Baby Expo

Today we're going to the Baby Expo at the AlamoDome. Yay! Checking into a new venue...

FourSquare

I love foursquare. I use it all the time. I have many Mayorships, but my friend Aleia has snagged my prized one. Grrr!!!!

Dr Who

We're about to start watching Dr Who (2005 Series). Let's see...

Well, that was weird. But funny, sort of. And the girl is cute.

Grace SweetPeace

I have this swing. We bought it CHEAP broken and I'm trying to figure out how to fix it. :) After working on it for about an hour and a half, I'm to the point of giving up. I've removed various pieces and paerts, but I just can't figure out how to get to the motor.


Baby girl is only 2 weeks away now.

Network Load Balancing

I'm really struggling with trying to get two VMs (under VMWare vSphere 4.0) to work in a Windows Network Load Balancing NLB cluster.

I found this article which indicates that the NLB clustering won't work if both Network adapters have the same GUID -which of course they do since they are both clones of our base image VM.

If the second host is still listed in the cluster, but unreachable, I'd remove it before doing the fix.

Check that by using regedit to drill down to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > WindowsNT > CurrentVersion > NetworkCards > (number)..

I only had one number under NetworkCards, number 7. I clicked on that and looked on the right-hand side. The Description lists the name of the Interface that you see in Network Connections (which you should rename if you have more than one adapter) and the ServiceName which lists the corresponding GUID.

This article tells you how to resolve this by making the GUID change. There are two solutions; I chose the second and here are the steps for that second solution:

* On either VM enter “Device Manager”
* Expand “Network Adapters” and right mouse click on the Network adapter that you are trying to add to the NLB configuration.
* Select ‘Uninstall’. NIC has now been uninstalled.
* Next you want to re-add the network card which in turn will create a new GUID for it. Do this by right mouse clicking your servers name at the top of the ‘Device Manager’ list and select ‘Scan for hardware changes’. This will now re-detect the NIC and give it a new GUID.
* Now exit out of “Device Manager”
* Re-configure the NIC

And there you have it. I spent days trying to figure this out.

Maybe I'm coming back

So, I'm just about tired of Facebook and think I might be coming back to blogger.

Here's a story from today:

I took a nap and had a dream about (maybe) the end of the world. All of us and my parents were either driving to Corpus or Florida - some coastal place, anyway. The bad thing is that I think that the big bad thing was going to be a tidal wave, so that was kind of dumb, but oh well.

Somehow, Christopher has persuaded me into getting an 18 wheeler to haul all his arcade machines, but we had to leave before we were able to load them, so I was driving an empty 18 wheeler across country. Doh!

We stopped at this one rest stop with a super fancy bathroom and multiple open stalls in like a weird star configuration. Bad design. :)

It was weird. Haha! It's out 10th anniversary, and I took a nap. We did go to Cheddar's for lunch tho. Jen had a chicken sandwich and I had ck fried steak. That's a turnaround. And I drank 5 glasses of raspberry lemonade. I love that stuff.

Happy Anniversary, dear. I hope you liked the roses.

Exchange 2010 CAS Array

I'm seeting up an Exchange 2010 CAS Array and I figured out something that I haven't seen elsewhere. After you create the array, there's no command to add any subsequent CAS servers to it. They join automatically after you install them. It doesn't say that anywhere that I read, so I needed to post it for others to find.

Lost Windows Passwords

I've spent hours trying to find a solution for lost windows passwords for a consulting client. The one and ONLY solution I've found that works on new PCs with Vista is PCLoginNow, which can be downloaded from SourceForge.

There are no instructions, but these instructions are from here.

After burning and creating PCLoginNow bootable live CD, insert the CD into optical drive disc tray, and boot up computer from the CD to start and run PCLoginNow autmatically. Normally, user is required to press any key on BIOS boot screen to boot from CD. If you don’t see this message, or cannot boot from CD, change the boot device priority or sequence list in BIOS to make cd/DVD drive comes on top.

On PC Login Now wizard, select the system with the user account to recover and reset the password. Each system detected is listed with its ID, System Name, path to SAM files and filesystem to help user recognize the correct system.

Then, user able to select the administrator accounts or user accounts, complete with UID, User Name, User Type and comment, to apply any of the five characteristics listed below.

1. is Administrator: if the account has the administrator privilege and rights.
2. password is empty: if the password of the account is empty or blank.
3. is disable: if the account has been disable due to the operation of administrator or the system rules.
4. is lockout: if the account has been locked due security breach such as too many unsuccessful login attempt.
5. password never expire: if the account has to set password on a specific expiry date or the password will expire after a set period.

Note that if the Windows account has already contained no password and is of administrator type, the two special properties are grayed out and disabled. User cannot downgrade administrator account to normal user account or create a password to an account in PCLoginNow. Existing states for the account are automatically checked.

******* the important part!!! ********

Change any of the properties to the selected user account by ticking or unticking the check boxes, then click on Next button to apply the new settings. To reset the password, select the check boxes for password is empty and password never expire to make the account no longer has password, and can log on by leaving password field blank.

PC Login Now is a freeware and supports all Windows operating system including Windows Server 2008, 2003, Vista, XP. PCLoginNow can support dual boot systems too. Download size is just 55 MB.