With the Remote Support tools available to us today, and with a little advance planning and preparation, it is usually not necessary to actually go to a remote site during an implementation project.

For example, I sent Windows 2003 domain controllers from Seattle to Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and migrated their systems from NT 4 with Exchange 5.5 to Windows and Exchange 2003, all done from a small office in Snohomish, WA, USA, with the aid of three monitors, a fast internet connection, a clock application to tell me what time/date it was in the various locations, and lots of caffiene and sugar.

However, sometimes the customer just feels better with an onsite presence. The UK office in the above-mentioned project was one such. Their systems were more involved than the other remote branches, being larger and having been in place far longer, and they were simply not comfortable with a remote migration.

So I packed up and went to Bournemouth, U.K. for a week to finish that project.

That was an extreme example, for an extreme migration. Certainly the largest one of my career thus far. I’ve done smaller trips to New York, and to California for similar purposes. I’m interested in doing more of those.

So now we have arrived at my point:

I have Tech, and I will travel.

Maybe you run a consulting company, and one of your customers has a branch office in a remote location such as Butte, Montana, US, or possibly even New York.
The customer’s environment is a complicated one with lots of fiddly bits and hands-on requirements.
You can’t spare one of your techs to send to the customer’s remote location; they’re too busy, and separating them from their daily customers is not good for business.

Or, maybe you’re the IT manager of a customer that is managing their own migration for the most part, but need some hands-on help in another site.

I’m your guy.

I have a flexible schedule, and do most of my customer support remotely. My customer are flexible and understanding, and are willing to wait a little bit for the stuff that is not time sensitive when I have something else going on, because most of the time they get prompt, undivided attention.

So if you need someone to drive or fly to a remote site and slam out a remote network upgrade/migration project, drop me a line. We’ll talk about your project, how my qualifications and availability matches up, and work out the particulars.

You can be assured of fast, competent work, and 100% compliance with non-disclosure and non-competition concerns. I don’t want to take your customers. YOU are my customer.

For more information about my background, experience, and some customer feedback, check out my company website.

Tags: Have Tech Will Travel, On-Site Service, Remote Support

Want pretty pictures to go with your instructions?
Check this out.

Want a portable executable to do the job for you?
Here you go.

Want to rotate the background so you don’t get bored with it?
This will do the trick.

History Lesson:
In Windows versions before Vista and 7, using a custom default wallpaper was pretty straightforward. You would simply point a registry key to the file, and Windows would use it. Things are a little tricker than that now, but it’s still do-able.

Caveats:
The image files must be .jpg files, must be less than 256 KB, and should match your screen resolution (they’ll be stretched or skewed if they do not). The following resolutions are supported:

768×1280
900×1440
960×1280
1024×1280
1024×768
1280×1024
1280×768
1280×960
1360×768
1440×900
1600×1200
1920×1200

The process requires elevated permissions (you must be running as an administrative account and may have to answer some User Account Control prompts) because you are changing system settings.

Here’s how to do it manually:

1. Create your image:
Either create your own image with the appropriate size and dimensions, or find an image you like (and that isn’t copyrighted), and adjust it in an image editor to fit your screen resolution. Make sure it is less than 256 KB, using JPG compression.
If you think you might change resolutions at some point, make more than one (one for each reoslution you might use). Including the resolution in the filenames of yor stored copies is a good idea.

2. Set the registry key:
Navigate to the following registry key:
HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background
Set the “OEMBackground” REG_DWORD value to “1″.

3. Create the folder:
Navigate to your Windows folder (usually c:\windows).
Go into the “System32″ subfolder.
Go into the “oobe” subfolder of System32.
Create a folder under oobe called “info”, and under that, one called “backgrounds”.

4. Put the files in place:
Copy your image file into the system32\oobe\info\backgrounds folder, and rename it to “backgroundDefault.jpg”.

Do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and admire your handiwork!

This is a fairly complicated subject, as SQL is a fairly complicated application.

Maybe you need to test connectivity to your SQL server as part of preparations for a failover.

Maybe you’re having some problems with getting a client application to connect and you want to make sure your SQL server is responding.

Maybe it seems to work locally but not remotely, and you want to gather more information on where you can connect from and where you cannot.

There’s no really simple methodology for testing this, because MS SQL can be configured in many different ways – using Windows authentication, using SA authentication, using TCP/IP, or Named Pipes, on different ports, even on dynamic ports.

So rather than present a step-by-step approach that will only work for one specific configuration, I’ll point you to some articles that will help you determine which way SQL is configured first – and then how to test it using that information.

This one is about enabling remote connections, but in the process it tells us where to look for the actual port number being used:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2005/05/05/415084.aspx

This one helps us figure out whether the server is using TCP/IP or Named Pipes, whether or not Dynamic Ports are bring used, etc:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/265808

This one helps us use SQLCMD to connect to x instance with y port, giving a number of syntax examples:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188247.aspx

If any of these links go missing, please send me a comment so I can replace them.

Tags: Connectivity, SQL

I loaded drivers on my SBS 2008 server for the HP Color Laserjet 2600n printer.

On my 32-bit XP workstation, I connected to the server via UNC path, right-clicked the printer, and told it to connect. This is usually sufficient to load the driver, and give access to the printer.

The symptom:
This time, although it connected successfully and I had a printer object for it, whenever I tried to print to it, Windows wanted to send a love note to Microsoft, and when I closed that dialog, Explorer crashed and restarted.

