Microsoft Fixit: CD and DVD Drives not working. Conversation with HP Tech Support

A friend of mine we’ll call Bob had this conversation the other day and kindly saved the chat session thinking I could use it on my blog. I can 🙂

Bob : DVD/CD ROM drives stopped working.
[An agent will be with you shortly.]
[You are now chatting with Charles .]
Charles : Welcome to HP Total Care for HP desktop computer. My name is Charles and I will be your chat assistant for today. Please give me a few moments to review your issue description details. NOTE: For security reasons, PLEASE DO NOT send credit card information via chat.
Charles : Hello Bob !
Bob : Hello
Bob : Can you assist me with my above problem?
Charles : Yes Bob. I will be happy to assist with your concern.
Charles : As I understand the issue, the Cd\DVD drive has stopped working. Am I correct?
Bob : That is correct
Bob : I have an HP Pavilion a1400e
Charles : Are you chatting from the same PC?
Bob : yes
Charles : May I have the product and the serial number of the system? This information will help me pull up the relevant details needed to troubleshoot the issue. If you are chatting from the same system, the best and fastest way to pull up this information would be via pressing the CTRL + ALT + S keys at the same time.
Bob : Product number is XXXXXXX-XXX
Bob : serial number is XXXXXXXXXX
Charles : Thank you for the information.
Charles : Bob, I request you to kindly confirm your email address. The Email Address is confirmed to send follow up correspondence incase the chat is disconnected midway while troubleshooting.
Bob : some_email@somewhere.com
Charles : Thank you for your cooperation.
Charles : Kindly make a note of the Support Request Number (Activity id)- 0000000 so that in case this chat gets disconnected, you will be able to call us back to help you with issue you are facing.
Bob : noted
Charles : Bob, May I know since when have you been facing this issue?
Bob : 1 hour ago
Bob : that is when I noticed it at least
Charles : Okay.
Charles : Let’s perform some troubleshooting steps together to resolve this issue quickly.
Charles : Click on start, open Run.
Bob : ready
Charles : Type: devmgmt.msc in the open field, hit enter.
Charles : It opens the Device Manager window.
Bob : open
Charles : Click on + sign next to CD\DVD drive.
Bob : it is already open
Bob : 2 ! marks
Charles : Let me know what device is listed under it?
Bob : ASUS DVD-E616A2
Bob : HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-H21N
Charles : Okay. I have got it.
Charles : Right click on ASUS DVD-E616A2, click on Uninstall.

Bob : k
Bob : done
Charles : Then Right click on HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-H21N, click on Uninstall.

Bob : done
Charles : Now minimize Device Manager.
Bob : done
Charles : Now we are going to download and run Microsoft Fixit application.
Bob : okay
Charles : It will remove the registry files that caused this issue.
Charles : http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9645377
Charles : The above-mentioned URL will take you to a non-HP Web site. HP does not control and is not responsible for information outside of the HP Web site.
Bob : installing
Bob : now what?
Bob : it says it has been processed
Bob : and it has 3 buttons
Bob : tell us what you think
Bob : click to get online help now
Charles : That’s great!
Charles : Close that window.
Bob : click to read more about microsoft fix it
Charles : Open Device Manager.
Bob : it asked to restart
Bob : and I said no
Bob : open
Charles : Click on any device from the list.
Bob : okay
Charles : Click on Action menu, click on “Scan for hardware changes”.
Bob : scanning
Bob : Charles
Bob : How in the world did the problem occur?
Bob : Everything is working now
Bob : but how did it occur
Bob : you are a genius!
Charles : Bob, its a normal issue.
Bob : I have had this for 4 years
Bob : never has occures
Bob : occured*
Charles : It occurs due to some bad corrupted registries.
Charles : Thank you Bob.
Charles : I suggest you to install a good antivirus software on your PC.
Bob : I will do
Bob : thank you again Charles
Charles : Bob, Is there anything else I can assist you with?
Bob : Not at this time
Bob : thank you!
Charles : It feels good and boost our confidence working with such a well-informed user. Once again, thank you for your comments and the opportunity to serve you.
Charles : It’s been a pleasure assisting you today.
Charles : Thank you for contacting HP Total Care Real-Time chat support. If you need further assistance, please contact us again at:

http://www.hp.com/support/chat

Chat support is available 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week.
For information on keeping your HP and Compaq products up and running, please visit our Web site at:

http://www.hp.com/go/totalcare

Note: You can save this chat session after clicking on End. You will get the option Save.

