A Mind Lost

Can’t Change Email Settings on Blackberry After Update

amindlost — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:26:11 +0000

A user had an issue after running an update on his Blackberry. The update crashed and caused the email to stop working. When accessing the email accounts (personal not BIS), the phone asked to validate the accounts with their passwords but returned the following error:

Sorry unable to continue your session. Please login again.

The fix was to follow this procedure:

connect the blackberry to WI-FI
Use the Blackberry browser to connect to mobile.blackberry.com
Select the Country
Scroll down the resulting page until you find ‘Communicate’
Click on the ‘Email’ link.
Follow the prompts.

This will validate each of your accounts (In our case the web page said that it had detected a new device and needed to ‘transfer’ the email accounts to it). Email should now start working again as well as allowing you access to the email account settings.

Microsoft Calling? It’s A Scam.

amindlost — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:27:20 +0000

It has been brought to my attention that a telephone scam is currently targeting local residents. A friend called to ask why Microsoft were calling her, telling her that her PC was infected with spyware and to follow their instructions to install software to fix it. She refused and the caller kept calling back getting more and more aggressive. Fortunately, I am aware of this scam as it has been used around the world in the last year or so.

The telephone number the caller is ringing from is not identified and will probably be from India and they insist that they are from Microsoft or your internet service provider and that your PC has been identified as having spyware running which is sending out spam emails. They ask you to sit at the computer and follow their instructions to download and install software to remove the spyware. What they are actually doing is getting you to install THEIR spyware which gives them control of your PC for their own use and to steal your personal information. Alternatively, they will demand a service charge of up to £200 to ‘fix’ your fictitious problem.

If you are contacted in this manner, please be assured that neither Microsoft nor your internet service provider will EVER call you in this way. Microsoft have no interest in your PC whatsoever and in the rare event that your internet service provider has an issue with your use of their services they will contact you in writing.

Remember:

Do not divulge any information about yourself or your PC.
Do not follow any of their instructions.
Tell them you are recording the conversation, although in the instance this week it did not faze them.
They will keep ringing for a while so either keep hanging up or make use of your caller ID and ignore the call.
They will become more aggressive. It appears that this is from a script they are given in order to increase the pressure on you to comply.
They have no access to your PC without your help. They cannot cut off your internet service or disable your PC regardless of what they threaten.

Tracing the companies carrying out this scam has been very difficult due to the international nature of the operations.

Microsoft has a statement on it’s website regarding their non-participation in cold-calling and also a press release from Australia when it became a problem there last year.

More can be read about the scam here (Guardian) and here (PC Pro).

Playstation Network Back. But at What Cost?

amindlost — Mon, 16 May 2011 11:25:22 +0000

As of last night, the Playstation Network is back up in the UK, at least for online gaming use. However, the issues for Sony will last a lot longer than the near four week outage. The first thing I did after being made to change my password was to delete my credit card details from the system and they will NEVER be entered on there again. I’ve only ever paid for two DLC map packs for COD MW2 but I will never be allowing Sony the use of my credit card again. They have proved that they cannot be trusted with any personal data and I have no faith in their rebuild of the network. They have failed to secure our details once and any claims of increased security are now just a gauntlet thrown down for every have-a-go hacker in the world to make a name for themselves.

For me, the worst thing about the whole debacle is that Sony did not once contact me to advise me in any personal way whatsoever that my details had been stolen from their system or what they intended to do about it. I received no emails, even after checking my spam filters. They allowed someone to steal my credit card and personal details, left it days to make any admission and then their users found out in the mainstream media.

I wonder how many people have now vowed never to buy any Sony product again?

Windows 7: Legacy Access to .ini Files

amindlost — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:01:13 +0000

Amongst other issus getting a legacy VB application to run correctly on Windows 7, I came across a problem accessing .ini files with configuration data in them. I had a app.ini file in c:\windows and I was making changes to it but my application wasn’t paying any attention to them, insisting on loading old values. It took me a while to figure it out but I discovered that c:\windows is a protected location and although my application was reading the ini file from c:\windows, Windows 7 was redirecting the calls to a copy of the file it had created in c:\Users\user1\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows which never seems to change to reflect changes made to the original file. I had to delete this file to get it to take any notice of my changes.

Short term, I have changed the application to use an ini file in c:\ instead but these workarounds are getting tiresome and it’s hard to justify a full re-write of the application to bring it into line with Windows 7′s requirements.

Thunderbird Email Corruption

amindlost — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:33:09 +0000

A user had a problem with their email in Thunderbird. No matter what email message they tried to open, Thunderbird would attempt to open a completely different email, but always the same one every time. It would show the email but then lock up and the process would have to be killed.