This works fine on the Vista computers in my network.

I right-clicked on the printer object and tried to get to Properties. Windows XP told me that I needed to install a driver for the printer. I gave it the proper driver and it showed me the properties. I tried printing again, and BANG! another Explorer crash. It turns out that no matter how many times I gave it that driver, it still thought it did not have the driver.

I tried a variety of different ways, from loading the drivers at the local console of the server, connecting from Windows XP and Vista workstations to \\server\printers and loading it there, across the network. I downloaded new drivers from HP and tried those.

Since this is a 2600n and has a JetDirect card, I realize that I could easily have created a port on the XP workstation and mapped directly to the printer instead of going through the server, but I was getting stubborn.

Finally, I tried something a little different.

I created a new port on the XP workstation. I used the “Local Port” option, but when it asked for a port name, I typed \\server\printersharename in the “Enter a port name:” field.

It works like a charm. The icon even looks like a network printer icon instead of a local one. I edited the printer name to be <printername> on <server> to make it look just like the other network printers, and I can manage its print jobs centrally.

There is one drawback to this approach: Terminal Services does not map back the printer when I do this. However, since it is networked printer on the same LAN with the server, and I do not often use this feature when connecting to other networks, it’s not an issue for me.

Tags: Laserjet 2600N, SBS 2008, Windows XP

One of my personal goals is to reduce the number of documents I write with screen shots to zero. I may never achieve this goal 100%, but I will settle for eliminating unnecessary screen shots. When a document is written with precision, screen shots are unnecessary. It is much faster and simpler to add a few careful words than to take a screen shot, crop it, save it in a compressed format to keep the file size down, embed it in the document, and place the text and carriage returns around it in such a way as to not annoy and confuse the reader.

If you have to write one, here are a few pointers that (in my opinion) will make a better document:

Interacting with the audience:

One reason I dislike step-by-step documents with lots of screen shots is that step by step documents, in general, encourage people to disengage their brains. Why would you bother to think your way through a process and learn about it, when you have a document that grasps your nose ring firmly and jerks you through it?

Related to the previous point about disengaged brains, what happens if a mistake is made in the documentation, or the documentation is not updated when the process is, and the reader suddenly finds themselves halfway through a process with a document that does not match up? Answer: the user gives up, shrugs their shoulders, and complains loudly about it. If the user had instead been thinking their way through an intuitive process, they’ll know exactly where they are and how they got there, and where to go from there.

Then, of course, comes another scenario: The process has changed, the author has updated the text of the document, but did not update the screen shots. Now the text does not match the pictures, and the user has to try to figure out which one is correct.

Finally, there is the situation where the author’s view of the program, having been tweaked and twisted, has checkboxes checked that the user does not, or vice versa – and now you have people that start wondering (and asking questions about) some checkbox that is not covered in the documentation. (I call these people rivet-counters, after the Star Trek fans who notice that the number of rivets in the wall of Sick Bay has changed from one season’s episodes to the next, and complain about it on forums. The IT world is full of jerks like that.)

Documents with text steps but not screenshots also have these problems to some extent, but the effect doesn’t seem as pronounced to me. I think screen shots, while helpful in small quantities, are mind-numbing when interspersed through a large document. Screen shots are good for showing a specific page when describing a particular point – but like most things, there can be too much of a good thing.
Logistics of document creation:

One reason why I dislike making documents with tons of screen shots is the sheer amount of effort involved with taking screen shots, cropping them, saving them to a compressed format to avoid making a document with an unnaturally high file size, and importing them into the document.

However, the creation and placement of the screen shots is just the beginning. MS Word, and most other document readers, have a very annoying feature. The arrow keys advance you from one line of text to another, totally disregarding images. So if you are arrowing down through a document, and watching the screen shots, you can find that most of a page has gone by quite suddenly. Sometimes you miss some text too. So you arrow back up and it scrolls up too far as well. It’s very disorienting. I find that with documents of this type, I spend more time trying to figure out where I was in the document than by actually getting anything out of it.

If you have to make a document like this, you can minimize the disorientation effect by placing the text that corresponds to an image BELOW the image – so when the document reader jumps, the text you’re seeing actually matches the image you are viewing.

You can also minimize the page-jump effect by filling the blank space at the bottom of a page with carriage returns. That way when you are arrowing down, and the arrow has gone faster than your eyeballs, or you’re not sure if it is the end of a page or not, you will actually see the white space before it suddenly jumps to the next page without warning.
One more point is that if the text of the document is written with precision, as it should be, pictures are completely unnecessary. Many documents say things like “Click the Advanced button.” But there are three different buttons on the screen labeled “Advanced”. Which one do you click on? The screen shot MIGHT show you that. Sometimes the author opens the screen shot up in MS Paint and puts a red circle around the correct button (and don’t get me started about how long it takes to write a document like THAT). Sometimes not. Even if they do, you still have to keep jumping between the text and the picture. The author could just as easily have written “Click the “Advanced” button in the “User Settings” area.” And a screen shot would NOT HAVE BEEN REQUIRED.
So as you can see, if one of these nose-ring documents with pretty pictures is not written with great care, which takes forever to do, they become quite annoying to people like me. I’d much rather look at a formatted-text document that uses words to great effect, not relying on pictures.

Tags: Documentation, Screen Shots