Archive for the 'Work' Category

Things I Have Learned This Week

Published
by
Howard
on February 17th 2006
in Hardware, Infrastructure, Internet, Microsoft, Networking, Software, Virtualisation and Work
. 0 Comments

Thing the first:
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 does not support teamed NICs on the host.

This bit us on the arse earlier this week when we teamed the NICs on the hosts of our virtual environment. As a result, although we could RDP to the host desktop, all our guest machines dropped off the network. A colleague is sure that with a bit of tweaking we could get Virtual Server to play nice with the (HP provided) teaming drivers, but we didn’t really have time to mess about with NIC configuration when there was an environment to build and documentation to write!

Thing the second:
m0n0wall is even better than when I last used it (several years ago). Its packet-shaping feature set is very useful if you want to simulate, for arguments sake, a low bandwidth lossy link between two networks. More on this and how to set it up in a virtual environment later.

Thing the third:
Turning off DHCP Client and Computer Browser on a Windows 2003 Server in an AD domain will break more than you might think. Specifically: the ability to register itself in DNS.

net start dhcp
net start browser

Thing the, aw hell, enough counting… Vodafone’s MobileConnect card will hang onto a 3G connection far longer and with far greater success if you configure it so that it’s *not allowed* to fall back to GPRS.

And finally, the commute from Winchester to Bristol is actually pretty reasonable - as long as you have a comfortable car!

Executive Hammock!

Published
by
Howard
on December 23rd 2004
in General and Work
. 3 Comments

Brilliant!

Sue bought me possibly the greatest gift an office working bloke can receive: the gift of somewhere to sleep. She got me an executive hammock! And I thought they were the stuff of executive dreams. It’s true though, they exist, and they work!

With a bit of help from Adam and Lisa for structural support (and knot tying) the hammock was set up this morning by my desk. It’s very comfortable. Adam and David have already had a go, although David looked less than elegant. :)

See the BOfH in his Executive Hammock:
Howard relaxes in his executive hammock

…here’s Ray enjoying a rest:
A Director's privilege?

and Chris, almost falling out:
Chris, almost falling out...

…Terry having a go:
Terry having a go.

and Sue relaxing:
Sue relaxing.

Why you shouldn’t rely on MS Access security…

Published
by
Howard
on December 8th 2004
in Work
. Closed

We’re working on taking a horrible Access database and moving it to SQL with a pretty web front end. This means pulling apart the forms based Access database they’ve provided to see what it does. All well and good, except the database they gave us had an auto run macro that presented a log on prompt instead of letting you see the tables/queries/forms.

No problem you might think, hold down shift when it loads to suppress the macro, and get in that way. Good idea, but in this case, not so! Unfortunately some wise-ass in their dev team had set the AllowBypassKey property of the database to False. That disables the shift key so you can’t get around the macro. Disaster!

Unless you’re a sneaky bastard. Which, by popular consensus, I am. Here’s how to get round it…

I created a new empty .mdb, for the sake of argument call it RemoveProtection.mdb. In this new database, create a new module, again I called this RemoveProtection. You might as well call them foo and bar for all it matters. Inside your shiny new module, paste the following code:

Function DisableShiftKeyBypass(strDBName As String) As Boolean

   Dim ws As Workspace
   Dim db As Database

   Set ws = DBEngine.Workspaces(0)
   Set db = ws.OpenDatabase(strDBName)

   Dim prp As DAO.Property

   db.Properties.Delete “AllowBypassKey”
   Set prp = db.CreateProperty(”AllowBypassKey”, dbBoolean, True, True)
   db.Properties.Append prp

   db.Properties.Refresh

   Set prp = Nothing
   Set db = Nothing

End Function

Then hit Ctrl-G to bring up the Immediate window. In that, type:

DisableShiftKeyBypass(”C:\PathToDatabase\ProtectedDB.mdb”)

and hit enter.

Voila! The database is now unprotected and you can hold down shift to get to the tables.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you shouldn’t rely on MS Access security to protect your data!

As requested…

Published
by
Howard
on November 18th 2004
in Work
. 1 Comment

Richard wanted a picture of the stomp rocket in action. The camera on my phone is pretty poor (Motorola V600) so this is the best I can do for now…

Ray and Andy aiming

That’s Andy standing up (providing the stomp power) and Ray aiming the rocket. They’re attempting to hit the bell we have mounted on the wall. (We ring the bell whenever we win a contract.) Hitting the bell with a rocket has proved surprisingly difficult so far!

I had an idea for using the rockets and special effects together… video the next stomp rocket battle, and turn them into lazers or photon torpedoes. :D Watch this space…

Goodbye Leased-Line, Hello DSL!

Published
by
Howard
on September 18th 2004
in Internet and Work
. Closed

That’s the big changeover done, with minimal down-time, and hopefully not too much disruption for the users.

Last weekend I set up a 512K DSL line at the office to take some of the load off our leased line. Our leased line is a measly (but very expensive!) 256K. That went well, after a bit of faffing about with the routers (Cisco 837). For some reason, one of the two 837 routers we had was sent to us preconfigured. It took us a while to realise that it wasn’t at factory defaults and go through the reset process. Once that was done the install was quite simple.

Today I went in and did the rest of the config, so now we’re not using the leased line at all. All web traffic goes out via the proxy to the 512K DSL line, while all mail and VPN traffic is sent out separately via a new 1Mb DSL line. Web browsing is already much snappier, and having tested the VPN today, it’s going to be much improved on the new connection. All this, and it’ll save us nearly a 10 grand a year in bandwidth costs. (Sorry Demon! :))

Bad Behavior has blocked 412 access attempts in the last 7 days.