Technical

Dell PowerEdge 1750 – Press F1 to Continue

We had a Dell PowerEdge 1750 that, every time it was rebooted, would stop in the BIOS bootup sequence and prompt you to “Press F1 to Continue, Press F2 for Setup.” This was a huge problem because it made remote rebooting the server impossible. More than once, I forgot and rebooted the server assuming it would come back up, then realized 30 minutes later that it was never coming back until I mashed that F1 key. This was particularly problematic when working from home — resulting in a 30 mile drive just to press one key.

It turns out there was a small problem that was severe enough to prevent the server from booting. During the BIOS sequence, there was a notice we had overlooked that read “CD-ROM not found.” Once we pulled the bad CD-ROM drive and replaced it with a good one, the message went away and the server booted without interaction.

Since the CD-ROM isn’t necessary for booting, it seemed odd that a missing (or bad) CD-ROM drive would prevent the server from starting up without keyboard interaction. Sounds like a flaw in the BIOS to me.

Reinstall Adobe CS3, keep all your settings

I recently had a problem with my laptop where I couldn’t update Adobe Acrobat because something had corrupted the installation. Acrobat (and the rest of the CS apps) ran fine, but I couldn’t update because the updater would throw an error, something about “source for the installation could not be found.” After much Googling and trying several options, I realized I would have to manually uninstall the whole CS3 suite and reinstall. Ugh.

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Howto: Reapply default NTFS permissions

I recently installed some software on my PC (Windows XP sp 3) and part of the installation process required changes to NTFS disk permissions. The installer somehow got confused (it was actually a bug in the installer) and it managed to foul up all the permissions on my disk. I mean all of them, disk-wide. I couldn’t even open my control panels. After hours of research (using another computer) I finally found this article at MS Technet.

The final command line I issued was this:

Change Nmap/Zenmap fonts on Windows

Application design is very important. The user-interface (UI) for applications should be clean and easy to read, and the font choices (while subject to personal preference) is critical. Some applications do a great job while others, especially apps that are designed for cross-platform use, tend to be hit or miss. Nmap, which is an excellent network diagnosis tool, is a great application but the choice of monospace font on the Windows platform (Courier New) is dismal. Fortunately, it’s easy to change this. Simply open the file pango.aliases (usually found in C:\Program Files\Nmap\zenmap\etc\pango\) and edit the line that reads

monospace = "courier new,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun, ...

Just add whatever font you want for the monospace font at the beginning of the quoted string. For example, to use Microsoft’s new open-type Consolas, simply change that line to read:

monospace = "consolas,courier new,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun, ...

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Change Nmap/Zenmap fonts on Windows

Application design is very important. The user-interface (UI) for applications should be clean and easy to read, and the font choices (while subject to personal preference) is critical. Some applications do a great job while others, especially apps that are designed for cross-platform use, tend to be hit or miss. Nmap, which is an excellent network diagnosis tool, is a great application but the choice of monospace font on the Windows platform (Courier New) is dismal. Fortunately, it’s easy to change this. Simply open the file pango.aliases (usually found in C:\Program Files\Nmap\zenmap\etc\pango\) and edit the line that reads

monospace = "courier new,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun, ...

Just add whatever font you want for the monospace font at the beginning of the quoted string. For example, to use Microsoft’s new open-type Consolas, simply change that line to read:

monospace = "consolas,courier new,courier monothai,mingliu,simsun, ...

– Update March 31, 2009 @11:02: The latest beta (4.85b5) has changed the location where this file exists (and, in fact doesn’t include the file.) The new location is C:\Program Files\Nmap\py2exe\etc\pango … create a new file named pango.aliases (using Unix line-endings) and paste the line above into the file. (more…)

Change default paste behavior in Word

I have always wondered about how to change the default behavior for MS Word, because the default paste mode is to try to use the existing formatting of whatever text you have cut. If you cut and paste much from web sites, this can wreak havoc on your layout. I finally decided to Google it tonight and found the easy fix from MS Office Online.

You too can paste text without the formatting into a Word document, according to this Help and How-to from Microsoft Office Online.

CatOS Config

I have been beating my head against the wall for an hour now and finally figured out the answer so I have to document it here. (This has everything to do with my OCD-ness.) When you are editing a Cisco Catalyst config (running CatOS) sometimes you make a mistake in the port configuration and you want to return it to a completely unconfigured state. Unfortunately, CatOS likes to keep remnants of the commands you have entered and it is hard to get rid of those parts, especially the trunking commands. For example, if you change the trunking state of a port then want to return it to an unconfigured mode, it might keep something like:

in the configuration. For the OCD in me, this drives me nuts. I want it to say nothing about the port. The way to remove or delete the “clear trunk” part from your CatOS config, you must enter the following command:

This should remove all traces of port trunking configuration from your config file.

Hacking the hacker’s identity | News.blog | CNET News.com

Whoa. Let this be a warning to all you IPTC/EXIF geeks (me included!) Note to self: Remove meta data from photos of secret informants.