Windows 7 and the Technisat Skystar HD Satellite card - SOLVED

With my fresh new install of Windows 7 I was very keen on finally seeing Media Centre working with satellite.

Once I had installed the latest drivers from Technisat everything looked fine, MCE recognised that I had a satellite card installed.

However, the problems started when the automatic scan for channels failed.

Then when I opted to manually configure the card I get a very nice interface to choose the satellite and type of LNB.

Then I chose to do a full transponder scan which should scan all the wavelengths on the satellite and add the TV channels it finds there.

Imagine my consternation when I find out that no channels were found.

I tried running the Technisat TV Center appliaction and it had no problems displaying channels.

Oh well I thought, it's probably a driver problem.. after all it is a brand new Operating System.. so I dropped Technisat a polite line asking when they would be releasing new drivers.. and this is what I got back:

Thank you for your inquiry and your interest in our products.

Technisat is always ready to offer its products on the latest hardware and software development.

We do not offer drivers for Microsoft's Media Centre Edition.
The reason is that with the built-in Microsoft driver architecture. This is inadequate for digital TV cards, which would create too many restrictions. For example, in the BDA architecture there is no support for DiSEqC.

The software that is offered by us, offers and contains even more additional functional elements than the Media Centre in Windows 7.
We have therefore renounces adapting our driver to the Windows 7 Media Center.

Oh briliant.. so they are not going to support Media Centre which is going to be on virtually every copy of Windows 7 sold in the next few years because they don't like the driver model... well tough! The arguments my be valid, but you cannot deny the fact that you are throwing away a very large sector of the market.. it's business suicide!

MCE - whilst not perfect is the first point of call for non-geek users who are thinking of using their PC in the living room, it's user interface is slick and the remote control is a joy to use with it even powering up your PC at the touch of a button... not to mention the streaming capabilities.

So in short... you can't use the Skystar HD in Windows 7 MCE.. sorry... it sucks... go out and vote with your wallets and make Technisat understand that the customer should come first.

GREAT NEWS!
You can use the Technotrend drivers instead of the Technisat ones and they work perfectly in Windows 7 and MCE.

You can download them here
Just go into device manager and update the driver and point it at these ones and choose TT-budget S2-3200 (BDA).

If this tip proves useful, please show your appreciation by clicking on one of the ads on the page.. no need to buy anything ;-) 

Running Nokia Software Updater on Windows 7 x64

I have been running Nokia PC Suite and NSU on my Windows 7 x64 PC with no problems for a while... but now Win7's been officially released, NSU tried to run an upgrade when I ran it, then told me that it doesn't support the operating system!

Looks like someone is covering their backside until they get a copy of Win7 to play with :-)

Anyway, the good news is that it DOES work on Windows 7 32 and 64 bit.

1. Forget about the automatic updater...
2. Download the updater file direct from the nokia site
3. Right click the file you downloaded and select Properties
   
4. Select the compatibilty tab and choose Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)
5. Click OK
6. Right click on the NokiaSoftwareUpdaterSetup_en.exe file again and select Run as Administrator
   
7. Install as usual and away you go!

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Setting up your F5 to use syslog on Version 10 (v10)

Really quick answer to a question I seem to keep looking for....

Q: How do I set up my F5 Load Balancer to output syslog entries to a remote server (e.g. splunk)

A: If you have and LTM v10+

1. Log in to the command line.
2. To add a single remote syslog server, type a command similar to the following:
   bigpipe syslog remote server { {host }}
   e.g. bigpipe syslog remote server {monitor.company.com {host 192.168.99.99}}
   
   To add multiple remote syslog servers, type a command similar to the following:
   bigpipe syslog remote server { {host } {host } ... }
   bigpipe syslog remote server {monitor.company.com {host 192.168.99.99} watcher.company.com {host 192.168.99.88} ... }
   
3. To save the configuration, type the following command:
   bigpipe save

 More information can be found at https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/5000/500/sol5527.html

 where there is more information about different software versions.

Backup Exchange Server to a remote site for free

Over the years I've puzzled over the best way to back up my Exchange server.

I have always used ArcServe or Backup Exec to archive to tape, but I'm forgetful (or just plain lazy) and don't take the tapes off site. So, if the office burns down, the tapes would be lost (or at best have a three storey building sat on top of them in the fire safe).

Ideally I'd like to do off site backup, but I have a database of over 100Gb! It wouldn't want to copy that over the net every single day.

The requirements:

    * Keep existing daily ArcServe tape backup working
    * Copy database(s) to remote location
    * Ability to restore DB without custom media (ArcServe is a 2Gb download!)
    * Cheap.... very cheap!

