Cacti graphing Enviromux Mini - 65535

I was having difficulty using the Cacti templates for the Enviromux Mini.  Values for the temp and humidity probes were returning a maximum value of 65535 which can also occur if the sensor isn’t connected.  We have several of these devices and they are nice monitoring solutions.  I had to make a few changes to the SNMP OID values.  I used this page as reference:

http://www.networktechinc.com/enviro-mini-oid.html

For things to work in Cacti I needed to add a trailing zero to each value.

Humidity Sensor 1     .1.3.6.1.4.1.3699.1.1.3.1.3.1.0

Temp Sensor 1            .1.3.6.1.4.1.3699.1.1.3.1.1.1.0

 

Solution:

Grab the templates from here and import them into Cacti

http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?p=109065

 

Modify the temperate and humidity templates as follows by changing the OID values.

 

ENVIROMUX – Humidity

 

Now add your devices, then Data Sources, and finally add new graphs.  This should work for later firmware versions of the Enviromux Mini.  I happen to be using firmware 1.41.

Outlook meeting reminders stop working due to KB2583910

Not exactly sure why this update causes an issue, but KB2583910 seems to be stopping some client reminders from showing up.  I tried all of the usual remedies including deleting the reminders folder, but removing this update solved the issue immediately.  I will be rolling it back from clients via WSUS.

Lync, Sophos, TMG/ISA Incompatibility

On several client workstations I was receiving an error message when starting Lync.  All of these clients were previously running Communicator R2 successfully.  Also, all of these clients are running Sophos anti-virus 9.5.  The message indicated a permission error running communicator.exe.

Using procmon.exe and some time I was able to determine Sophos was blocking Lync for some unknown reason even though it was in the “allowed applications” list.  Note below that I authorized ALL instant messaging applications just to verify it wasn’t Sophos causing the error:

 

 

To make this more complicated, no application control event were being logged on the Sophos console either.  After doing some comparisons on client pcs, I discovered that either the ISA Firewall 2004 service or the TMG 2010 firewall service was installed on all of them.  Disabling didn’t fix the problem, but uninstalling and rebooting did.  Shortly thereafter, I discovered a listed incompatibility between sophos and these firewall client pieces.

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/111203.html

The fix was to uninstall the firewall clients, and then reinstall Sophos manually from the workstation.  Re-deploying via the console did not work.  I used Spiceworks to determine all of the workstations that had the firewall clients installed and then used WMI to remotely uninstall all of them.  Then I emailed a Sophos reinstall link to the affected users.  After the Sophos reinstall, a reboot was required to get Lync to start again. Using WMI to remotely uninstall is very handy!  As a workaround, I created a group on our Sonicwall the allows direct internet access to the users who need it.

/failfast:on /node:@"c:\computers.txt" product where name="Software Name" call uninstall /nointeractive

See this spiceworks post for more information about using WMI to uninstall remotely.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/179

Maximizer Web Access and IE9 Compatibility modes

 

Trying to run an upgrade for Maximizer 11.5.  Part of this upgrade includes the ability to use Maximizer Web Access.  The current version does not play well with IE9 showing only a black white box instead of the full interface.  I tried switching the browser to IE8 mode and everything started working again.  How can I force the browser to always do this for everyone?  No problem!

Open up IIS and add a custom HTTP header.  Notice here that the name is “X-USA-Compatible” and I have set the value to “IE=EmulateIE8”.  You can also force earlier versions of IE.  Close your browser, reopen the site and it should magically work again.

Incorrect DFS referrals–IPv6, Win7, iSCSI

 

I have been struggling with an issue concerning Win7 clients, ipv6, and our file servers running DFS.  They would always refer me to the wrong location out of our site.  I have file servers with two NICs on board.  One of these NICs connects the corporate network and the other one connects to a separate vlan for iSCSI.  I have sites setup in AD Sites and Services for all of the subnets, even the iSCSI networks.  What to do?  After some searching I saw a similar post referring to the binding order of your cards.  Lo and Behold moving the corprate lan NIC to the top and the binding order and restarting the DFS service things started working as expected.

ISA Firewall Client 2004 breaks Windows 7

 

There must be an update from Microsoft for Windows 7 that causes an imcompatibility with Win7.  Telltale problems around here:

• FlexLM License servers on local machines filled log files with “internal error” until the disk was full. No other errors were present in the log file.
• Visual Studio 2008 web server appears to hang and do nothing when debugging a project.  Lots of posts about ipv6 problems and firewall issues, but ISA client was the issue.

There are far newer versions of the client and we will try one of those to see if it helps.

Solid Edge 2D won’t install on XP with UAC Error

Situation:  Solid Edge 2D won’t install on a Windows XP in the domain where UAC is turned on.  I know what you are asking yourself, hey Matt Windows XP doesn’t even have UAC right?  Correct, it was introduced with Vista.  In our Domain though it still set the registry value for UAC on windows XP client machines.  You must make a registry change to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Change the DWORD value for EnableLUA temporarily to zero instead of one.  This will allow the installation to happen.