Fixing slow ringtones on Android phones

I've been playing around recently witht he new Android phones, and have been generally very impressed with them. They still have a few rough edges though, and my HTC Magic has been exhibiting some strange behaviour...

The first thing I do on any new phone, is copy over my ringtone. Honestly, if it doesn't use that ringtone I'll tune it out and never answer it. So I copied over my MP3 file and set it up as the default ringtone.

Imagine my surprise when I called myself, and the phone vibrated, the screen flashed, but the ringtone didn't fire up for a good 10 seconds, then after another 5 seconds it went to voicemail.

Initially I thought this was the fault of the MP3 being too big and was taking up too much memory, so I chopped it down to 236kb, and tried it again... with the same results.

I then fired up a file manager on the Android phone and saw that all the built in ringtones were in OGG format.

On a hunch, I fired up Mediacoder and converted my MP3 to OGG Vorbis using the settings below:

Set the Encoder to Vorbis

Set the Container to OGG

Once I had generated the OGG file, I copied it onto m sdcard, and set it as the default ringtone, and now my phone flashes, vibrates and rings all at the same time :)

I hope this helps you out if you are having the same problem. If so, please show your thanks by clicking on one of the adverts on this page... you don't have to buy anything ;-)

Windows 2008 Remote Desktop Gateway Woes (but finally fixed)

Windows 2008 Remote Desktop gateway is a great idea.

Instead of opening up multiple machines on your firewall to allow users to remote dektop in, RD gateway allows you to open up a single IP which then tunnels through to RDP servers inside of your network.

RDG uses a combnation of RDRAP and RDCAP to verify who is allowed to use the gateway, and what servers they can connect to.

I had a situation were we needed to grant business Partners access to one of our servers bu I didn't want them to be able to access any other network resources.

So I created a new user and put him in his own group. I also clicked the "Logon to" button and gave him access to the targer server: TARGET

Then I granted that group access to TARGET with RDRAP.

I also added the user into the "Administrators" group on the TARGET machine.

But...

Something didn't work...

I could connect using RDP in the office with that username to the TARGET machine but not through the RD gateway. I kept getting logon error messages and asked to re enter the password.

After much headscratching it was found that it was the "Logon to" setting that was causing the problem.

RD Gateway will not work with a user with "Logon to" set. You can either delete the setting OR add in the client machine name.. yes.. really... the name of the PC you wil be running the Remote Desktop Client from!It sounds crazy, but it definitely works, so hopefully you don't have to go throught the same hoops I did to work it out.

Thanks go to the guys on the Windows Server Forums for helping me work this out.

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Exchange slow to add new users to GAL

Exchange was very slow to dsiplay new users... when I say very slow, I mean several hours wait.

I'd put it off for a while as there weren't many people joining, but eventually I realised it was something I was going to have to fix.

Taking a look at the Event Viewer gave no clues, so I headed onto the properites on the server just to see if I could spot anything obviously wrong.

Opening up the Directory Access tab, I noticed that none of my Domain Controllers (or indeed Global Catalogs) were listed.

Hmmm, something is up...

First I tried to manually add my DCs, but I thought better about this.. there must be a reason why this is behaving this way.

Then I got a suggestion that I should take a look at the AD to check if the DomainPrep changes were applied. I thought this was ridiculous as Exchange has been running perfectly for the last five years in this environment... heck I've even DomainPrep'd it for Exchange 2007... ah!

After running the Policytest tool found on the Exchange 2003 install disk, I got the following results.

DC = "DC1"
In site = "USA"
!!! Right NOT found !!! 

DC = "DC2"
In site = "USA"
!!! Right NOT found !!! 

DC = "DC4"
In site = "USA"
!!! Right NOT found !!!

Great.. now I know what's wrong.. one swift reinstallation of the DomainPrep later ( X:\setup\i386\setup /DomainPrep) and everything is cool.

I ran the Policytest tool again and watched as the schema changes were replicated to my three DCs, then opened up properties on the Exchange Server node and saw that it was now using the local servers.

Phew!

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Fix Windows 7 Media Player Internet Streaming

I'm not going to go into the details of how you set up Windows Media Player in Windows 7, it's pretty self explanatory, streaming across PC's on the same network works well once you have a homegroup set up... until you get to the point when you want to stream across the Internet.

I was able to stream when in the same network, my office PC was in the same homegroup as the one at home and I'd set up my authorised users but still it wouldn't work...

After much head scratching I decided to give Microsoft a call as they must have experienced the issue before.

Initlaly they said it wouldn't work because my laptop (the machine in the office which was the client) would not be able to play music from my home PC as it was a member of a domain.

After reading the message out loud to the engineed a few times he accepted that it did indeed state that a Domain PC can't be the media server, but can be the Client.

Then we had the confusion because my home PC was Windows 7 Home Premium and the work one was Windows 7 Professional.

Finally I get escallated to someone else who then asked me the all important question:

Have you configured your firewall?

Apparently the firewall should be configured automatically by UPnP, but as a lot of routers are unreliable with UPnP it's a good idea to enter the port forwarding directly.

If you click on Stream - Allow Internet access to home media... you get the option to Diagnose Connections.

You need to set your home router up to forward TCP/44687 to TCP/10245 to your home PC.

I hope this helps you out.. if it does, please click on the ads on this page to show your appreciation.

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).

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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.