Tony’s Tech Help

Wow, so this one stumped me. If you have two Word 2007 Windows open at the same time, when you switch from one to the other, either by alt+tab or by viewing them side by side and clicking one then the other and you get the hourglass, then this might solve your problem.

My clients were having the slowdown after upgrading to Word 2007. But we have Adobe CS2, and some clients that just have Adobe Acrobat 7 installed. The problem is that there is an Adobe Pluggin in Word causing the slowdown, and not that Virusscan is scanning files for viruses on file opens or some other nonsense.

To disable The Acrobat PDFMaker addin, follow these steps:

1. Log in as Administrator.
2. Open Microsoft Office 2007.
3. Click the Office Button in the upper left.
4. Click Word Options in the lower right.
5. Click Add-Ins on the left.
6. At the bottom, make sure ‘Com Add-ins’ is selected in the Manage: drop down and click Go…
7. Un-check ‘Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin’ (Or whatever you think might be making Word 2007 slow).
8. Click Ok.
9. Close Word.
10. Open Two Word Windows. Now you can switch back and forth instantly!

This will work for all users on the system!

I’ve you’re just starting to play with a Union, then you might have gotten the error message:

#1221 - Incorrect usage of UNION and ORDER BY

You might be thinking: Whoa, hang on there! Do you mean MySQL can’t order a Union?! Oh, but it can! First little issue I had was in realizing that you can put parenthesis around the queries. So phrase your query thusly:

“(SELECT …) UNION (SELECT …) ORDER BY …”

Just be sure that your Order By includes only the column name. Table.Column is going to get you another error!

In fact, Contribute is automatically generating filenames ending in _000 or _001 instead of opening a prompt to replace them when you try to make a link or publish them from your computer.

The problem is that your role isn’t being allowed access to delete files.

But Tony, does replace equal delete in this strange land of Seattle in Washington?

NO! I mean YES! It does, everywhere. Because in order to replace something you sort of have to delete it first, then upload what you really want to be there. Windows file serving permissions work in a similar way.

1. Open Adobe Contribute CS3, as the Site Administrator.
2. Click the ‘Edit’ drop down menu, then ‘Administer Websites’, then click the site you want to edit.
3. Click the role you want to fix, probably ‘Publisher’.
4. Click ‘Edit Role Settings’ on the right.
5. Click ‘Folder/File Access’ on the left.
6. Under ‘File Deletion’ Check ‘Allow users to delete files they have the permission to edit’.
7. Click ‘Ok’, then ‘Close’.

Have you seen this?

My original solution was to extend the amount of time between ‘Restart Later’ nags. Of course now only the Administrator can use ‘Restart Later’.

The solution now is two-fold. I’m setting the updates to download and install automatically in the middle of the night. If the user shuts off the computer at the end of the day, Window’s XP SP2 Automatic Updates will download and install the updates the next morning when the computer is turned on.

So we still need to disable the auto-restart message. That is done by:

To prevent Automatic Updates from restarting a computer while users are logged on, the administrator can create the NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers registry value in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. The value is a DWORD and must be either 0 (false) or 1 (true). If this value is changed while the computer is in a restart pending state, it will not take effect until the next time an update requires a restart.

Thank you, Tim Rains’ Weblog.

Wow this had a simple answer. I feel silly. It all started when I made a custom 404 page, editing the .htaccess file and the Apache configuration. I went into Contribute to make sure I could still edit files and found:

Access Denied. The file may exist, or there could be a permission problem.

When using Contribute to edit the root page of my site. Pages in other directories were fine. The pages in the other directories had the same file permissions!

I thought it was possibly some server update I applied awhile ago that broke, or an Adobe Contribute misconfiguration. I removed my connection to the site.

When I added the connection back in, I got the browse folder dialog ok, and after I choose my sites root folder I got:

Contribute cannot verify your connection information.
/var/www/html
Please contact your administrator for assistance.

Rude! Well after some investigation I found that Contribute CS3 writes tmp files to the root directory. So I thought maybe Mod_Security was preventing writing or reading tmp files.

NOPE. The permissions for the root dir itself had been changed. Possibly during an update, or when I ran this command:

sudo /sbin/restorecon -R -v /var/www/html

At any rate, here is my solution:

sudo chown staff:webauthors /var/www/html

Note: staff should be the name of the sftp user you have in contribute, and webauthors should be their group. Make sure the owner has write permission of course.

There’s probably a ‘proper’ way Change the IP address of your Cisco asa5505 endpoints.

I have no idea what it is. Why does Cisco make routine maintenance tasks difficult? Oh well.

Here’s the way I do it, which I think is really straightforward and easy. It’s basically these steps:

1. Download the complete configuration text file from the asa5505
2. Do a find and replace on the VPN endpoints IP address
3. Upload the new configuration and restart the asa5505

Easy, right! Here are the detailed steps:

• Put your computer behind the firewall.
• Start a TFTP server. If you are running windows, you can download and installa Cisco TFTP Server very easily. There are linux servers for this too.
• Connect to the console. I like using the blue console cable. If you need to know how to do this, check out the first couple steps here.
• Type ‘ena’ to enter enable mode. You may need to enter your enable password.
• Type ‘copy running-config tftp:’ to start the transfer. The asa 5505 will ask you a few questions, like what is the IP of the TFTP server? Conveniently, this is at the top of the TFTP server window. The entire exchange should look like this:

ciscoasa(config)# copy running-config tftp:

Source filename [running-config]?

Address or name of remote host []? 192.168.3.66

Destination filename [running-config]?
Cryptochecksum: 3e2fdd1f ba8792a1 11a9e4e7 f89d46dd
!!
4165 bytes copied in 1.290 secs (4165 bytes/sec)

• The Cisco TFTP Server saves the uploaded file here by default: ‘C:\Program Files\Cisco Systems\Cisco TFTP Server’
• Open that file and replace all of the old IP’s for the VPN server with the new IP address. In my file there were three instances.
• Make sure your TFTP server is still running, and enter ‘copy tftp: startup-config’, then answer the prompts. If you try to replace the running config you’ll probably get errors. For example:

ciscoasa# copy tftp: startup-config

Address or name of remote host [192.168.3.66]?

Source filename [running-config]?

Accessing tftp://192.168.3.66/running-config…!!
Writing system file…
!!
4165 bytes copied in 0.380 secs
ciscoasa#

• That’s it, now you just need to reboot the device without saving the running-config! Type ‘reload’.

Hey! November is National Novel Writing Month. I just got started today, a little late I know. I have some catching up to do. If you’re doing nanowrimo too, you should visit my profile page so that you can add me as a friend. If you want to read my novel as I write it, I’ll be posting it on this site, just not on the front page. Click ‘NaNoWriMo’ in the right hand column to see it.

Hit escape to enter command mode, then type this in:

:%s/old text to replace/replace with this new text/g

After installing vsFTPd on RHEL, I got the following error while trying to log in:

500 OOPS: cannot change directory:/home/curreri

The problem is that SELinux is standing in the way. I told it in English: “I know FTP isn’t secure SELinux, but I promise I’ll stay behind the hardware firewall.” Unfortunately SELinux doesn’t understand English. Here’s how you say that in Linux command line speak:

sudo /usr/sbin/setsebool -P ftp_home_dir 1

That’s it, now log in!

I made an ISO of my Windows 98 Boot CD. I needed it yesterday, and I couldn’t find it online anywhere. Get Windows 98 Boot CD Here!.

I used Alex Feinman’s ISO Recorder to create the image. You could probably use any tool to burn it, but Alex’s is pretty awesome. It adds right click burn to image power in Windows XP!