There are many different solutions to installing Thin Clients ranging from using old PCs to dedicated hardware devices.

I found the best solution was a little known piece of software from www.wtware.com that will turn an old PC into a functional RDP client in less than 10 minutes. I have used this software to setup wired thin clients using older PCs a couple years ago however this time I needed to setup clients over a wireless network. I knew wtware supported wireless cards however I didn’t realize the limited selection of wireless card support. After working with the developer and doing some of his testing since he has limited available hardware for testing in Russia we were able to add drivers for our newer wireless cards from Belkin (F5D7000)  and Linksys (WMP54G) and this easily stays at the top of my list of easy, fast RDP client deployment.

Wtware is far and away the easiest, fastest RDP client for old PCs I could find.

Wtware features

• Boot from CD, Harddrive, floppy or PXE
• 30 second install to Harddrive.
• 15 second boot to remote login screen from hard drive
• Comes with Windows install/configuration tool.
• Comes with Windows syslog utility to capture log information for debugging.
• Simple edit of configuration files from built in editor to change settings.
• Support staff very attentive and willing to make some changes to enhance operation.

Note: The wireless does only support WEP encryption and the documentation says ‘ath0’ where it should say ‘wlan0’ so beware if it doesn’t work right away don’t be afraid to ask for some support.

Other solutions tried

During this process I was concerned due to the immediate needs of my client  that wtware.com might not be able to come through in the required time so I looked at several other similar applications available in the open source channel. Below is a brief review of some of the results.

Puppy Linux – After quite a bit of research I found http://pctsc.ponderworthy.org/ which gave a pretty straight-forward configuration to get up and running. This would have been my second choice since it was the second easiest to get setup.

Ubuntu – Knowing that Ubuntu has a good following I figured I could get this installed and possibly make this work. I downloaded the iso image and got it installed with minor complications. This could have worked but it was just too clunky for my needs however it was the best Linux desktop I’ve ever seen and actually selected a resolution much higher than I would have expected by default. Configuring this to go straight to a Remote Desktop client would have required very specialized skills I just don’t have. This would have been the third choice had the other two not worked out.

Cult – This actually looks to be a good possibility but I couldn’t really understand how to get it setup. It does have what looks to be a nice Chrome browser thin client implementation and some nice graphics that makes what it does do a pleasure to work with.

Thinstation – This was a disappointment to me. This may have actually worked however I couldn’t get an installable copy that would recognize the wired or wireless network card. They have this nice TS-O-Matic site that allows you to specify your requirements and then a iso image can be created. It claims to be a non-Linux admin dream but without the network card working easily I just couldn’t get it to work. Also the TS-O-Matic didn’t work in IE8 or Chrome, I could only get it to work in Firefox which was a bit of a pain. With a little work this option would be hard to beat with all the connection and hardware options that can be selected through a wizard type system builder.

AnywhereTS – This company is out of business however they have a pretty close option however it is really designed to work from a PXE boot arrangement that is a bit heavy on the Windows install (requires SQL Server lite).

Other References

• Many Small Linux Installs
• Ubuntu instructions for creating a thin client – unused but looked to be a good candidate.
• Where I found link to making Puppy Linux terminal server client operational.
• Brian Madden article on Converting PC’s into thin clients.

My wife’s computer (possibly my fault) was attacked by a new virus and boy was it a pain to resolve. I haven’t had a real virus for sometime for myself or my clients but this one reminded me of why you must be diligent in keeping your system up to date.It turns out my wife’s computer was attacked by the TDSS Trojan. The way I determined something was wrong was that every time I did a Google search and clicked on a search result it opened another browser and was directing my to some go.google.com/…. address which was never what I was looking for anyway. I then found that my AVG install was not operating correctly - The scan actually fails with an error I can’t remember. To make matters worse I found that I could not run many of the utilities to resolve these issues like Hijackthis.exe. The programs would run and show in the task manager but nothing on the screen. This would even occur in the Safe Mode.SolutionThe final solution was to use the Ultimate Boot CD  to boot the computer, go to the windows\system32 directory and remove a bunch of recent files starting with TDSS and then repeat in the windows\system32\drivers directory.Once I did this I was able to reboot the computer. Update the AVG and PC Doctor and run scans which cleaned up the rest of the problem. I have left out a bunch of details since finding this solution took several hours of work to get to a point where this was the actual issue.I thought this might help someone else with a similar problem and not create a whole wasted evening making a computer work. 

Ever had a difficult time managing your to do lists on paper? Try this little known feature in Word to help make your life more manageable. Be careful the volume is a bit loud. Let me know if you find this useful. This has been by far the most watch video on my personal site (www.brianmehl.com) that I thought I would also post it here for anyone that didn’t see it. 

I have a large database application that is ran on 25 client computers accessing a MS SQL database back end.

This works out pretty well however I have found a little incompatiablity between version 2002 and 2003 and/or the setup between my machine and the clients computer. 

The main issue seems to be with the speed in loading the forms with lots of controls.

We have one main table that contains all the orders and the related form contains 514 controls (yes a large number but it’s a client requirement as it is right now). I do most of my development on Access 2003 and then transfer the client’s computer which has Access 2002. 

The form becomes very slow to load when I transfer the database to the 2002 computer. I have found that if I open the form in the design mode, change the filter from Orderid=0 to OrderID=-1 and save the changes the system speed returns.

I have not seen any other mention of this problem and would be very interested in anyone that could shed some light on why this is the case and how it could be handled more appropriately. It becomes a real pain to put new programs online when you always have to open and modify a form to maintain the system performance.

Abstract

A plastics manufacturer uses a custom build vb6 application to track production. This is the only application that is needed on the plant floor and the computers need to be secure to prevent un-authorized access to other resources (Internet, games, etc).

Background

Previously this was done with Windows 98 computers locked down with profiles from the domain. Recently the manufacturer experienced 55 inches of water through their operations facility. Luckily the server and general office area is upstairs so none of that equipment was affected. However all 6 computers in the plant were destroyed.

Requirements

The one manufacturing program is needed for each production machine in the plant. A barcode/label printer is needed for each workstation. Also one seperate laser printer is needed. The Barcode printers used are EasyCoder PC4 printers, not exactly industrial strength but for $85/each the price was right and we can replace several printers before reaching the cost of an industrial printer.

The existing server and office workstations were operational so I didn’t want to change anything with the already working operation that might disrupt work with an unproven system. Spending my weekend rebuilting a server that was previously working is not my idea of a good time.

Hardware Solutions Reviewed

NComputing - $230/workstation. This would be a good solution and could have worked. NComputing claims it can run up to 30 workstations from one PC without comprimising performance. They do have the support to really make things happen and are moving from the educational market into the small business community. This is not a true Remote desktop setup. It was a little more expensive than I wanted to spend.

Axel Thin Client - $290/workstation. This would be a true Remote Desktop environment and the test unit I received would support VNC as well as RDP. I am not as sure about the support to get the printers to work on the remote clients.

Off Lease HP 530s desktop computers - $100/workstation. These were standard slimline HP business computers with 256mb, P4, 40gb harddrives, floppy, cd, LPT port. These proved to be the most cost effective solution and if the thin client idea did not work out then they could always be loaded with XP and used as full PCs.

Software

I was looking for a simple piece of software that would run a remote desktop application and provide the support for the local printer on the client. After several hours searching for the a software application to fit the bill I found AnywhereTS and WTware. Both had free versions to try out. The ideal scene was to load the clients from the network however due to the current setup for DHCP (as several more hours of research proved) this was not going to work.

Wtware.com I found on a Tuesday evening and tested it out and determined that it was going to work and was quite disappointed to find the domain expired Wednesday morning. After a bit more research I found that the company is out of Russia and also maintained wtware.ru so an email to support let them know that the domain had expired and they were back up a day later. I have also contacted them on a couple other support issues and they have been very responsive and their existing webpage has a lot of easy to understand examples to get the configurations going.

Downloading and installling Wtware is a simple operation. Once done your choice of media can be choosen to create the boot media. I chose a CD to get started to work ou the proof of concept. The screen was a little confusing when determining were the configuration file was stored for the thin client but once that was understood then things went well. The main thing to know here is that the best way for the system to work is to use the built in tftp server to hand out the configuration files for the clients, this is the ‘get configuration from network’ option. I was able to get this setup and log into an existing XP machine remotely without to much problem. After several more hours of tweaking and understanding the configuration files I found that I could get the system to automatically log on, run a specific application and use a local printer. Wtware was on the only site/software that I found which had the instructions for connecting up a a printer laid out on their site.

There are several pieces of software out there that support providing Terminal Services on XP computers. There is some question about compliance with Microsoft’s Licenses and one could spend a whole lot of time discussing the rights and wrongs however that is not the purpose of this article. The software that I chose was XPUnlimited.com. I have used this before briefly on a couple different projects but this would be the first real live ongoing setup. The cost is $145-$455 depending on licenses and domain requirements but makes the setup of Terminal Services quite easy.

After quite a bit of time researching profile setting to make sure the user on the client computer couldn’t shutdown the main computer and get to the run command the system is pretty tightly setup. The one drawback is that the existing setup doesn’t particularly have a easy override to log in and get to the standard desktop. In order to do this I must change the configuration file back on the server and reboot the client to get access but it sure makes it secure. The only time this will be needed anyway is to change any default settings with the printer or environment settings.

As a note when setting up these terminals each user needed to be unique so they could all be logged in at the same time and each user needed their own default printer and it needed to be set correctly to make sure the labels were set to tear off correctly. This just required the setup to not run the specialized application and I could setup the environment and the reset the configuration file and everything works great.

Future

The plan is to make a virtual machine that supports all of the above including the specialized application so the solution will not be dependant on the one computer upstairs. If something was wrong with that computer then the entire plant would be shutdown. By using a virtual computer that can be ran from different workstations they can just execute the virtual machine from another computer and have the plant back online again.

Due to the effectiveness of this solution and the need/desire to move computer operations to more of a data center environment for backup, support etc. I am considering offering this as a service where the actual system could be rented and all one would need is either a remote desktop or a thin client and they could be up and running.

I got a call from a client today about their website and email being down. Not a big deal I thought, call the hosting company, yell a little bit and boom up comes the website.

Oh was I wrong.

A little bit of background. The website was hosted at ipower.com until January of 2008 when it was transferred to easycgi.com.  Everything was working fine until a couple weeks ago when the site was ‘migrated’ to new servers. The website mysteriously went down and when chatting with India they said that the client needed to talk to ipower.com since the domain was hosted with them. This problem mysteriously fixed itself and the website was back up and running within a couple hours. Nothing more was thought of this besides some oddball website hosting company craziness.

Now today I call the hosting easycgi.com hosting company and they pull up this old transcript and tell us that the domain name is hosted with ipower.com and can’t be added to our easycgi.com account until it is resolved with ipower.com. Now I know that I may not know everything about web hosting but it is my understanding that you register a domain name and then point it to the hosting company’s name servers and then on the hosting side enter the domain name so that when the domain name is resolved it knows where to go. So why would different companies be a problem? Maybe easycgi.com and ipower.com are related? I ask the support tech, no he says they are not related. OK so I mark this up to oddball occurrence and it is clear from my conversation with easycgi.com that there is nothing else they can do until I call ipower.com and resolve the account issue.

So I call ipower.com and talk to a support technician. Of course I can’t answer the standard security questions since as far as the client and myself are concerned there is no account. They ask for the last 4 digits of the Credit card on the account. Of course we don’t know that either and all the accounts we think it might be are not the correct ones. Additionally the administrator account email address is the same as the domain that is not working so they can’t even send an email to the administrator to provide the correct account information. At this point I am about to climb through the phone and strangle someone since now they are making it impossible to resolve the issue. OK so the last possible way to resolve the account information is to fax a copy of the driver’s license of the account owner along with the billing address. Another call back to the client, he is out at a customer location working on installing another system so he can’t get me the copy until later in the evening. So everything is on hold. I go onto other clients and get back to this in the evening after the client sends me a copy of his driver’s license all the possible billing addresses, any possible credit card last 4 digits and just to be on the safe side he includes his shoe size (turns out to be the one piece of information I didn’t need).

I put all the information together in a word document and using my handy online fax service fax it to the ipower.com fax number and call tech support. After listening to “We are experiencing higher than average call volume, please stay on the line” for about 10 minutes I finally get to talk to a support tech. Just as a quick note when calling Ipower.com you have to press 2 for tech support and then another automated voice tells you to press 2 again to talk to tech support, like the first time they weren’t sure you wanted tech support, I should have been suspicious at this point. So the support tech asks me for the domain name and then as per the script the last 4 digits of the Credit card on file, of course I don’t have them and inform him that I have just faxed the required information to the company. The support tech informs me that “oh that goes to the security department and you will have to wait until they call you back.” Now I about come unglued. I have to wait for them to call me back since due to some problem with their system, all of a sudden, the hosting that had been working previously is now not working. Of course my friendly support techs hands are tied without the proper identification information he can’t give me ANY information about the account. ARGH!!!!

