Tag Archives: windows

HP LJ 1020 Spooler Service Restart Revisited

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My previous fix for the HP LaserJet 1020 Spooler Service Restart issue did not stick. Upon reboot of the server, the problem returned and was not correctable in the manner previously described.

I researched the issue again and found a Microsoft forum post where they actually fixed the issue. The fix goes as follows:

  • NOTE: Do this on the machine connected to the printer.
  • Run gpdedit.msc
  • Go to “Local Computer Policies\Administrative Templates\Printers”
    • Set the setting “Allow print spooler to accept client connections” to “Enabled”
  • Go to “User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Printers\”
    • Set the setting “Point and Print Restrictions” to “Disabled”
  • Close the Group Policy Editor
  • Go into the Printers and Faxes control panel, right click on the printer and hit properties.
  • Click the “Ports” tab
  • Uncheck “Enable Bidirectional Printing”
  • Close the Printer panels/windows
  • Run a command line, type in “gpupdate /force”, and hit enter

Fixed!

The forum fix was here.

Dial Up Networking Error 720 Fix for Windows XP

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Finally found the definitive fix for error 720 in Windows XP if the problem is not caused by your ISP totally sucking b***s. The original fix was created by someone and was posted here. Here is my version for your enjoyment.

SYMPTOMS

When you try to use a dial-up connection to connect to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), you may receive the following error message during the "Registering your computer on the network" portion of the connection agreement: Error 720 – the connection attempt failed because your computer and the remote computer could not agree on PPP control protocol. Additionally, when you view the devices in Device Manager, you may notice a yellow exclamation mark (!) over the icon for the WAN Miniport IP (#2) device. Then again, you may not.

CAUSE

This issue may occur if:

  1. the TCP/IP protocol has become unbound from the dial-up adapter
  2. or if a conflict is created when a second WAN Miniport IP device driver loads
  3. or a malfunctioning firewall product broke your network stack
  4. or a firewall product was removed improperly or otherwise broken
  5. or Windows simply decides it wants to suck a bit more today.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this issue, uninstall then reinstall the WAN Miniport IP and PPTP devices. To do so, follow these steps:

Part 1: Remove the WAN Miniports

  1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
  2. Click the Hardware tab, and then click Device Manager.
  3. On the View menu, click Show hidden devices.
  4. Under Network adapters, you will see WAN Miniport IP devices. If a WAN Miniport IP device is listed, continue to the following step. If no WAN Miniport IP device is listed, go directly to Part 2
  5. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
  6. Locate the following registry subkey:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
  7. On the Registry menu, click Export Registry File, type backup-key in the File name box, and then click Save.
  8. Click each of the registry subkeys under this key, and then view the Data column of the DriverDesc value to determine which of the subkeys corresponds to WAN Miniport (IP). For example, the 0005 subkey.
  9. Right-click the subkey whose DriverDesc value data is WAN Miniport (IP) or WAN Minport (PPTP); (for example, right-click 0005), and then click Delete. Click Yes to confirm that you want to delete the key.
  10. Quit Registry Editor.
  11. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
  12. Click the Hardware tab, and then click Device Manager.
  13. On the View menu, click Show hidden devices.
  14. Under Network adapters, right-click WAN Miniport (IP) and then click Uninstall. Click OK to confirm that you want to remove this device.
  15. Repeat for the WAN Miniport (PPTP).

Part 2: Reinstall the WAN Miniports

  1. Find netrasa.inf in c:\windows\inf
  2. Make a copy of the file and name it netrasa.inf.save
  3. Open the orignal copy of netrasa.inf and place a semicolon in front of the line that starts "Excludefromselect=\" and and continue with all follwing lines and then end with "MS_NdisWanNbfIn,MS_NdisWanNbfOut" under the [ControlFlags] section. (all lines between)
  4. Start a Add new hardware session (from Control Panel) and choose that the hardware is already installed. Choose to "Add New Hardware" and then select "Network Adapters" followed by "Microsoft" and then both the PPTP and the IP Wan miniport one at a time. (NO need to reboot between these steps)
  5. After you finish both then reboot.
  6. Select Start -> Run and type: netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt
  7. Reboot and try your connection.

This should resolve your issue.

Upgraded the Wiki Box

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I upgraded the wikibox today. I replaced the old PIII 800 machine with an Athlon XP running in the 1650 area. I decided to do this instead of using the Athlon machine as a render client, since it really doesn’t have the horsepower to do so. I want to eventually replace the Hard Drive in the wikibox with something faster to increase responsiveness.

