July 12th to 16th
This week is a software update week, and autodesk has updated their registration tool so our network licence file has been received.
- windows software update
- Setting up licence for autodesk products
January 18th, 2012
Following the directions on-line for android and eclipse defaults to an installation which can be run by users in a limited permission environment. This is good, but also means that they the computer they use ends up with a copy of eclipse and the sdk for each user in their home directory space. As an alternative, I tried the following steps to allow students to use the same copy of the sdk and eclipse for development. The instructions below are for windows 7, but an installation on linux or mac os would probably be able to use some of the same steps.
To install the software:
- Download and install the latest version of Java from Java.com
- Install the android sdk
- Install the Classic version of Eclipse
- Install the ADT Plugin for Eclipse see developer.android.com for instructions. (NOTE: You may need to install additional components for all of the adt plugin parts to install correctly. Adding http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo to the list of Software sources under Help -> Install New software fixed this.)
- You can choose the directory when eclipse starts. It should point to the location of the installed sdk. In my case that’s c:\Program Files (x86)\android\android-sdk .
To make available to other users:
- Move the eclipse directory to c:\Program Files\
- Copy the plugin directory from the user who set up ADT to c:\Program Files\Eclipse\dropins
- For windows 7, you can use an administrator level powershell to copy a shortcut to the eclipse executable to c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs so that users can access the Eclipse IDE from the Start Menu.
- To stop eclipse from prompting new users for the location of the android sdk, copy the c:\Users\username\.android directory from the first user above to c:\Users\currentuser . A script could be set up to do this if the path variable in the ddms.cfg file is missing, or the .android directory isn’t present when a user logs in.
Tags: android, eclipse, students
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September 22nd, 2011
I found that when installing Lion from a formatted drive, the ppd files for HP printers aren’t present. You can get them from the previous OS install disc (snow leopard), in the following location (it’s hidden, so use CMD-K in the finder to browse to it):
/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/
In there you should find a set of all the printer drivers for various printers that could have been installed previously. I recommend using grep to determine which package has the driver you are looking for.
Tags: Lion, Mac OS, PPD
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September 16th, 2011
I found a neat trick on-line to get windows 7 to recognize the virtual network card it doesn’t have a default driver for in vmware server 1.0.10. You add the following line to the end of the .vmx config file, and it sees it as an intel e1000 card and installs the correct driver.
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
This is posted about in a few places, but here is a link to the one I found:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/5c74d385-98f9-47c8-962f-b0cfc47abadf
Tags: vmware, window 7
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May 13th, 2011
Alan discovered that we can deal with a stale nfs file handle on zeus by using the following command:
umount -l directory
This performs a lazy unmount, which cleans up references to a filesystem after detaching it.
Tags: cluster, hydra, stale nfs file, zeus
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April 12th, 2011
Discovered an interesting problem with windows xp and 7 clients in an active directory domain(although this may happen to non-ad clients as well). If the dhcp server has several different DNS servers for different groups of clients, and a default is overridden by the others, the override doesn’t go into affect when a lease is acquired on reboot (only a manual renewal seems to get it).
The fix was to set up the dns options so that no “default” existed (i.e. the other groups each got the same entry placed inside a subgroup for them). Then both the windows and other clients picked up their own dns options with no overrides.
Essentially, what I did was move
option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.1
into
group ( ),
so that no default exists.
Tags: dhcp, dns, option domain-name-servers, windows 7, windows xp
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December 22nd, 2010
Computers running rocks software that are receiving updates via yum or another method have a unique issue when it comes to kernel upgrades. Part of the rocks system involves changing the grub.conf file at boot time depending on how the system was shut down. If the computer is shut down properly, grub-orig.conf is copied over grub.conf. If not, rocks.conf is used for the startup.
Tags: cluster
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November 30th, 2010
Here’s a way to add a dgp http printer to mac os (and configure it to deal with the abort-job policy problem):
lpadmin -p ‘MomonWood’ -E -o name=’MomonWood’ -v ‘http://wood.dgp.toronto.edu/printers/Mom_on_Wood/.printer’ -P ‘/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/HP LaserJet 2430.gz’ -o printer-error-policy=”abort-job”
Tags: mac os x, printer
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November 24th, 2010
I recently received a macbook which I didn’t have an account on, so I found the following instructions for resetting the password (from
http://www.macyourself.com/2009/08/03/how-to-reset-your-mac-os-x-password-without-an-installer-disc/ )
Reset 10.5 Leopard password
- Power on or restart your Mac.
- At the chime (or grey screen if your chime is turned off), hold down Command+S on your keyboard to enter single-user mode.
- This step is optional, but it’s a good idea because it checks the consistency of the hard disk before moving on. At the prompt, type fsck -fy and press Enter/Return. Wait for the checks to complete before going to the next step.
- Type mount -uw / and press Enter.
- Type launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist and press Enter.
- Type ls /Users and press Enter. This lists all of the usernames on the computer – helpful if you don’t know or remember what these are.
- Type dscl . -passwd /Users/username password and replace “username” with one of the users displayed in the previous step. Replace “password” with a new password of your choice. Press Enter.
- Type reboot and press Enter.
Tags: mac os x, password reset, single user mode
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November 15th, 2010
Microsoft maintains a website with a catalog of all the device drivers, software update and hotfixes you get through windows update or the add/remove device wizard on windows. It’s intended for corporate deployments of these packages. The website is here:
http://catalog.update.microsoft.com
Tags: drivers, microsoft, Update catalog
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September 14th, 2010
A student showed up today with a drive formatted using exFat, which isn’t included on windows xp by default (Vista and Win 7 have support for it). Microsoft provides an update that can be downloaded. Here is the command line to allow you to do a silent install from a central location using psexec (Sysinternals):
psexec -c \\MachineName WindowsXP-KB955704-x86-ENU.exe /passive /norestart /quiet
It looks like it will require a restart to work, but can be installed without restarting right away.
Tags: exfat, kb955704, update
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