Tech From the Trenches

This one will probably get me shot, but here goes.  I am by birth a PC users. Not really, because I wish the Commodore 64 would have lasted longer.  Anyway. Almost all the way through my 20 something years of computing. I have worked on/built/managed/etc PC’s. Windows 3.1 to Windows 7/Server 2008. To this day, I still [...]

For those that have no idea what ping is, it is a network command run from a DOS/Linux prompt to test to see if a server or address is responding. Example: ping techfromthetrenches.com In DOS the sends out 4 requests and expects 4 requests back.   On linux flavors the requests continue until stopped.  So what [...]

Since working with Blackboard a far back as CourseInfo 4.  They have always had issues with log rotation and drive clean-up routines. Through the years it had gotten better. However they still require a couple of external scripts and programs to do the work.  For years, I have used David Carter-Tod’s vbs script to clean [...]

This one is short and sweet.  If you drill down through your X:\blackboard\content\vi\bb_bb60\courses\1 you will be amazed how many empty directories there are.  Thousands,  they exist becuase these folders were created when content was added but never gets deleted when the content is removed.  This is a long standing debate of the impact of empty [...]

Woke this morning with another miserable headache.  They seem to happen more often, had them as a kid and the only solution was a wet facecloth, a quite darkroom, and Motrin.  Ok, so I actually got up and headed to the office anyway and my wife phoned that the garage door would not rise.  I [...]

Overview The Blackboard Learning System includes a tool for handling the import/export and archive/restore of a number of Courses at once. The tool will process a batch file that includes the Course ID and the name. Creating a batch file A batch file used with the batch_ImportExport tool only has two values in each row, [...]

Ok, started the day with a migraine and it was compounded by a lingering Blackboard issue. For several weeks  we have been getting “Service Unavailable messages”  all related to the Jakarta Service.   This morning after once again getting this error and users were completely unable to access our system, I decided to modify some of [...]

If you have access to Windows via reboot or Safe-Mode you can turn off the automatic reboot on system failure. 1. Go to Start -> Control Panel -> System 2. Go to Advanced 3. Under the Startup and Recovery section, click Settings… 4. Under System Failure un-check “Automatically restart” If you do not have access [...]

As most of my blogs entries start, I have this family member with a machine. Well in this particular case.  They were getting a hal.dll could not be found and the system would not boot.  This will not be for the faint of heart.  However, I am hopeful it will help someone else. There are [...]

I am often asked to clean a machine after infection occurs. This is more often very tedious and very technical (ie. registry changes, forced file removal etc.) I am not going to go into the the removal per se.  I am however, going to share some tools that might help elimininate infections before they occur. [...]