watch 4 Folder completely, and set the batch file up as a scheduled task on the server to run, say, every 20 minutes. This won’t completely get rid of the problems (and conversions won’t start almost instantly), but it may fit your needs better.

UPDATE 22/09/2010:

Seems most of the problems listed above don’t actually occur in practice. Half-copied files don’t get moved as they’re still open, so they don’t get broken during conversion. So actually, my solution is more ace than it appeared to be at first.

I also forgot to mention that you can, of course, change the file format and bitrate you convert to by passing different parameters to ffmpeg in the third line of the batch file.

Posted via email from deKay’s posterous

64-bit 2008, by default, only installs printers with the 64-bit 2008 and (for some printers, it seems, but not others) the 32 and 64-bit Vista/Windows 7 “User Mode” drivers. The old-style 2000/XP/2003 drivers don’t get a look in. There doesn’t seem to be a way to add them on the server either.

Thankfully, someone else has already found a way of sorting it. Basically, you navigate on an XP client to the Printers and Faxes share of the 2008 server, then click File > Server Properties > Drivers > Add, and point it at the XP (and other, if necessary) drivers for the printer.

There are a few issues, particularly if the 2008 and XP drivers have different names, but these can be resolved or worked around.

Here’s the full set of instructions – read the comments there for how to fix the additional problems!

The Insane Console History Video 2.0 from Elder-Geek on Vimeo.

I kept clicking “No Thanks”, but a page change or reload and it was back. This annoyed me a bit. Well, a lot. So I decided to chat with them.

Here’s the transcript (with the “Dell Expert”‘s name replaced). They were an expert indeed.

I am pleased that the Dell Zino can run imovie, and amazed that different colour computers are, as is the way with cars, different speeds! Amazing.

Oh yes, and the best bit was when, during the chat, this happened:

(Oh, and for those of you feeling sorry for the Dell Expert, I gave him/her a glowing customer satisfaction report.)

The Express version of SQL Server 2005 is nice because it’s free, but it does limit database sizes to just 4GB. This may sound huge, but for us, that’s only around 4 months worth of internet logs, and we need to clear some space every so often. I always forget how to do it, so this post is a reminder to me as much as anything.

Before you start, to make things easier, get yourself a copy of Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express. It’s free, and makes managing your SQL databases much easier. Once installed on your SQL Server machine (and connected to it), you can set about fixing WebMarshal.

Firstly, you need to purge a load of old records from the log. Chances are you don’t need to go back more than a few months anyway. If you do, you might want to backup your database, name it as a “snapshot” of today’s date, and then restore it if you need to have a look at old entries. How you purge depends on the version of WebMarshal you have, but for either 3.x or 6.x you start my clicking open the WebMarshal database from the object explorer on the left.

Now, on the pane on the right, you’ll have an empty command window. In here, you need to paste one of the following commands:

For WebMarshal 3.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @NumDays = 'n'

Where n is the number of days to keep. So, if you want to get rid of anything more 60 days old, replace n with 60.

For WebMarshal 6.x:

exec dbo.PurgeLogData @PurgeDate = 'yyyymmdd', @MaxRecords = 0

Where yyyymmdd is the date from which everything older is deleted. So, if you wanted to get rid of everything from before 10th April 2010, enter yyyymmdd as 20100410.

Whichever command you use, after typing it in, click the “! Execute” button to perform the task, which may take some time.

Unfortunately, all this does is remove the data. It doesn’t shrink the data files, so your 4GB database will still be 4GB. Thankfully, there’s an easy way of doing this.

Back on the object explorer pane, right-click the WebMarshal database and choose Tasks > Shrink > Database, then click OK. Again, this may take a while. Once finished, for good measure, choose Tasks > Shrink > Files, then click OK.

Now your database should be much smaller! To check, right-click the database once more and choose Properties. In the General section, there’s an entry for Database Size. If this is way below 4GB, you’re done. If not, you might want to do a bit more purging!

