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    Entries in restore (3)

    Thursday
    25Jun2009

    Desktop Restore - Restore icon position

    Don't you just love it when ever you update your Nvidia video drivers, or change to a smaller resolution, all your desktop icon positions get reset? This is especially annoying when you have multi monitor setup, and you are really lazy to keep all the icons organized!

    I found a great utility, that runs as an explorer right click (on desktop) extension that will save your icon positions, and can restore them in a click.

    Works on Vista 32 and 64bit. It is called simply Desktop Restore.

    Wednesday
    10Jun2009

    D-Link DIR-655 Firmware upgrade FAIL

    As a rule of thumb, I avoid D-Link routers.

    I have had unexplained drop outs from D-Links in the past when paired up with HughesNet Satellite internet, all fixed by replacing the router with a Linksys (my fav choice - the Linksys WRT-54GL).

    Earlier this week, I was called out to a business that had a D-Link DIR-655 router. The client explained there were some dropouts. After making sure all clients were set to not connect to other wireless networks, I'm pretty sure I have fixed the majority of the "drop outs".

    The next thing to do, just as a rule of thumb, is to make sure the router has the latest firmware (esp since this is a draft N router!). The D-Link website mentioned quite a few bug fixes from 1.2 to the latest at the time - 1.31

    So off I went to D-Link's website to get the firmware, run the config backup of the router, flashed, and rebooted. Then I went to restore the config, and it FAILed. Tried uploading it via multiple browsers/OSes - no dice. Found some forum mentioning this is a bug! The saved config file is not recognized by the latest firmware - 1.31 (from 1.20).

    Lucky for me, I was able to manually find out all the previous DynDns settings, and port forwards, but just a reminder to document, take screenshots etc and not to trust the config backup option on D-Link routers!!!

    Finally, the new firmware had on by default, Securespot 2.0 - which was always nagging about expired subscription when browsing anything - so that was swiftly turned off - what more could D-Link do to discourage me to use one of their routers!

    Sunday
    24Jun2007

    WSS 3.0 Backup / Restore

    WSS 3.0 has a great web interface Backup/Restore facility.

    But for the life of me, I don't have any joy restoring using this (the backup was a mission, fiddling around with folder permissions etc!). Why is online documentation so scarce, and why can't this thing just work!

    After many hours, I figured the best way to achieve backups/restores is via stsadm. There are plenty of Microsoft articles that explain how to do this. It works a charm, unlike the web based one. But to throw a spanner in the work, I had this prob...

    The situation:



    • Windows 2003 R2 Evaluation 60 day edition (using Virtual PC 2007)
    • WSS 3.0 installed
    • Client created site on the Eval server, and the server locked up after 60 days
    • Client wanted this site, recreating the site again from scratch not an option
    • Needed to move the site onto another VM machine without a locked console so the client could continue development of the WSS site

    Since the console was locked up, I didn't have much choice but to:

    • Remotely turned off all the WSS and SQL services (Computer Management - connect to another computer)
    • connected to the c$ share of that server, and copy the .mdf and .ldf files off the server

    I the followed these instructions: