John M McD's Blog

I have a Hawking HNAS1 with Vista Home Premium and could not map a drive to it from Vista to save my life. The Hawking Technology web site doesn't mention any support for Vista. I figured that the HNAS1 used Samba under the hood, so I googled for hints on Samba and Vista. I found some instructions for running secpol.msc to change the LanMan authentication level, but Vista Home Premium doesn't have secpol.msc. Rather than finding a computer with secpol.msc installed and using a registry sniffer to see what it was doing, I keep on googling until I found the link above with this gem:

If you're running a version of Vista that cannot use secpol.msc, you can edit the registry instead. Just change the value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LMCompatibilityLevel from a 3 to a 1.

I ran regedit, made the changes, rebooted, and could then map the drive using the net use command. My only issues are that net view \\myserver still gives a "System error 1728 has occurred. A remote procedure call (RPC) protocol error occurred" error. And of course, since Vista is made by Microsoft, the /persistent:yes flag for net use doesn't save the password, so I have to type the password again after I reboot. But at least I can map drives to network shares!

Labels: HNAS1 Hawking Vista

Neither the WebLogic appserver used by itself or the WebLogic appserver used with the plugin for IIS return a Content-Length header when the JSP page generates content that is more than 12215 bytes. This is fine as long as they return a Connection header (with value of either Keep-Alive or close). The appserver used by itself generates a Connection header all the time; if the content is 12215 bytes or fewer in length, the value of the header is Keep-Alive; if it's 12216 bytes or higher, the value is close. So far, so good. However, the plugin never generates the Connection header (or, looked at another way, never passes it along to the browser). So when the content is longer than 12215 bytes, the browser can't tell how long the content is supposed to be. See the list of ways to determine the length of content at http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec4.html#sec4.4 ; since none of the ways apply, there's no way to determine the length of the content.

My adventures learning Unix continue. This time, I was trying to logon to an AIX system using a non-root LDAP account. I got errors to the effect of"3004-09 Failed running login shell." I was able to logon as root, but I could not change the shell of the non-root user with the chsh command. I'd get "Invalid entry" or somesuch. A Google search turned up this instruction on how to add a valid logon shell:

If you want to use bash as a login shell, you first have to add it to the
list of shells in /etc/security/login.cfg. Then use `chsh` to change your
individual setting.

I also created a symlink from /bin/bsh to /bin/bash

Labels: 3004-009, AIX, chsh

The Google home page is probably the most valuable web real estate. One would think that Google would want to make sure that every service accessible via the Google home page is working 24/7/365. As of this writing, though, this is not the case. The "Business Solutions" link on the Google home page shows nothing in the browser window. I've tried using Firefox 1.5.0.7 and IE 6.0 with all the latest fixes.

-> Update 2/13/07: The Google site was fine; the problem was on my side, where I was blocking some of Google's servers to keep them from serving me ads.

I've noticed a problem with my windows scrolling down all by themselves. I'm just sitting there, not touching the keyboard or the mouse, and the window scrolls down. Anybody else see this? I'm using Windows XP service pack 2, with all the latest service fixes. I first noticed the problem a few months ago.

My company recently made me install Connected DataProtector on my (well, the company's) laptop. It puts an icon on the system tray. There's a context menu for the icon, from which "Close System Tray Icon" can be selected. True to its name, it closes the icon. So far, so good. But in a few minutes, the icon returns.

How do I keep it from reappearing? Or am I destined to have this icon constantly reappearing, mocking my efforts to close it?

Update: 19 April 06: The "Close System Tray" icon doesn't just remove the system tray icon: it kills the application also. There must be some background process that restarts the application when it goes down, so that makes the system tray icon reappear. Hint to Connected: you might want to change the menu selection to "Exit", because that's what it does.

I used Gaim as my IM client for quite a while. When my laptop hard drive died and I had to rebuild it, I installed GAIM, but it didn't work any more. More specifically, gaim.exe would load (and be visible in Task Manager), but no UI would be visible. I tried newer and older versions of Gaim, to no avail. I gave up and went back to Yahoo Messenger.

Finally, today, I took another look at Gaim. Right in the FAQ there was an entry for "If you use 0.75 or higher on win32, try deleting tcl.dll". I tried it out, and it worked. Furthermore, no ill effects from deleting this DLL have been observed. So why is it installed in the first place?

This page explains how to mount a NFS drive in Solaris.

I also learned how to use the sudo command, and how to start a VNC server on Solaris. What I didn't find was a decent, free X server that worked on my Windows XP machine. I tried X-Deep, MI-X, and Cygwin/X, but none of them could open a window.

I exercised some stock options in 2003. I did a "same-day" sale, where I exercised the stock options (bought the shares at a discount) and sold the shares on the same day. A same-day sale was the only choice I had on the smithbarney.com site, and it's the one I wanted, so that's fine. Smith Barney (part of CitiGroup) was the broker who exercised the options and the broker who sold the shares. CitiGroup took their cut for transaction fees, sent the amount due to me to my employer. My employer withheld taxes, cut me a check, and reported the amount of the check as ordinary income on my form W-2. At the end of the year, I got my W-2, reported this stock options income along with my other income. This is basically what the IRS says to do in Publication 525 for 2003 (PDF) . Notice the last line: "Report your ordinary income as wages on line 7, Form 1040, for the year of the sale". It doesn't get much clearer than that.


All was well. Or so I thought.

I also got a 1099 from CitiGroup, saying that CitiGroup had sold shares on my behalf. I didn't think much of it, because the income from this sale was on my W-2. I didn't make any mention of this 1099 on my income taxes.

Big mistake.

Fast-forward to June 2005. Somewhere between the end of 2003 and June 2005, CitiGroup reported the amount from the stock sale to the IRS. They reported the gross amount from the sale of the shares. They did not report the amount that I had spent to buy the shares from them when I exercised the options (a millisecond before I sold the shares). From CitiGroup's report, one would think that a little birdie gave me the stock. The IRS gets CitiGroup's report and thinks, "Hey, this guy made a ton of money by selling shares and didn't report any of it to us. Let's audit him." Which is exactly what they did.

So now I have to write a letter to the IRS saying that, no, I didn't actually get the stock from a little birdie, I bought it from CitiGroup a millisecond before I sold it. I also have to fill out an amended Schedule D saying that I had sold shares, but made no money off of them. (I can't say that I made money, because I already reported that money as income, and I have no desire to pay taxes twice on the same money). The way to do this is to report on Schedule D that I sold the shares, but the cost basis was the same as the sale price. How do I do this when I really made money on the sale? I have to increase the amount that I paid for the shares by the amount of income I received from the transaction. Does this make sense? If it does, when did you get your CPA?

I found some very helpful web sites on the topic. After the fact, of course. I now I have to clean up the mess.