Useful links: July 2008

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Not all of the stuff I stumble across on the Internet makes it into my blog posts so, here’s a list of items I’ve come across this month that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

This Modern Life (original artist unknown)

Account lockouts and disconnected remote connections

Posted on By Mark Wilson

For the last week or so, my colleagues have suffered an increasing amount of profanity as I’ve struggled with account lockouts on our Active Directory. I honestly nearly threw my notebook PC across the room last Wednesday.

I’d had my password reset twice and the account lockout flag removed about 7 or 8 times but I didn’t really get the answer that I needed when I asked our (offshored) IT helpdesk what might be causing the problem (for example, were there any AD synchronisation issues that they were aware of). After giving up on the helpdesk, I circumvented the proper support channels and dropped an e-mail to one of the administrators, who helpfully pointed me in the direction of another support team with the tools to diagnose the source of my lockouts and said it tends to be a disconnected terminal session or a software update program (e.g.from Adobe) using old credentials (e.g. to access the Internet via our proxy servers) that causes the lockout.

Sure enough, the problem was traced to a terminal server – and I did have a disconnected session there. Since resetting that session, the account lockouts have gone away and my access to e-mail, intranet, internal websites, Internet proxy servers, etc. has been restored.

My first inclination was to blame the infrastructure – and in this case it turned out to be a user error (or “a layer 8 problem”, as I like to refer to such things)… even so, I thought the experience might be useful for someone else who is getting frustrated by near-continuous account lockouts.

Microsoft Update failure

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve been building a Windows XP virtual machine for test purposes and needed to apply the latest updates (even with Windows XP service pack 3 it required over 20 updates to be applied). Unfortunately, Microsoft Update hit a problem and refused to install some of the updates, telling me that “a problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed“. I tried disabling my anti-virus software (AVG Free) but that made no difference.

Microsoft Update: Failed Updates

Microsoft’s advice is to re-register a number of DLLs using the following commands:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll

For each successful registration, Windows should return “DllRegisterServer in filename.dll succeeded” but wucltui.dll didn’t seem to exist on my system. Even so, after re-registering the remaining DLLs, Microsoft Update successfully installed the problem updates.

Useful things to know about Cisco IP Phone software

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Whilst configuring my Cisco 7940 IP phone it’s been necessary to reset it a few times to load new configuration details. I started out by removing the power (pretty brutal, but effective), until I reached a point where I could telnet into the phone and issue a reset command.

Then I learned the reset codes for Cisco IP phones:

  • For SIP firmware, press *+6+settings
  • For SCCP firmware, key in **#**.

Note that these are soft resets (like Ctrl+Alt+Del on a PC) – they do not return the phone to factory settings.

Finally, it may be useful to know that the default password for the phones is cisco.