MySQL Server Has Gone Away

I was writing a PERL script that would determine the location of several virtual machine which would then update the location of those virtual machines in the database, when I came across an interesting error

MySQL server has gone away

My first thought was “excuse me?” because I was pretty certain that my MySQL server was as active as could be. I then realized after some Googling that my connection was timing out. I found I was opening the MySQL connection early in my PERL script where I didn’t need it. Actually I didn’t need to open the connection until the end of the script. Once I did this everything came together smoothly.

How to send emails via PHP on your web server tutorial.

Assuming you have a properly installed web server with PHP also properly installed, I want to explain very simply how to set up PHP to send an email. It is really a simple process how to set up PHP for this so this post will be short.

I have installed xampp on my local machine by which PHP is included, but the process is the same.

Open your php.ini file which, if you have xampp installed, is located in the C:\\xampp\php\ directory. Search for SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) in the file. For me I start seeing my mail server information around line 1099. the SMTP and smtp_port are the two variables of interest. To find this information we use our good friend google.

public smtp servers

Search google for public email servers that you can use. Sometimes, but not always they will be in the format of smtp.somehost.com. The port is often port 25, but may be otherwised specified. When you find a public email server to use. Change that information. Makes sure it is not commented out (remove the ; at the beginning of the line if any). Save the file and restart the web server (or xampp if that is what you are using) so it can read the new configuration file. Now you can go Google for the code on how to send an email in PHP. Here is an example:

<?php
$to = “recipient@example.com”;
$subject = “Hi!”;
$body = “Hi,\n\nHow are you?”;
if (mail($to, $subject, $body)) {
echo(”

Message successfully sent!

“);
} else {
echo(”

Message delivery failed…

“);
}
?>
I got this from here

You can search elsewhere from this Google search or you can do your own search.

how to send an email in php

Determine Locations Of Virtual Machines

My boss approached me with a project to build a PERL script that would run on all of our VMware hosts to determine the location of each virtual machine (Yes, documentation has been terrible, hence me having to perform this task). Simple task right? Well after a couple hours of search there really wasn’t an obvious way for us to determine the guest server’s name as DNS knows it, because whoever installed the virtual machines, named them something different than what the network sees it as. Finally we figured out how we could go about this. No I agree it isn’t clean, but it works.

First we used

vmware-cmd -l

This command lists the configuration files for each virtual machine. Inside each configuration file is the virtual MAC address for the associated guest. We thought we might be able to determine the IP address from the MAC address, but alas we again were stumped.

I discovered the command

vmnet-sniffer

which when used with the -e flag which requires the guest NIC (/dev/vmnet1, /dev/vmnet2, etc.) as a parameter to that flag, acts like tcpdump and dumps all the traffic from that guest. Using this method we managed to get the IP address because this tcpdump-like command also prints the MAC address with its associated IP address. The command actually looks something like this in its full form when used:

vmnet-sniffer -e /dev/vmnet0

Now that we had an IP address we were able to use nslookup

nslookup [IP Address]

to determine the host name as DNS sees it. With this information we were able to update the database for each virtual machine with the name of the server that it is located on. It doesn’t help that some of the MAC addresses entered in the database were wrong themselves.

I’m sure there is probably some much easier way to do this, but I’m sure some of you might appreciate a good hack like this, so that is our method.

How to plug data from PERL regular expressions into a name value pair array.