The Solution:


Usually the best way to minimise the data being transferred would be to do an incremental backup. This type of backup only copies changes since the last Full backup. However, I do a full backup (with ArcServe) every day, so an incremental backup would only have the few emailsthat came in between the daily full backup and the incremental backup... no use to me if the office burned down.


I decided to get NTBackup to run a daily full backup to a directory on a remote server in the same site. This gives me the facility of a near line backup should I need to do a quick restore if things go wrong. I had an old Dell PowerEdge 750 knocking around, so I stuck a couple of 1.5TB disks in it and now I have loads of space!


I also decided to split my Exchange 2003 database into multiple (in my case: four) Storage Groups. This is always a good move as it should reduce the outage period if you have to restore a backup. It also allows me to schedule a backup for one quarter of my data at a time, allowing me to be more flexible.



So now I have the following:

ArcServe - Daily full backup to tape

NTBackup
    * Storage Group 1 - Daily full backup to in office Server - 25Gb
    * Storage Group 2 - Daily full backup to in office Server - 25Gb
    * Storage Group 3 - Daily full backup to in office Server - 25Gb
    * Storage Group 4 - Daily full backup to in office Server - 25Gb

Now all I have to do is get those files off onto a remote storage...

Let me introduce you to rsync. It is a protocol (and application) designed to help with synchronising files over a network with the minimal amount of data transfer. Instead of just looking to see if a single fie has changed, it'll actually look at the data in that file to see what has changed.

This is ideal for an Exchange backup where the majority of the data will not have changed, and only new emails need to be copied over.


It works on a client/server model, so you have a copy of the rsync application of both ends of the connection.

Being a Windows kinda guy, I then got myself a copy of Deltacopy and installed it on the office backup machine and my home PC.

Then I made sure I had configured my home firewall to allow through port TCP/873 and to direct it at my PC... don't forget  to open up your windows firewall too if you have it turned on.


Then I scheduled four DeltaCopy jobs to take each of the Storage Group backups over onto the Home PC. The initial backup takes an age (25Gb each SG), but after that it's much quicker. You can configure DeltaCopy to send a status email after each job.


You will receive a message like:

Profile SG1 ran successfully.
Execution log
-------------
sending incremental file list
./
SG1.bkf
sent 1460800130 bytes  received 1130102 bytes  161138.63 bytes/sec total size is 18515066880  speedup is 12.66 Profile 'SG1' executed in 4753285 milliseconds. It ran successfully.


So you can see that the file was 18.5Gb, the remote PC received 1.1Gb and sent out 161Mb. This is a massive saving as shown by the "speedup" value of 12 (this means that it only transferred 1/12th of the data you would normally need).

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Latitude E Series secondary hard disk

If you have a Dell Latitude E Series laptop you'll probably be very happy with the device (especially if you get the backlit keyboard which allows you to pretend to switch between typing and watching the TV like I do).

As an IT professional though, you may well have come across the problem of re-imaging these systems, because you need somewhere to store your Ghost or True Image files. Sure you can store them on the network, but a secondary storage device is so much quicker (and if your company is anything like mine, the first you hear about a new joiner is when someone stands at your desk and introduces themselves).

...and so to the Latitude E.

Dell can supply a Media Module to give you a second SATA hard disk, but it's external only and only allows you to use a 1.8" disk. This means that the maximum storage space is compromised and the performance is very poor.

But we do have another option...

Lenovo make a module for their laptops called the ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter II (Part Number 43R1980) which replaces the removable drive bay with a 2.5" HDD.

See those two plastic plugs on the back? You don't need 'em. Chop them off with a sharp knife...

 

Then fit in your hard disk... in this case a very nice 500Gb one...

... and slap it in the drive bay.

 

It might be a bit tight, but it does the job and doesn't look wrong if you leave it in there all the time.

Windows 7 64 bit and Adobe Acrobat preview bug

So you've just installed Windows 7, and decided to go 64 bit because you think one day you'll need more than 4Gb of RAM. Then you fire up Outlook, click on a PDF attachment and you get:

This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer:
PDF Preview Handler for Vista
To open this file in its own program, double-click it.


What!!! How can my nice shiny new Operating System not understand a PDF!

Anyway, it's an Adobe bug and there are a couple of ways to fix it.. because it's been around for a couple of years and Adobe can't be bothered to!

First you could ditch Adobe as the previewer and use Foxit previewer crafted by Tim Heuer (it's free).
Alternatively you could try this registry fix by Leo Davidson at http://www.pretentiousname.com

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