Firefox 4 does not prompt to save tabs on exit

The solution that worked for me was to set the configuration flag in about:config to:

• > browser.showQuitWarning to true

There are several popular solutions to this issue that did not work for me. Some that I came across while researching this issue:

• > browser.tabs.warnOnClose , see http://kb.mozillazine.org/About%3Aconfig_entries
• > browser.warnOnQuit , see http://kb.mozillazine.org/browser.warnOnQuit
• > browser.warnOnRestart , see http://kb.mozillazine.org/browser.warnOnRestart

Element CFID is undefined in SESSION

This is an issue I came across with a site hosted on a shared hosting server. The problem is a misconfiguration in the CF Admin. The solution:

1) Login to the CF Admin
2) Navigate to the Server Settings page -> Memory Variables
3) Un-check the option Use J2EE session variables
4) Check the options Enable Application Variables and Enable Session Variables
5) Submit the changes

Windows Update Page is Blank in IE on XP SP3

Here's a new one I've never seen until last week. Latest and greatest IE8, XP SP3 with all the trimmings (all fixes) and when you visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com - you get a blank (white) page that doesn't appear to load anything. If you view the source, you'll see that there's a whole page there telling you that either your browser doesn't support active x or it is not allowing active x content. Smooth move there MS, way to test your shit!

If you visit http://update.microsoft.com/ - the page loads, but you see an error message telling you:

"Files required to use Windows Update are no longer registered or installed on your computer. To continue:

Click option 1: Register or reinstall the files for me now (Recommended)
Click option 2: Let me read about more steps that might be required to solve the problem."

Clicking option 1 may fix the problem, but this is doubtful. Ignore option 2 as it does not contain ANY relevant information for fixing the problem. The problem is that for some reason, a bunch of the DLL's required by windows to run windows update have become unregistered. What you'll need to do:

1) Start -> Run -> cmd (to open a command window)
2) type: regsvr32 wuapi.dll [enter]
3) type: regsvr32 wups.dll [enter]
4) type: regsvr32 wuaueng.dll [enter]
5) type: regsvr32 wucltui.dll [enter]
6) type: regsvr32 atl.dll [enter]
7) type: regsvr32 msxml3.dll [enter]

After every time you hit enter, you should see a window that pops up and tells you that the DLL has been successfully registered. When you're done with registering the last DLL, go back to the updates page in IE and click on option 1 - let windows do its thing. When it's done, you should be able to visit either updates.microcrosoft.com or windowsupdate.microsoft.com without a problem.

And now, a big round of applause to MS for creating an error message page that their browser won't display. Good work fellas! Way to test and maintain your products. Helluva job... really!

Thunderbird Error: Dovecot/Postfix

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: error"

This is the error that Thunderbird 2 [2.0.0.23] reported when I tried to check my email this morning. Did some digging and found that the problem is with the mbox format on the server. Some tweaking yesterday for mail server migration must have messed this one up. I tailed /var/log/maillog on the mail server and watched for errors. I saw:

File isn't in mbox format: /var/mail/username

Edited /var/spool/mail/username and got rid of 2 garbage lines at the top of the file. Restarted postfix and dovecot for good measure and fired Thunderbird back up. No more errors and it looks like all my email is there.

DSN-Less Database Connection to MySQL in Coldfusion

Have not tried this myself yet, but wanted to drop it here so we can play with it in the future.

A DSN-less connection is made completely through the code, without the need for configuring anything within the ColdFusion Administrator. All of the information for the connection is specified within the code. This includes the driver, servername, databasename, username and password.

To make a DSN-less connection to a MySQL database, the following code snippet can be used:

<cfscript>

classLoader = createObject("java", "java.lang.Class");
classLoader.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
dm = createObject("java","java.sql.DriverManager");

con = dm.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver}; SERVER=server; PORT=3306;
DATABASE=database; USER=username; PASSWORD=password;OPTION=3;");


st = con.createStatement();
rs = st.ExecuteQuery("Select * FROM table");
q = createObject("java", "coldfusion.sql.QueryTable").init(rs);

//the query is stored in the variable q

</cfscript>

Start ESX or ESXi Guests at Boot

I've had to do this before and always forget, so here goes.

1. Launch the VIC
2. Click on the server icon (not the guest icon)
3. Click the "Configuration" tab
4. Click on Virtual Machine startup/shutdown
5. Click on "Properties"
6. Click on "allow virtual machines to start and stop with the system"
7. Click on the guest you want to start automatically and then click "move up" until it's in the 'Automatic Start Up' section
8. Rinse, repeat for any other guests OS's

The last few steps are not very intuitive, but you get the idea once you've done it a few times. Thanks to Merrick for reminding me which tab these settings were on. I had to do this a few months ago and had forgotten.

Expanding a Virtual Drive in VMWare Workstation

David Merrick and I ran into an issue today growing a windows 2003 WMWare disk partition running on VMWare workstation. Apparently, you cannot use the GUI tools in Workstation to increase the size of vmdx files. However, you *can* use the command line:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12GB “Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.vmdk”

Where 12GB is the new size of the disk. Make sure you do this from the VMWare Workstation install directory.

Check out David's blog post on this for more details. After that, we used PMagic to inflate the partition to the new drive size.

Can't Undo in Dreamweaver CS3

A few days ago Dreamweaver CS3 stopped allowing me the ability to undo things whether I was in code view or design view. I thought maybe restarting DWCS3 would fix it, but to no avail. I did some googling and found a post where people were saying you needed to delete the FileCache.dat file in the Macromedia application data folder for the user having the issue. This information did not hold so true for DW CS3, but it did lead me down the correct path.

My solution was to close DW and navigate to:

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration

In there I found a file named: WinFileCache-AD76BB20.dat Your WinfileCache file might be named slightly different, but it's the only .dat file in that directory. Rename that file or delete it (I always err on the side of caution) and restart Dreamweaver.

Open Source [Free] Disk Partitioning Tool

PartedMagic - so very cool! Patrick Verner and his development team have created a really awesome FREE tool for manipulating drive partitions. A big thank you to Patrick and his team for creating this utility. Works great for growing NTFS disk partitions in the guest once you've grown them in your ESX (or other hypervisor) environment.

Super Secret ESXi Command Line Access

Even though they tell you it doesn't exist and they want you to use the RCLI tools, you can get to the command line interface on ESXi. Here's how:

1. Alt+F1
2. Type: unsupported (you won't see anything) and press enter
3. You should see the support warning and then the prompt for your password
4. Enter your password

Jon Warburton has more information about this and how to enable ssh on his blog.

Converting NRG disk images to ISO using DD

I use Nero for a lot of things under windows. Unfortunately, Nero does not allow you to create disk images as standard ISO files - not to mention I have a lot of old NRG image files laying around. Well, ESX doesn't know what to do with NRG image files, so I needed to convert them to ISO. I found 2 solutions:

1) MY SOLUTION: Use DD

dd if=image.nrg of=image.iso bs=4096 skip=75

2) Use nrg2iso from Gregory Kakanosky

Mihai Criveti has more information about this on his blog about this and some responses from people who disagree with his solution. Those people can suck it, it worked fine for me!

ESXi Windows XP Install: scsi disk drivers

In setting up a new ESXi (3.5.0) server I came across the issue of not having the BUSLogic driver or the LSI Logic driver when attempting to install windows xp pro as a guest os. I was getting that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer" error message.

You've got several options:

1) MY SOLUTION: Download the BusLogic driver disk directly from VMWare: http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp.

2) Download the LSI Drivers from the LSI website and make your own .flp image.

3) Slipstream a copy of windows XP installer to include either of these drivers using something like nLite (good god, that software is AWESOME!)

Vincent Vlieghe has much more detailed instructions on his blog. These instructions work for both ESX and ESXi.

Everyone's got a blog - why should we read yours?

Don't. This blog is for me - so I can remember how to do stuff. I've given up on writing things down, making paper notes. Inevitably those get lost and I'm sure at some point this website might go away - but until then I'm hoping I'll be able to document stuff I've done (IT or otherwise) so I can come back to it and remember how (or why) I did something. Secondary to my own selfish desire to keep ideas for posterity, maybe this blog will get indexed and my ramblings might help someone else solve a similar issue.