The upgrade was easy and not easy. Unlike Windows and their fascist “copy protection asshat HAL kernel sh*t”, you can change the hardware on an Ubuntu box rather easily without tripping some kind of Gestapo alarm or basically causing the whole operating system to puke blue chunks. I just yanked the hard drive from the old machine and popped it into the new one and it just booted up and ran. I did have a couple of problems, however.

May I take this opportunity to say that the X Windowing system sucks. It’s settings are hardcoded into a fuc**ng text file and if you change the video hardware, oops sorry, you don’t get a GUI. It does not have any kind of automatic fallback mode, so if you change your video hardware and you don’t have any experience with the command line, you are basically screwed. Secondly, I think GNU/Linux really needs to create an X Windows compatible API that is BUILT INTO THE FUC**NG KERNEL, just like EVERY OTHER MODERN OPERATING SYSTEM. Maybe then graphics on Linux would not be slow, buggy and generally crufty crap.

Back to the story: I had to do some guessing and hacking and a couple “sudo -reconfigure dpkg-xserver-xorg” commands to get the video running. Then, to my surprise, the network card did not work. Running a “lspci” command showed that the OS knew the card was there, and some other command starting in “mod” (that I found on a forum somewheres) told me the driver was installed, but eth0 was just not up and could not be brought up with “ifup eth0″.

After about 2 hours of forum hunting and getting nowhere, I finally stumbled across a bit of nice detective work. Apparently, Ubuntu’s network software, also, sucks. If your network card changes, it will not automatically reconfigure your configuration files and just make it work. Oh no. You have to hand code “/etc/iftab” to match your new card’s MAC address. THEN and ONLY THEN wil eth0 come up. What if you aren’t intimately familiar with linux and/or you aren’t a hardware geek and don’t know how to get the MAC address of your network card? Again, you would be completely screwed.

What a pain in the ass! Well, at least I didn’t have to reinstall the Operating System. On XP, it’s nothing more than a minor irritation: a quick repair install and phone reactivation and you are up and running. Vista, however, is a totally different story. You CANNOT repair install it. You have to completely replace the OS, reinstall all your software and drivers from scratch, and put all your data back.

I guess what I am saying is, VISTA BLOWS.

Idle time…

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I really haven’t posted anything in a long time. Nothing really new has been happening in the tech world. Lets see:

Windows Vista does not have a repair install in the standard sense. You can do a new installation without formatting the machine, but you will always have to reinstall your applications, and the old program files and user folders are dropped into a folder called windows.old. Teh suck.

The Computer Museum is pretty much done. Just need to take some more pictures and clean it up a bit.

Ideas for SPID are floating through my head, but nothing has really gotten done there.

10 Days in Tech Hell

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I’ve had the worst 10 days in technician hell. I had the opportunity to work on several computers that were either very broken requiring enormous effort to fix, or would seem to be almost fixed then give me a nice surprise right at the last minute. Let me see if I can sum it up…

One computer came in with a massive malware and rootkit infection that took extreme effort to repair without a format. The hard drive had to be removed multiple times, and the system had to be booted into a WinPE environment multiple times to use a series of anti-virus scans and my patented “Most Recently Created Files = DELETE!” trick to remove the infection. This machine also had the MXZ virus, a nasty thing I would like to call a “system disabler”. It physically kills the taskmgr.exe file and drops hundreds of thousands of DLL files into the Desktop, Windows and Windows/System32 directories. Deleting those with a wildcard command line took, oh, about 4 HOURS! Final result: machine cleaned and working properly, account of kids who infected the computer were seriously locked down using manual registry hacks to system policy (XP Home, no GPEDIT.MSC!), per parents’ request. They can’t download anything, install anything, run Java, Flash or ANY ActiveX control, create or change passwords for their user accounts, or create new user acounts to bypass the security measures. I couldn’t keep them from running IM clients, but since they couldn’t download them or install them, I figured I was okay on that front. I don’t think we’ll see that one in again for malware infection.

