I’m working on the last set of patches from Microsoft for the labs, and they are beginning to annoy me.

The one for IE6sp1 works just as advertised, with the standard unattended commandline:IE6.0sp1-KB833989-x86-ENU.exe /q:a /r:n.

The one for the DotNet Framework 1.1, isn’t quite so straight-forward. The command line options work as advertised. (I’m using NDP1.1sp1-KB867460-X86.exe /Q /L:c:dotnetsp1.txt). But after installing, the version numbers don’t match up with the version checking method listed in KB318785. %WINDOWS%System32URTTempmscoree.dll does NOT get updated, while the version in %WINDOWS%System32 does.

Arrgh. Now on to the Office 2003 patching, from an Admin install share. This should be fun. At least there are reccommended practices from Microsoft on this stuff.

This is the earliest we’ve ever opened the labs and, knock on wood, this is the smoothest one I’ve had in some time. Very few people are actually here,

The only bump in the road was easily solved, once I thought it through: URHNet users were getting told that our print servers didn’t have drivers for the printers we were sharing. This is not true. Since they are coming in as the Guest account, I figured something had to be up with permissions. The share (servernameprint$) had Read permissions for Everyone, so that’s good. The underlying file permissions, on the other hand, were missing Everyone. So, I re-added that, and all is now good.

And, had I looked in the Microsoft Knowledgebase first, I would have found article 271901.

I’ve been busy rebuilding lab machines, hammering the network, as this graph shows:
That’s the gig interface on a Dell 2650 server, working hard. And those spikes correspond to about 120 workstation installs across 5 sites. Graduate sites, that have to be scheduled, start tommorrow morning.
And we get to find out how people are going to react to losing the (free) dot printers. With cheaper laser printing, more lasers and color lasers available in 3 sites, hopefully it will go well.

We’ve had many requests for better international language support in our labs, especially in our graduate halls. Many years ago, I tried and miserably failed to get something going with Windows NT 4.0 and Internet Explorer 5.01. In the last couple years, we’ve gotten international fonts working in Internet Explorer 6 sp1 (and Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox) without too much trouble.

This year, we’ve made some pretty good headway using some good documentation from Microsoft. While some of it is straight forward, figuring out which of the many locale ids/Input Locale combinations correspond to what is not. For example 0804:00000804 is Chinese_PRC with the US keyboard, while 0804:e00e0804 is Chinese_PRC with the PinYin IME. Thanks to this page, I know I need the second one to be able to enter Chinese characters. Chinese_Hong Kong was similar, with the first being a US keyboard and 0404:e0080404 being the one with the IME. Japanese and Korean both install IMEs without anything special.

As for AutoCAD 2005 that I mentioned earlier, it seems to be working pretty well, but the multiple install server support is still untested.

Next up is testing somewhere besides our limited test machines.

I spent most of the day today trying to get all the new hardware in the new workstations for the student sites working with my antiquated OEM style Windows 2000 setup. This is almost always something between visiting the dentist and trying to buy a new car: it either all works very quickly or you spend hours googling for tidbits of knowledge. But this year, I had a bit of an advantage: we ordered our Dells with Windows 2000 preinstalled, so I knew we’d have working drivers there.
But, I went racing off towards ‘cutting edge’ drivers from all the vendors, blindly erasing the Dell install on my test machine and stuffing on ours, assuming it would all just work. Ha, was I wrong, just like putting the case back on before you boot up your freshly built computer. Using the most recent NVidia Unified Drivers (56.something), GUI-mode setup locks up at the end of the Detecting Devices progress bar. Something isn’t right there. So, after a few more tweaks and adjustments of what I had downloaded, I gave up and went to dig through a Dell that hadn’t been formatted. I found a much older version of the drivers, from December 2003. Once I copied that set of drivers over to my $OEM$ directory structure, all was much better. Now I get to move full steam ahead into updating applications and other fun.