My First Android App - Game Encyclopedia

I have decided to join the onslaught of Android developers and build my first app: Game Encyclopedia. Essentially, it is a news and reference application that provides a front end to news and video game data hosted by GamesRadar.com.

Here are the current list of features:
- Up to the minute video game News Features
- A video game Browser that allows you to navigate through video games past, present and future by Platform, Genre or Name with the ability to sort results
- View related information such as a description, release date, ESRB Rating and review score for games
- A video game search that allows you to find the game you are looking for quickly

If you have an Android phone, you can now download it from the market by searching for "Game Encyclopedia." If you want to help me out, you could go install it, give it a nice rating, and leave a nice comment in the market :)

For more information, you can also visit the website I put together for all of my Android-related projects: ForTheGamer.com.

As always, I welcome all questions and suggestions!

Altiris Agent Prevents Roaming Profile Removal

When I logged into one of our Citrix Servers, I noticed something interesting:  The user directory folder (C:\Users on Windows 2008), contained multiple copies of users' cached roaming profiles.  So, for example, there would be folders maugustine.domain, maugustine.domain.000, maugustine.domain.001, etc.  I thought for sure that I had set the Group Policy to remove locally cached roaming profiles upon log out to avoid this sort of mess, and when I double checked, my memory was correct.

Upon further scrutiny, I discovered that everything was being deleted from the user's profiles except for one empty directory: C:\Users\username.domain\AppData\LocalLow\Microsoft\CryptnetUrlCache, which is related to Security Certificates when using Internet Explorer.  In a few tests, I was able to reproduce the problem by logging in, opening IE, browsing to an https site (like www.bankofamerica.com), and then trying to log off.

After going through the services on the system and the startup items under msconfig one by one, I learned that it was the Altris DAgent service that caused this.  If I stopped the service and then ran the previously mentioned test, the user's profile would be deleted just fine.

So, I went straight to Symantec support, who has acknowledged the problem, has been able to reproduce it, and now considers it a "known issue."  If you are sitting on Windows Server 2008 and are experiencing the same problem, unfortunately there is no permanent fix available yet.  Your best bet is to disable the Altiris DAgent services and startup items and subscribe to the following KB article for updates:
https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=51228&p=1

However, if you happen to not be on Vista or 2008, you also have the option of going back to the Altiris AClient until they release a new version of the DAgent.  Unfortunately, the AClient is not compatible with Vista or Server 2008.

Sorry for not providing a permanent solution at this point in time, but at least you have a workaround and a KB article to follow!

Windows Server 2008 Freezes -- Finally Solved!

In our environment at work, we have a Citrix farm that users connect to that is running on Windows Server 2008 x64.  During our testing phase while we still had a relatively light load of users on the farm, things went pretty smoothly.  As we added more and more users to the Citrix environment, different issues cropped up here and there, but none as horribly evil as our servers freezing to the point of becoming completely unresponsive.  At that point, all sessions that users were in would lock up, forcing them to lose any unsaved data and restart their sessions again.  As you can imagine, management did not see this as an enhancement to their productivity.

So, for the last several months we have been troubleshooting this issue.  There was no pattern in regards to when servers would freeze.  At any given time, any of the four servers we have in production would freeze.  There was also no consistent user base on the server that would freeze (the only consistency being that they weren't too happy when it would happen).  After bringing in several consultants that helped set up this environment initially, we took our case to Citrix.  Several log and memory dump files later, they came to the conclusion that Internet Explorer was causing our servers to lock up.  Naturally, I then presented this information all to Microsoft support.  Upon further analysis, they discovered that we were experiencing a bug that has been resolved by a hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976674

Basically, the hotfix resolves an issue that occurs when Server 2008 or Windows Vista is under a heavy load and there are a lot of network share accesses going on.  Well, in our case, the user profile is a network share, plus their Outlook PST files were out on a network share, plus their other file shares were network shares, and the list goes on.  After applying this hotfix (which was a little over two weeks ago) we have not experienced any freezes.  Good news for everyone.

If anyone is interested in the detailed symptoms:

• Users sessions (terminal services/Citrix) would become completely unresponsive
• The server would become unresponsive even at the console level
• The server would respond to pings
• Apparently anything in memory at the time of the freeze would continue to function -- as soon as you tried to access something else, the session would freeze
• The only workaround when this occurred was to hard reboot the server

Random Empty Print Jobs Sent to Network Printers

I recently came across an odd problem having to do with empty print jobs being sent to printers across our network.  Since our printers are all configured to first print a cover sheet with the user's username before each job, this would result in dozens of coversheets being printed on various printers throughout our company.  After a closer inspection, the jobs being spooled were all named "Remote Desktop Redirected Printer Doc" -- so I knew that Remote Desktop had something to do with it at least.

At some point in the troubleshooting process I found that I could recreate the problem at will (which is gold in the technical troubleshooting world).  All I had to do was start a remote desktop session from a computer with network printers installed, to an XP computer on our network.  I also had to choose the option to redirect local printers to the remote session for it to occur as well.  Whichever network printers were installed on the local machine, and were redirected to the remote session, would receive a random amount of these empty print jobs.

After scouring the internet for awhile, and involving Microsoft support, I discovered that our problem was related to a little 3rd party application called Scan2PC.exe -- which was installed with some drivers to a Dell multifunction printer that all of our executives have.  So, if we started a remote desktop session to any XP computer that had this application installed, the problem happened.  As soon as I removed the Dell drivers, the problem went away.  Since our executives aren't planning getting rid of their brand new multifunction devices anytime soon, our current work around is to uncheck the box in the RDP session to redirect local printers to the remote session.