One last idea. Maybe I can get through on the live chat available 24×7. So I start the chat session and of course the same security questions come up. After telling them that they need to look for the fax they ask for what number it was faxed from. Since I used the online fax service I have no idea. I guess a likely number from the fax account but I am wrong. Now I re-fax using my handy all in one printer so I know the number that it is faxing from and after a few minutes my handy live chat person has located my fax without having to go through the security department that is apparently closed. Now we go through asking the security questions again complete with what is the account log-in name. If I knew these things I wouldn’t have had to send the fax! Now the support tech is starting to wise up and ask for some information about the easycgi.com hosting account which I do have. Now I’m starting to get the idea that there must be some relationship between easycgi.com and ipower.com so I asked my chat buddy. Sure enough they are sister companies. So I asked the next question “Are the accounts hosted on the same computers?” since this would start to explain the problem. According to my chat buddy they are not.

Since I have access to the easycgi.com account I can provide the security question answer and the last 4 digits of the credit card on file. This was the final piece that allowed my support tech to transfer the account back to the easycgi.com account. I don’t believe anything now unless I see it for myself so I check the easycgi.com account and sure enough the domain has been transferred back. Now the domain is back where it should be but the DNS information now has to propagate throughout the Internet before the website will become live. I reluctantly close the chat (not before copying the transcript) with support for my long wait for the domain name to propagate.

This has now cost the client over three hours of my support time which will cost more than a full year of hosting with both companies combined to resolve a problem that as my chat support says “Frankly I don’t know what has happened” and as far as I am concerned should have never happened in the first place. Unfortunately I don’t hold my breath for either of the sister companies to make this right and provide free hosting and the cost incurred by me to resolve this problem and frankly since there are several things about this case that can’t be explained as to why this has occurred, it makes me very wary of continuing to use either of these hosting companies.

I generally use another hosting company for all my hosting that I do and have had a few problems along the way but am always asking the question as to what occurred so I can understand if the problem is part of issues of incompetence or the fact that as much as we like to think that computers just always work there are problems that occur.

Update: 12/2/08 - Turns out the migration back to easycgi.com appears to have missed the database so now the shopping cart part of the site is not functional. More details as they develop.

I was asked recently what was needed to do basic video editing. Specifically take a bunch of video from a camera and remove some jumpy sections between scenes, add some music and burn to a CD for Christmas.

First you must get the video from onto the computer. The most standard way of doing this these days is through a Firewire cable. This is normally marked on the camera as a DV in/out port. The port looks like a small rectangle with one of the long sides pushed in so the cable can only be inserted one way. Most recent laptops already come equiped with a firewire port while most desktops will require a new card to be installed. A firewire card for a desktop will run about $35-$45 and can be installed pretty easily.

You will then need a cable to connect the computer to the camera. Most desktop connectors will require a larger 6 pin connector while the camera uses the smaller 4 pin connector. My advice on purchasing this equipment is to find a local computer guy that can send you to a good place to purchase cables and/or cards. They are available at Bestbuy and/or Circuit City but they can get a bit expensive.

Ok at this point you should have all the hardware you need to get the transfer going. If you connect it all up the computer should recognize that you have connected a new device (just like a usb device) and may ask you if you want to import the data. I would connect it all up at this point to see that you get some connectivity.

The next step will be software to do the editing. I have used Ulead VideoStudio 11 with great success. I found it to be the easiest software to get the results the quickest. You can download a trial copy before purchasing. Look around a little before purchasing, better deals can be found than on www.ulead.com however one stop shopping isn’t bad either.

When running the software you want acquire the video from the camera. This will take the same amount of time as the video is long to transfer the video but once you have it on the computer you can edit away. The real advantage to the ulead software is that it will automatically split the video into scenes so you can easily build a complete video without having to manually cut all the video apart.

Ok that is your quick overview of how to get starting editing video. I’ve left out a number of details but this nutshell should be enough to get you going.

I have found a program that will allow you to run a slide show on a secondary monitor (like from a laptop) and be able to update the pictures in the slideshow from the main monitor without disrupting the slideshow. This would be great for a party where there are a bunch of kids with parents watching.

The software is called: Able Slideshow from www.graphicregion.com

Video for purchase:

Video for Setup:

Video for Setup Live:

I would strongly suggest that you add a ‘Warwick Photography’ advertisment to come up once  a loop.

Several people have asked over the years to either move or backup their outlook file. For the general home user Outlook stores your information in a .pst file that is buried where Microsoft thinks it is important which does not make it easy for the general user to dig it out.

As an additional note a user can have multiple .pst files accessed at the same time so if one wants to keep business and personal information seperate then you can use File->Open to create a new .pst file.

Watch the video for more specifics for finding and moving you .pst file.

click play on the below video.

To make the video full screen, click on menu then on full screen in the upper right then menu again.