So I just started working as an assistant Linux administrator at school. My first job was to write a Nagios script which ran a command to retrieve the state of several nodes in a batch cluster that we have. the data looks something like this.

host1
state = free
np = 3
ntype = cluster
status = some long string with timestamps and other information

host2
state = job-exclusive
np = 3
ntype = cluster
jobs = 0/3558.torque, 1/3558.torque, 2/3558.torque
status = some long string with timestamps and other information

host3
state = down
np = 3
ntype = cluster


So as you can see there are 3 hosts listed with 3 states. We have 16 hosts in our cluster. My PERL script parses this information retrieving the host name and the state and sticking it easily accessible name value pairs. Here is the script I used in PERL to parse the information.


$_ = $pbsnodesData;
my %hostAndState= /(\w*)\s+state = (\S*)/g;


The variable, $pbsnodesData, holds the information as shown above which was returned from a command executed in the shell. And directly above is the regular expression I used to load the host and the state of that host into a name value pair array (hash).

Hope that helps someone.

How to Build a WordPress Theme Tutorial

Found this tutorial while learning to build a WordPress Theme from wpdesigner.com. This tutorial skips no steps and gives you everything. If you don’t know programming, don’t worry it’s all spelled out for you.

Learn how to build a WordPress Theme

This tutorial is great for a variety of reasons. If you are new to design, each step is elaborated upon. There are several lessons that you go through to get to the end product, but they’re quick and simple and divide up the goal into smaller pieces that you can work with. These are the kind of tutorials that I look for. Long yes, but simple and elaborated upon.

Web Development 101 (Installing XAMPP)

When I was younger I wanted to learn how to build web sites. I found rather quickly that I couldn’t just install PHP and run it in my browser and I couldn’t understand why. Tutorials on how to set up web servers and databases didn’t make any sense to me and I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it and gave up. I hope here I can help anyone who knows as little about computers as I did at that time, to get started.

Simple concepts:

1. If I mention a word you don’t understand I give you two references: http://wikipedia.org/, and Google. In particular you can go to google and type “define: term” and it will give you a list of definitions from several sources which you can look at.

2. There are many various protocols and languages used in web development which fall under two general categories: client-side and server-side.

• Client-side: Languages that fall under this category include XHTML (HTML), CSS, Javascript, and various Javascript frameworks (use item 1 to find out what a framework is). These can all be written in a text editor like notepad and then opened up in your favorite web browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc).
• Server-side: Languages in this category can not be run in the browser like client-side languages. They are run in what is called a web server (Apache, Tomcat, IIS). The web server performs all the function and spits back out data in the form of HTML which can be presented in the web browser. This link illustrates this concept http://www.mathplayground.com/FunctionMachine.html. You decide what is processed (your PHP code for example), the web server does the computing, and spits back a result (in some combination of client-side languages).

3. So what we  need is a web server. We’re going to install everything though in one fell swoop. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. Go here and download xampp. This package contains your Apache Server, you MySQL database, PHP, and Perl with all the proper configurations. I have mine installed right under the C:\ directory. The installation is simple enough. Just download the installer and follow the directions. There are versions of xampp available for the major operating systems. You don’t have to, but for ease of access, check the box that asks for a xampp control panel desktop icon. Once you are through with the installation, open up the xampp control panel and start the apache server. Open up your browser and plug this link into it. http://localhost/xampp/splash.php. You should see a page that has the xampp logo

xampp logo

with various language options. If you see this then you have successfully installed your web server on your computer. Wherever you installed xampp your working directory is %install directory%\xamp\htdocs\ . Anything place under htdocs will be available to your web server. For example, if I make a page called blah.html and put it in the htdocs folder, I can open up my browser and type http://localhost/blah.html .

Congratulations you’ve learned a few simple concepts and now have a web server set up. Now you can start making some PHP pages and place them in your htdocs directory and view them. Don’t forget to start up that apache server!