Thunderbird creates an index of your emails and it appeared that this had become corrupt. To fix it, you need to delete the index file and allow Thunderbird to rebuild it. Open a Windows Explorer window and type the following into the location bar (this works for XP/NT/Vista/W7):

%APPDATA%\Mozilla

There will be a set of profile folders there, move into the correct one for your user and delete the inbox.msf file. When you reload Thunderbird it will begin a rebuild of its index, which for large numbers of emails and folders may take a while, but it will then display the correct emails when you want it to!

MySQL ODBC 3.51 Connections on Windows 7 x64

amindlost — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:57:49 +0000

A legacy app of ours needed an ODBC connection to a MySQL database via their ODBC connector version 3.51 on a Windows 7 x64 laptop. However, loading ODBC manager from Control Panel wouldn’t show the MySQL ODBC driver or connections at all. In order to create the required connection I had to load the lesser known 32-bit ODBC manager by running

c:\windows\syswow64\odbcad32.exe

You must type the path in full unfortunately as if you just try odbcad32 on it’s own, Windows 7 will load a different version with the same name and without the functionality you need.

Firefox: Delete Entry From Form History

amindlost — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:14:10 +0000

A few times now, when entering username and password combinations into a web page, I have not pressed TAB properly between the fields and my password, or part of it, gets tagged onto the end of the username. Unfortunately, Firefox then remembers and displays that entry in the drop down history box every time it encounters a text box of that name again. Previusly I have had to clear all of the form history but have now discovered a simple method for removing a single entry from the history instead:

Navigate to the form containing the field that has the saved value that you want to delete.
Click on the text field you wish to delete the historical entry from.
Press the down arrow on your keyboard until the incorrect value is highlighted.
Press Shift+Delete together and the value will be erased from the history.

Linux Script To Match And Move Files

amindlost — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:47:07 +0000

One of our sales reps had a dead laptop from which I had salvaged the email messages on our server in case he needed access to any files at a later date. Sure enough, last week, he needed copies of all emails sent to a particular customer. I had a few thousand .eml files in a folder and needed a quick way to copy any which mentioned the customer. The following three line script worked a treat:

mkdir copies
grep -l “searchtext” * >t.txt
cat t.txt | while read line; do cp “$line” copies; done

It simply finds any mention of “searchtext” in the current directory and creates a list of the files in a file called t.txt then processes the list and copies all of those files to the “copies” directory.

Frustrating Android Task Management

amindlost — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:05:17 +0000

I have a Samsung Galaxy S phone which, on the whole, I’m very pleased with. However, the Android task management and the lack of control over it is infuriating. I monitor some share prices at shareprice.co.uk and I downloaded their Android app to run on my phone. When I am at the office, I monitor the prices from my desktop but when I am out would like to monitor them on the Galaxy. No problem you would think. Except that Shareprice can only stream to one device at a time and once the app has been loaded on the Galaxy, I can’t shut the damn thing down and it stops me connecting from the desktop. I have a task killer on the Galaxy and can kill the Shareprice app once I’m done with it but Android keeps restarting it every few minutes. and kicking the desktop out of the service.

All the searches I’ve done give me replies such as “It’s not using any battery” or “Don’t use task killers, just let Android control the apps automatically”. But in this instance, Android is getting it wrong and won’t let me put it right.

Since the desktop is where I spend most market hours, the only solution has been to remove the Shareprice app from the Galaxy. This is not the way things are supposed to work, the smartphone is supposed to empower me not hinder me!

Samba Across Subnets

amindlost — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:42:32 +0000

I have been having some issues at the office with gaining access to Samba servers on different subnets and I think I have found the correct set of configuration parameters for Samba to operate how I need it to.

We have two companies with offices on opposite sides of the street and I used to have a wireless link in bridge mode between the two so that I could access the other server across the road and the other office could use our internet connection. To make things more efficient I decided to install broadband over at the other office and then split the network into two subnets via a router on one side of the wireless link. This creates two self-sufficient networks but allows access between the two.

Each side of the network has its own Samba Server and an internet connection via a Netgear FVX538 firewall router providing DNS. The Samba servers also need to be configured as WINS servers.

My problem was that each subnet could access its own services and I could access everything from the other subnet except for the samba server. Every time I tried to access a samba share from across the router I would get an error that the server could not be found or that I may not have permissions to access it.

I finally found the set of Samba configuration entries which work across subnets. Details and diagram after the break

The diagram for the network layout is as follows:

in /etc/samba/smb.conf on each server, I have the following entries:

domain master = yes

preferred master = yes

local master = yes

wins support = yes

wins proxy = yes

os level = 65

Don’t forget to restart samba (/etc/init.d/samba restart) to get the new configuration up and running.

I now have access to the Samba shares on each subnet from the other subnet.