13 Nov 2015

Use Technicolor modem as slave wireless access point

1) Used "other" easy setup wizard to gain access to turn off DHCP on slave router
2) Set slave IP to be out of the DHCP range of the main router, but within the subnet.
3) Setup wifi SSID, password etc to match the main router, but use different wireless channel.
4) Put slave at opposite end of house, connected over powerline.

Bingo... Seamless wireless transition throughout the house and garden. Can also connect devices to the slave via cable.

11 Sept 2015

Bluetooth Issues with Lenovo ThinkPad T410 - Error 1935

Horrible recurring problems with this machine where the Bluetooth drivers get screwed up.

I tried to fix by downloading the latest ThinkPad Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate Software for Windows 7 and reinstalling, but it kept failing with the dreaded Error 1935. An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.VC80.ATL error.

The only thing that fixed this was by running the Microsoft Fix It tool, telling it that I had a problem with Installing the Thinkpad Bluetooth software. It fixed stuff, rebooted my machine (without asking!) and I was then able to install the software.

17 Mar 2015

IIS 7 URL Rewrite - Ensure SSL/HTTPS and Ensure Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) as Hostname

I had the goal of ensuring all traffic on a web site was via SSL, and also using the canonical hostname, i.e. www.mysite.com rather than just mysite.com.

After installing URL Rewrite 2.0 on IIS, this was achieved by adding the following to the site's root web.config file.


    
        
            
                
                    
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
                
                    
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
            
           
    

16 Feb 2015

Get Inserted ID from SQLOLEDB ADO Recordset.AddNew with SQL Server

Migrating a legacy ASP site to SQL Server, had a prob whereby lots of code that previously used RecordSet.AddNew() with RecordSet.Update(), and then immeditately retrieved the inserted ID from the RecordSet, suddenly failed to get the inserted ID.

The solution was to set the RecordSet CursorType to adOpenKeyset (constant value 1)

10 Feb 2015

Edit Web.Config from File Explorer in Windows 7 / 8 / 2012 - Read Only for Administrator

Don't you hate that UAC thing whereby you can't edit your site's web.config file directly from File Explorer? It lets you open it in notepad and then won't let you save. Even though you're an Administrator! ANNOYING!

It's because of the default Access Control List on the Inetpub folder. When you edit any file under that folder, Windows busts you down to User level permissions, even though your user is a member of the Administrators group.

A quick fix is to grant full access permissions over Inetpub to your explicit user account. Run this in an elevated (Run As Administrator) command prompt (Note you don't need to type your actual username in here, the environment variables will be interpolated for you automatically):

icacls %systemdrive%\inetpub /grant  %userdomain%\%username%:(OI)(CI)(F) /grant %userdomain%\%username%:F
If I helped you out today, you can buy me a beer below. Cheers!