Ant's Blog

This week, we bit the bullet and installed Windows 7 on all 100 machines in the university library. Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to test everything works first. But where’s the fun in that?

So, 64-bit Windows 7 installed, we checked all was okay. Oops… x64 windows needs x64 printer drivers. That wasn’t a problem, and most printers were working within an hour or so. However, some of the HP printers that are in the library, particularly the HP colour laserjet 9500, proved more troublesome.
64-bit drivers added to the Server 2003 x86 server, the client machines would download the driver (we were using the HP Universal print driver PCL 6) but then fail with the following error when trying to connect to the printer:

Windows cannot connect to the printer.

Operation failed with error 0x0000007e.

So we tried PCL5. No luck. None of the HP drivers would work. Googling the error showed lots of people in the same position – with 64-bit Windows Vista or Windows 7 and a 32-bit print server. The only suggested workaround is adding the printer manually to a workstation as a local printer, and picking up the driver from a CD or download that way (not from the print server).

So… in comes procmon. Not long before the dreaded error message, spoolsv.exe looks in a registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider\Servers\[SERVERNAME]\Printers\{0000-guid-of-printer-00}\CopyFiles\BIDI\Module that tells it to go find (system32) spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\hpcpn081.dll. This doesn’t exist, hence the ‘module not found’ error 7e. The driver installation does, interestingly, copy a newer hpcpn104.dll into this directory. Getting warmer!

Copying hpcpn081.dll from \\PRINTSERVER\print$\x64\3 to c:\windows\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3… printer installs successfully! So, why is it copying the wrong dll? Well, a short dig through the server’s registry reveals a key similar to the one on the client, in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Printers\[PRINTERNAME]\CopyFiles\BIDI. The “Module” value points to spool\DRIVERS\W32X86\3\hpcpn104.dll. Change this to hpcpn081.dll and hey presto, all is fixed.

No having to deploy drivers to all machines or send the desktop teams round… just tweak this value for each of your stubborn printers!

Just go to your print server and change

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Printers\[PRINTERNAME]\CopyFiles\BIDI\Module

from hpcpn104.dll to hpcpn081.dll

AutoCAD has been an interesting beast to sequence to App-V so far. I’ve installed .NET 3.5 on the local machine before sequencing, as recommended on XP. I’ve monitored the installer and installed it to Q, but was having problems running AutoCAD prior to stopping monitoring.

Windows Installer 3 gives the error: “This action is only valid for products that are currently installed,” which is an interesting one to get when you’ve just installed the thing. Apparently, this is either due to shortcuts pointing to the wrong place, or reboot requests not having been processed yet. In my case, it was just the shortcut. Running acad.exe from the Q:\installation dir worked fine. If the installer tells you that you need to reboot, clicking ‘Stop Monitoring’ processes the reboot tasks and makes the program think you’ve rebooted. You can then Start Monitoring again and do a first run.

The next interesting error comes on testing the package. AutoCAD tries to use Windows Installer to repair itself and then says:

"This version of AutoCAD was not installed properly and some features may not run correctly. You should reinstall AutoCAD immediately to make sure all features are working properly."

That doesn’t look good to end users. A technet discussion here points to this problem being that Docs & Settings\Administrator\Local Settings is excluded from the sequencer monitoring list, and the contents can’t be replaced. I’m now trying again (6th install today) to see if deleting the exclusion helps!

For those that don’t know, App-V is a great way of rolling out applications to users without actually having to get the app to install on the local machine. Each app is run in a ‘sandbox’ and streamed down to the computer as needed. User settings and program changes are stored in Application Data so it seems like users have complete permission over the installation.

From Microsoft’s blurb:

I’ve managed to hand over my part in the Moodle-to-university-systems integration over to some real developers, which leaves me with the media server.
Kaltura (http://www.kaltura.org) do an open-source Community Edition, which looks promising.
First impressions are rubbish, because it’s only in beta and took about 10 attempts to install. Second impressions are brilliant – there’s a flash-based video editor, it has an admin console with moderation, tagging, transcoding profile, etc.
Just what we wanted. Even a moodle plugin. But that, in keeping with the rest of the offering, doesn’t work yet.

Upgraded the core router this morning… at half past 7 after driving in in the snow. The new image wouldn’t fit on the Cisco 6509′s bootflash and BT iNet told us we couldn’t upgrade, but the 91Mb image did fit on the CompactFlash sticking out the front of the switch and it seems happy to boot off it. I’m also happy you can issue the commands

Which means the thing won’t end up in ROMMon if the new image fails to boot.

So Moodle is installed on the new server. For those of you that are interested, here are the server specs:

Dell PowerEdge R610 – 4x quad-core 2.5GHz Xeon, 16Gb RAM Running Windows Server 2003 x64

3 x Mirrored 300Gb Disks (6 disks total)

- System disk partitioned to 100Gb for Windows & Progfiles, 200Gb for Logs

- Database stored on 2nd Disk (F)

- Htdocs (www root) stored on 3rd logical disk (G)

- Moodledata will be stored on our SAN (awaiting HBA for connection) Apache 2.2.13 (Win32) PHP 5.3.0 VC6 Thread-safe MySQL Server 5.1 x64 Moodle 1.9.5+ (Build 20090916) installed.

Apache runs as a separate user not ‘SYSTEM’.

Work is in progress setting up automatic importing of courses and roles. We will have a local database fed from our student records and timetabling systems and will use the External Database enrolments feature to enrol both students and staff on login, followed by a custom-made periodic script to move courses to separate logical categories.

The database will also have information on course timetabling, which we hope to present on the My Moodle page alongside course listings.

I’ve also made a small modification to the way Moodle handles photos, adding a couple of PHP functions in weblib.php which fetch a user’s picture from our systems and save it to moodle the first time a user’s picture is required. The rest of the avatar handling remains in-tact.

We’ll be setting up a Flash media server alongside the Moodle server for staff to use as a video repository. I hope to write a simple Moodle plugin / module to allow uploading of media to the server from within Moodle then we’ll have the Mediaplugins filter enabled for embedding.

Apart from the MyMoodle page and plugins (including a Talis plugin for reading lists), the other thing that will require work is the course template for automatically-created courses. We want students to have each course as a useful tool for interaction with fellow course members and for organising themselves, even if their tutor has not yet put any content on.

Here you will find the random rants of a system network administrator. Basically, the phone calls every 5 mins, Radio1 playing Christmas songs and general haphazardness of my daily work make it hard for me to keep track of what I was working on last. So, after a power cut last week I decided a good place might be a blog like this. This way not only I but even you, my dear reader, can keep up with the latest projects here at the University of Bolton