The first thing you’ll notice is that, unlike most SD cards, the SanDisk for Wii card is white. Like the Wii. Little known fact: the Wii itself, its power supply, the  SD card shaped. Check yours – I’m right!

Other exciting features include a write protect lock switch – ideal if you’re paranoid about Nintendo’s system updates deleting your Wii’s homebrew stash. This sort of thing is pretty standard for SD cards anyway though, and you could just remove the card when you update…

Anyway! In use, it performs about as well as my usual SanDisk Extreme II card. I couldn’t tell any speed differences when transferring channels and saves to and from it compared to the Extreme II. The Extreme III is supposedly quicker, but I suspect a lot of the speed issues are down to the Wii’s transfer methods and not the cards themselves. Apart from that, it’s an SD card and it works. You can even use it in cameras and stuff – it’s not fussy about only being for the Wii. There’s even a sticker on it declaring DSi compatibility. Wow!

You can get these fine items (and other similar things) from MemoryCardZoo. The 2GB SD Card is £5.99.

Competition!

Now, of course, you want to know how to save yourself £5.99 and win one, right? Of course you are! So what do you need to do?

Simply reply in the comments with Things You’d Put An SD Card Slot In And Why. You can email me pictures (the worse the better) to andyk @ lofi-gaming.org.uk if you’d prefer. Closing date, ooooh, close of day Sunday 4th July. One card each to the two suggestions or pictures I deem best. Or worst. Go!

However, the fact that it’s on, and some of the games are on during the working day, causes a few problems in that staff at work want to watch them. And they don’t have teevees. Me to the rescue then, with this motley crew of software and devices:

• An Elgato EyeTV 410
• A PowerMac G5
• VLC
• The VLC Plugin for EyeTV

Of course, this method should work for pretty much any supported EyeTV product and Mac. You’ll also need to know the IP address of the Mac you’re streaming from.

Firstly, you need to install the plugin. You can find this here. Once done, open EyeTV then open VLC. Make sure you can access EyeTV from VLC by choosing File > Open Capture Device and choose EyeTV from the selector. You may find you have to choose Screen then EyeTV again as it sometimes doesn’t “see” EyeTV right away. Pick a channel from the channel selector (you can change this later) and click OK. Don’t choose anything to do with streaming here.

You should now have an entry like “/eyetv-channel=3″ in your VLC playlists. Play this, and you’ll get your EyeTV channel in VLC!

Next, you need to so the streaming. Click File > Streaming/Exporting Wizard.

Choose Stream to Network, click Next, then choose the /eyetv playlist from the “Existing playlist item” list, and click Next again. For Streaming method choose HTTP, and leave Destination blank, then Next again. Leave all the Transcode options unticked, click Next, and choose “MPEG TS” for the encapsulation format. Click Next once more. In the next window, click Finish. You now have a ready-to-watch stream!

Now, on another machine on the network, open VLC. Choose File (or Media, depending which version you have) and Open Network Stream. For Protocol, choose HTTP, and in the address box type ipofmac:8080 (where “ipofmac” is the IP address of the Mac that’s providing the stream). Now Play!

All things being well, you should now be watching your TV stream across the network. If you need to change channel, you can do that on the “server” by simply flicking channel on the EyeTV controls.

First, click “Add your own background image now”, and upload this suitably sized blank image. Set that as your background, Bing and You’re Done(TM).

Phew, eh?

There was a system on the Amiga for higher quality (than standard) icons for programs, games, files and folders called NewIcons. I’d installed it on my Amiga, but couldn’t find icons for a few things. So I created my own.

NewIcons had two states too – clicked and not-clicked, so each icon needed two images.

Anyway, here they are!

Amazing, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Posted via email from deKay’s posterous

Well, would you look at that! I actually have some sort of usable internet connection! After a month of virtually nothing! It’s the most exciting day ever.