Today is a good day, and it’s only 10:05am. Here’s a great tip for those of you who work in I.T. shops and have Dell 5110cn Printers.
You know those pesky transfer rollers? Yeah, the things that need to be replaced 3x as often as the Imaging Drum they’re often sold with? Yeah, it turns out that you can re-use them successfully. I know, I did it myself just today.
Wanna see how?
Lately we’ve been encountering some rather frustrating issues at work. These issues have been piling up as we’ve been otherwise unable to find a solution to them. It was beginning to get maddening.
Let’s start from the top:
SPLWoW64 crash with error message: “The program cam’t start because x2utilHL.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.” This happened exclusively in 32-bit applications on a 64-bit operating system. This was a little difficult to figure out, but we think we finally got it. In our environment users get printers added through a login script that maps printers based on location and user. That is to say, if I login at building A on device 1a, I get printers X (and if I login on device 2b, I get printers Z) but if I login at building B on device 1b, I get printers C. At one building we have recently swapped to 64-bit Windows 7. The problem seemed to start when we got new Xerox multifunction printers. In looking at the queues on the print server, we see that the 32-bit print driver was not installed. So we installed it. The problems have slowly been trickling away. Of note: we had to completely remove the printers from machines, and then remove any printer ports, and then remove any installed printer drivers. The next time they logged in the problem went away. Fingers crossed.
Dell Latitude 2110 not getting WiFi access no matter what. It was weird. It had been working for 3 years with no problem, but all of a sudden this morning it wouldn’t connect to any of our secure networks (using a certificate). We reset winsock, we uninstalled and reinstalled the hardware, we updated the drivers, we did gpupdates, everything we could think of. We even cleared out DHCP entries on the DCs and white-listed it in the Aruba Wireless Controller to make sure it wasn’t getting black-listed for failed authentication attempts (which we were seeing). In the error logs we were seeing details about DHCP failed (DHCPNACK). None of the related google searches seemed to help. It’s been very frustrating and slow-going. We restore an image to the netbook and it works 100% fine. So weird. There must have been some deep-seated change to the OS that we just weren’t aware of. Maybe corruption somewhere, since users can’t make system-wide changes. Very frustrating. It takes about 2 hours to image and deploy packages to a netbook. 2 hours for what should be a simple fix. Go figure. I’m sure there’s an easier method but I’m just missing it.
These were fun challenges to try and figure out. I love a good challenge. I even love a good challenge that I can actually complete and figure out. It’s very rewarding to me. Helping people as a general rule makes me feel all warm n’ fuzzy inside.
This week has been a good week. People have been thanking us for our hard work. That’s a rare treat, and I think I will savor it for the weekend.
It is nice to be appreciated for the effort we put in to our jobs.
I hope you all get the same courtesy at yours. Enjoy your weekend folks.
-M
Yeah. It’s like that.
Unless something goes horrifically wrong.
Like it did to today.
But more on that later.
So, we’re looking to change over to Web Help Desk at work and we got a very handy OVA file for VMWare and got it up and running.
Let me start by saying: Web Help Desk is pretty slick. Very full-featured, seems to be extensible, mobile friendly, email for creation/comment/take tickets.
I was initially looking at RT and even ZenDesk, but we went with Web Help Desk at the end of the day.
However, there is only part we got stuck at, and I’m still waiting to hear back from their support department: getting our certificate added to the web server to make it a SSL site.
For the life of them, they couldn’t figure out or find documentation on how to convert our wildcard PFX/PKC12 certificate over to the Tomcat (JKS) keystore. As I recall they said “Getting this done in Windows is very easy, but most people who do choose the Linux version already know how to do this.” Well isn’t that marvelous. We don’t. Do you want us to buy your product or not? We’re still waiting to hear back, but we figured it out. Here’s the guide for you, just in case.
Reposted from JAMF Nation
keytool -v -list -storetype pkcs12
-keystore yourkeyfilename.extension
keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore yourkeyfilename.extension
-srcstoretype pkcs12 -srcalias thealias -destkeystore newkeystorefile.jks
-deststoretype jks -deststorepass apassword -destalias tomcat
Notes: You don’t need to supply a password. I didn’t. The destalias can be required to be something by whatever program you’re plugging into. For me it was tomcat. srcalias is the alias from step 4.
Thanks to Nick Koval (nkoval) for the fix.
Work at the office during the summer is always an interesting experience.
Today we took 4 deliveries of Desktops, 158 computers spanning 474 pieces. I will be posting pictures of that today. We get to spend the summer unboxing, imaging, and setting up those computers. It’s a fast-paced, frantic process. We took delivery of another 144 on Tuesday. And that’s not even all of them. We received a few orders of Samsung Chromebooks during May and June. I think we got over 200 of those too.
We also want to re-image one of the other buildings, but that’s put on the back burner.
If you’re interested, we’re also going to be selling the old computers (Dell Optiplex 960 Desktops, Dell E6400 Laptops). I’ll be posting the GovDeals links when we’ve posted them.
Here’s the generic link for any and all auctions we post: GovDeals.
Read more for pictures of the new computers and Chromebooks.