Monday 18 October 2010

I’ve been nominated for the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2010!

It's a great feeling to have been nominated for the Computer Weekly IT Blog Awards 2010 in the Male IT Professional Blogger category, sponsored by IBM.




The voting structure is very simple, number of votes cast, with one vote cast per visitor. So if you’re a reader of this blog, and want to vote for me, visit the Computer Weekly Voting Page for the Male IT Professional 2010 category, hit the big Vote Now button, and pick my name from the list for the Male IT Professional drop-down.

I’m really grateful to those people who took the time and effort to nominate me, and for anyone else who votes for me – I really appreciate it :). Don't forget to vote for some of the other fantastic nominee's in the other categories as you only get one chance to vote.

Thanks

Kris

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Duplicate Name Exists On The Network

Wowzers, this is an annoying message! I spent the better part of Three days trying to crack this for a customer!

Ok so in my scenario, I had 30 PC's coming up with this error at bootup. I think at that point its a fair assumption that there aren't actually 30 PC's all running with duplicate names sitting downstairs in a store cupboard right..?

So first port of call, check the event log. I had something like this:
The name "MYDOMAINNAME/MYPCNAME :0" could not be registered on the Interface with IP address 192.168.1.100. The machine with the IP address 192.168.1.1 did not allow the name to be claimed by this machine.

The SBS in this case was 192.168.1.10 so why is 192.168.1.1 even talking to my machine when it boots up!?

I checked the source of the problem 192.168.1.1 and at first glance couldnt find any problems but then a little more digging and we found out the issue.

192.168.1.1 was a Linux server, named exactly (yes I said exactly) the same as the Internal Domain Name. So guess what, at DHCP request time, it was going off and sourcing DNS and DHCP via a combination of Samba and Windows SBS packets.


I appreciate that this wont be applicable to everyone but when I was trying to find this error where there actually WASNT a numpty who had named two computers the same it came up dry...

By the way, another fix which might help you a little... Put your DC/GC with its domain name Domain.local into hosts and point it to the server IP... Might work?

Monday 11 October 2010

Num Lock not enabled by Default on some new PC's

Strangely enough to mine and I'm sure many other peoples surprise, the commands are no longer in BIOS. See below.

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard

0 - Turn all indicators Off (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)
1 - Turn CapsLock On
2 - Turn NumLock On
3 - Turn CapsLock and NumLock On
4 - Turn ScrollLock On
5 - Turn CapsLock and ScrollLock On
6 - Turn NumLock and ScrollLock On
7 - Turn all indicators On (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)

In my case, the string value was some 7 or 8 digit number such as 21765430. These entries are the cause of the reboot change in the num lock status. If you want it on when you boot, set the string value to 2 in all the keys with numeric values. Problem solved!


Compliments of @RWheeldon

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