Another computer had, too, a rootkit infection. This one appended itself to ndis.sys (somehow bypassing windows file protection) and hijacked the network stack to do whatever the heck it wanted. That machine had weird DHCP and DNS issues, random BSODs, etc. Fixed that with another round of the “Most Recently Created Files = DELETE!” trick and the obligatory scans. After I got this system all clean and tried Windows Updates, Microsoft felt abliged to inform me that this customer’s machine was running Windows XP Pro VLK. I called the customer, got approval to replace their OS with Windows XP Pro OEM, via repair install/upgrade. Turns out that there was something really wacky with their registry, and the repair install resulted in no Primary IDE or Secondary IDE controllers being listed in the proper class key in the registry, giving me 0x0000007b, DIRECTLY AFTER FINISHING AN ENTIRE REPAIR INSTALLATION, AN INSTALLATION WHICH HAD TO BOOT OFF THE FRIGGIN’ HARD DRIVE TO COMPLETE THE SECOND HALF! After a 1.5 hour long attempt to swiss-cheese the registry by doing a clean install on a new HDD and trying to export it’s working IDE controller class entries, then Loading the Hive of the customer’s installation and importing the entries, but to no avail, I gave up. Final Result: backup data, wipe HDD, install clean copy of Windows, return data. Basically, the 4 hours I spent removing the infection by hand was rendered completely unnecessary.

Third computer had a weird series of problems. Random BSODs, missing files, file system corruption, incorrect file permissions, broken ActiveX, broken Windows Updates service, broken Cryptographic Service, and the pièce de résistance, “invisible display tabs” (as referenced in another blog post). The cause of all this weirdness was a combination of 2 things. First, a hijacker, Smitfraud most likely, that killed much functionality via registry-hacked policy (no task manager, no display tabs, no change certain IE settings, etc.). Secondly, a bad stick of RAM. Replaced the RAM, removed the infection, then bounced my head off the wall forever trying to figure out the “invisible display tabs” problem, finally wading through all the crap Google spewed at me regarding System Policy and finally settling on this page, that had the right fix. That fix definately went into the Service Wiki.

Then I had a weird computer that would not boot into normal mode. While trying to boot into normal mode, it would proceed all the way past the splash screen to the point where it first initalizes the video card, then freeze. Tried new video drivers, disabling ALL (when I say all, I mean ALL) unnecessary system services, disabling all unnecessary hardware, shutting off all startup programs, and even creating a new user account. None of that worked. I ran hardware scans, and those all passed. For giggles, I ghosted the customer’s drive to a new drive, and voila, it booted. Once. It stopped booting from the new drive after that. I tried a repair install of Windows on the customer’s drive: no joy. I tried a repair install on the new drive: worked great. I tried booting the customer’s drive again and this time I put my ear to it. It was very quiet, but it was exhibiting click-of-death even though the diagnostic passed. Replaced the drive, did the repair install, system fixed.

Fifth computer was just comic. Came in because the customer said that it rarely boots to Windows anymore, and most of the time it won’t turn on. When it does turn on, he says it “turns on, then shuts right back off.” We figured bad power supply, and I grabbed it thinking it would be a quick job for me. Ended up being bad motherboard. A Dell with a bad motherboard. 4 years old. No direct replacement motherboard available. Chassis is proprietary to the motherboard. Heatsink is proprietary to the motherboard. Only new motherboards I can get have 2 RAM slots, he has 4 sticks of RAM. New motherboard, RAM, system chassis and heatsink/fan combo, basicially a complete system rebuild. Yeah, that was a $400 repair.

And the last computer. This one looked like it would be a real challenge to figure out, because according to the sign-in description, it wouldn’t complete POST. I figured “what the hell, I’m already on a roll, lets pick the one that will take 3 days to figure out.” I benched it and, lo and behold, it would not finish POST. Got to the point just before detecting IDE drives and would freeze. Cleared CMOS, no joy. Disconnected all unnecessary parts, no joy. Swapped RAM, no joy. I figured motherboard, so I took the customer’s CPU, Power Supply, and RAM, attached them to a new motherboard: no POST/Video. The only things left are CPU and Power Supply. I tried the Power Supply first and the customer’s hardware on the new motherboard POSTed. AH HA! I tried all the customer’s old hardware with a new power supply. POST freezes. AH HA AGAIN! Customer had a failing power supply that most likely damaged the motherboard, or vice versa. Called customer got approval to replace motherboard+power supply, installed them, Windows didn’t even require a repair install, installed the 2 missing drivers, and the system was done. Total diagnostic and repair time: a little over an hour.

Figures, the last one I take, the one I figure would be the hardest of all of these ends up being the easiest. Just my technician’s luck, I guess.