Windows General Category

Revisiting BlackBerry Desktop Software 6

February 15, 2011 by teknologist | 1 Comment »

I decided to see if BlackBerry had solved their install problem with the Desktop Software version 6 that I tried to install back in September 2010. I’m sad to say their software is full of FAIL still.

As you can see from the errors above, you can’t even launch the application. It makes me wonder if programmers at RIM even QA their software at all. I’m not the only one having this problem either.

I could go on and on but I figured I’d need to stop somewhere. It’s pretty bad. It seems users have been reporting this even a few months before I tested it out in September 2010…so this problem has been around for more than 6 months and RIM hasn’t done anything to fix it…and they wonder why Android is chewing up their market?

The worst thing is that when googling around this particular error…you find it is a simple fix in .NET framework inside the application and the app just needs a reference fixed and a recompile. Figures. Something that could be done simply and quickly to solve pain and suffering of many goes unnoticed…but hey, let’s make sure we make big bucks on everything else!!

Bottom line is…I have to revert back to previous version. This means I can’t update my BlackBerry and I can’t call customer service because they won’t help me unless I’m running the most recent version. So at least they have THAT going for them…they don’t have to address any concerns about BlackBerry Desktop Manager 6 because they can just ignore people that call in that aren’t running that version of the software…and since the people CAN’T get to that version, they get lost in the void.

Hat’s of to RIM! They’ve cooked up a good way to ignore people in this case. I hope they fix their problem sometime in the next 6 months.

Windows General | Tags: 6.0, blackberry, Desktop, RIM

Cannot Create Scheduled Task Server 2003 R2

December 13, 2010 by teknologist | 2 Comments »

I hit a snag at work today while trying to create a scheduled task to run a batch file daily on a server. The problem was after creating a scheduled task using the wizard, a popup displayed this:

The new task could not be created.
The specific error is:
0×80070005: Access is denied.
Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the application.

Of course, the task wasn’t created. Googling around wasn’t much help…most of the stuff references Windows XP and a bunch of the results want you to go inside the registry. I figured there must be a better way. Something that all the posts had in common was saying that something had changed the permissions on the Windows Tasks directory. So, I figured running CACLS to reset the permissions on that tasks directory should fix things. I was right. So this fix is MUCH simpler than all those forum posts and mailing lists posts said.

To fix: Open up a command prompt and change directory to C:\WINDOWS. Next issue the following command:

 CACLS Tasks /E /G builtin\administrators:F

it should echo back ‘processed dir: C\WINDOWS\Tasks’ and return you to a prompt. After this, you should be able to schedule a task quite easily. The skinny of this problem is that the tasks directory just gets its permissions wrong and you’re using CACLS to reset things. Hope this helps someone out there! It took me a couple hours to figure it out!

Windows General | Tags: 2003, permissions, scheduled, security, tasks, windows

Security Group Membership without Powershell

April 7, 2010 by teknologist | 1 Comment »

I’m getting pretty used to powershell in my day to day workings with Exchange. Today however, I was helping a user out on a PC in a different department and I needed to find all of the members of a specific security group. Sure, I could remote back into my work PC and launch ADUC but I’d rather be able to query it with a single query…all from right there using her computer with the limited user account.

Thanks to powershell, I now think in pipes…while I’ve always done this with Linux, I’ve never had to do so with Windows. It’s almost like wearing two caps at the same time. Nonetheless, I was able to figure out how to do this after 3 or 4 attempts and then output it to a file so I could see members of the security group and I did so without the power of powershell (ba-dum-ching!)

I used dsquery and piped the command using dsget to grab the information I needed and then output that into a text file onto the desktop. Important to note that you should open the command window using ‘run as’. So in XP, browse to Start >> Programs >> Accessories and then right click ‘command prompt’ and ‘run as’ with elevated privileges. You’ll need to be able to view the group you’re querying. I used my own user since I’m a domain admin…you get the idea. Once you have the command prompt, cd to Desktop so the text file will be easy to find. Then initiate the following command:

dsquery group -name GroupName |dsget group -members |dsget user -display >memberlist.txt

Substitute for GroupName and put in the group you’re looking for. Hopefully this helps out.

Windows General | Tags: active directory, group, microsoft, query, security, windows

Windows General Category

Revisiting BlackBerry Desktop Software 6

Cannot Create Scheduled Task Server 2003 R2

Security Group Membership without Powershell

Login

Teknologist Sponsors

Archives

User:
Password:

User:
E-mail:

User:
E-mail: