I use Remote Desktop for a lot of purposes: contacting servers and doing administrative tasks, using machines that I have long running background tasks on, without requiring yet another monitor on my desk (I already have four). However, anyone who uses it frequently has encountered the problem with clipboards being erratic.

This older post (November 2006) explains a lot of the complexity, but the key takeaway:

* If remote to local fails, kill RDPCLIP.exe (if running) and then start->run->"rdpclip.exe" to restart it.
* If local to remote fails, reconnect
* If the CPU spikies, kill RDPCLIP.exe *AND* optionally reconnect

While filling out the template for an account with MOSSO, the second page has a check box for "Use the information I provided on the previous step for this form". This is a reasonable option if your billing address is the same as your physical.

Sadly, the option failed silently on Firefox. It turns out, I used the larger address box to enter the suite number on a second line (the newline was accepted into this input box as expected). This caused the script to fail with an "unterminated string error" as it tried to convert that into a string internally and failed to handle the newline properly.

Using a comma and keeping it to a single line worked, but it always leaves one with an uneasy feeling when such minor errors creep into an application, especially one front ending something as complex as cloud computing.

I'm now all signed up, and the control panel seems basic, but usable. I'm transferring some smaller projects now and will update once things have progressed.

Earlier I mentioned a distaste for hard license enforcement schemes for mission critical software. An unmentioned side of the coin is the sheer usefulness of soft license enforcement schemes for ensuring that a company is in compliance with the licenses they have purchased.

I have never been fond of "hard" license enforcement rules for enterprise software. By definition, the software is mission critical, yet vendors continue to deploy it as a default way of thinking, despite possible bad results.

As strange at it may seem, this is often caused by a bad Shell Extension, which is mistakenly handling the launch request.

I had this happen on Vista, and found the NirSoft ShellExView was just the thing to fix my issue. It is freeware and if you don't need it, you won't even know what it is, but if you need it, you really need it.

I encountered this message in my logs: "restorecond: Will not restore a file with more than one hard link (/etc/resolv.conf) Invalid argument". A bit of searching found this fix at the Fedora Forums. Elevated to administrative level:


: ls -i /etc/resolv.conf #(or whatever file is problematic)
NNNNNNNNN /etc/resolve.conf #(will return the inode)
: find -inum NNNNNNNN #finds all copies
/etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/default/resolv.conf #most likely hard link
/etc/resolv.conf #the original

CA ARCserve backup came with one of our backup devices as a pack in. It has always been a bit dodgy, but recently it collapsed completely. It appears to have been a database issue.

ARCserve uses Centura Software's "RAIMA VLDB" and there are utilities documented in "VLDBUTIL.HTM" file in the main folder of the backup software. Well, mostly documented... you need to know that the *server* you are working on is always called CASDB (the baked in user name and password are documented).

I decided recently to try BackupPC at one of our sites; one of the advantages it has is the ability to back each file it finds up once, and only once, saving much space on the backup device. This would be a secondary backup, but being disk based should allow faster recovery of files than our existing solution does (although the media changer is fast, it still isn't disk access).

Configuring it on Fedora Core 9 was easy, although not obvious what was required thanks to fairly spartan documentation.

An interesting article was posted over at CircleID explaining why network neutrality would be a bad thing. I am cross posting my comment here, because I think it is probably the shortest and most direct way of illuminating the current confusion over network neutrality.

The house has passed H.R. 4279 (a short summary can be found at BillBoard.biz). This, combined with a recent finding about DMCA complaints, should lead to excitement.