It's crazy how such a small thing can cause so many weird things to happen!

My Fake Droid Review

Disclaimer: This post is a joke based on a gift that I received this week from my ever-so creative wife. If you are looking for the latest and greatest news regarding the Motorola Droid, coming out on Verizon this Friday, you will need to look elsewhere :) With that said, let's have some fun!

Ever since I heard about the Droid, I've pretty much been obsessed with getting more information about it. I've been following any Android news website I can find, and also do daily searches on Google news. I am currently a Verizon customer and have long awaited the day when they present their customers with a truly "open" device that hasn't been gimped. Well my friends, I believe Friday is that day.

In any case, if I do end up getting the Droid it will partially be because of the mercy of my wife. I just used my new-every-two upgrade this summer to get the enV3 by LG (a great phone by the way), so I'm not eligible for a new phone discount anytime soon. However, my lovely wife, is a bit overdue for an upgrade. So, I had to convince her that she does in fact want my enV3 and really does want to let me use her upgrade. Well, sometime after having that talk with her, she decided to make a little gift for me: her take on the droid without seeing any pictures or reading any reviews. All she had to go on was things she may have heard me say and things she knew about technology in general -- and mind you, my wife is not a techie.

So, the only thing not self-explanatory in the picture above is the antenna where it says: "Perfect Reception Always". Here are the rest of the pictures (unfortunately when she tried to write on the tape holding it all together, it didn't stay, so I'll clarify when necessary):

In case you can't tell, the top half says "Free Navigation" and the bottom has "USB", "Ear Phones" and "Dial-up Modem" (Love that one!).

I couldn't stop laughing when I saw the "Jedi Button" -- who KNOWS what kind of power will be unleashed when I press it!

Here you have the "Hi-tech camera" and "Google Maps".

The "Cool Google easy Keyboard" -- I'm not sure what some of those symbols are though :)

All in all, a pretty good device -- don't ya think?

Wyse Device Manager Agent Disabled

In our thin client implementation we have decided on going with Wyse.  We're using the Wyse OS based V10Ls for standard users and then Windows XPe based R90Ls for users that require special setups.  Managing the V10Ls could not be easier: set up an FTP server with one config file and put the thin client in DHCP.  The rest is magic.  However, with the R90Ls we needed a way to customize the factory XPe image and deploy it to the rest of the devices.  We initially looked into using Altiris for imaging, since we were already using it for some of our servers, but soon discovered that it would cost us about $5,000 in licensing to image the rest of our thin clients.

Enter Wyse Device Manager (WDM).  This free thin client management solution from Wyse is great for keeping an inventory of your thin client devices, and can also be used for things like remote control and imaging.  The process of taking an image of a thin client is fairly simple -- customize the current image to your liking, run a built-in prep script on the client (so that the device maintains its "uniqueness") and then take the image using the WDM interface.

As I started creating our XPe images, I noticed something.  After every time we took an image, the WDM Agent service was stopped and disabled on the thin client (called the HAgent service in the Services tool).  No matter what I did, this service would be disabled causing the device to no longer be in communication with the WDM server.  Obviously this defeats the purpose since going forward we would not be able to remotely control or image this thin client.

After doing some digging, I discovered what the issue was: a typo in the built-in prep script.  In prep_4_man.bat in C:\Windows\Setup there was a line that read:
regedit /s /i c:\windows\setup\isetup.reg
But there was no file named isetup.reg in C:\Windows\Setup -- but there WAS a file named setup.reg.
I simply removed the extra "i" from the line, and that triggered the train of scripts that run post-imaging that cause the thin client to establish itself and enable the WDM Agent service.

I'm not sure how many people are building custom XPe images with Wyse thin clients -- but if you're using the latest XPe build from Wyse, this should help!

Users Unable to Change Expired Passwords on Windows Server 2008

In our environment, we have Citrix XenApp 5.0 publishing desktops from Windows Server 2008.  Our users connect to these published desktops via thin client or through the web interface.  We recently decided to put our password policy into effect, which included expiring user passwords once a month.

When the first user experienced the password expiration interface in Server 2008 after coming back to a locked workstation, they received the following message:
"The password for this account has expired. To change the password, click Cancel, click Switch User, and then log on."

However, there was no cancel button to click on, and no apparent way for them to either change their password or log off and log on again to do so.  The only way we could get around this was for them to call the help desk, we'd manually reset their passwords in Active Directory and then they could log in again using that new password.  An unacceptable solution in my opinion :)

So, I started to do some digging and found the following Microsoft KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958900
which has an associated hotfix, that we applied and users were able to happily go on changing their passwords when they expired.

But then, we noticed something else.  Users that had two monitors set up at their station were experiencing an interesting symptom now: When the Server 2008 login screen came up, the dialog was now centered in between the two monitors (instead of only being in the primary), and it only showed the left half of the dialog in the primary monitor.  The secondary monitor was just completely black.

Oddly enough, the solution was to upgrade to Server 2008 SP2.  The service pack includes the previously mentioned hotfix, but for some reason did not have the same affect on dual monitors that the hotfix alone had.

I spent several hours scouring the web for a solution and didn't find anything -- so hopefully this will help you!