Steven Eppler’s Blog

I ran into an issue recently where any application would crash when printing to a network printer. Our environment is unique in that we are printing to a Windows print server (using Guest privileges), but users on the network are logging in using the Novell client.

The crash would not happen with generic Microsoft drivers that came with Windows XP, but it would happen with any HP-branded drivers. Our first workaround was just to use PCL or PostScript drivers that closely matched the printer, and hope for the best.

In the end, we found out that when printing with the HP drivers, it would write to a file in the Windows directory called hpmnwun.ini. The contents it would write were:


[NWUSERNAME]
NOVELL=1
NWUSERNAME=testuser


Fixing the issue was a two step process:

1: Erase the contents of the file
2: Change the NTFS Permissions of the file to make it read-only by all users (even Administrators)

I think this forces the HP drivers to print to the printer in the standard Windows printer sharing way. When the HP drivers detect the Novell client installed, it writes the NWUSERNAME info to the file and must try to print in an ‘NDPS friendly’ way, which causes the application to crash when printing to a standard Windows shared printer and not a NDPS printer.

written by eppler

About a week ago I installed Dropbox, and I have to recommend it to anybody who needs to sync their files between machines. I have a group of Macs that I use to sync data between, and I used to use iDisk, but Dropbox is so much quicker that I can’t see myself using iDisk anymore. Also, the syncing between Linux and Mac OS X works great – I haven’t got a chance to test the Windows client yet, but I’m sure it works just as good.

If you sign up with this link, you’ll get an extra 256MB, and so will I.

written by eppler

With Windows XP, you can define custom paper sizes (such as 3×5 cards) by doing the following:

Start -> Printers and Faxes -> File -> Server Properties

In this dialog, you can define a 3×5 card. The problem is, with the LQ-590 and LQ-300 drivers, these paper sizes do not show up as options when you try and print. Any paper size below 4 inches in height will disappear from your printing options.

To get around this, install the LQ-570 driver (the one that is built into Windows XP). This driver will let you use a 3×5 sized form.

written by eppler

The new Intel-based Macs will not run Windows XP, because current versions of Windows do not support the new EFI BIOS that the new Macs use.

x64 versions of Windows and Windows Vista do support EFI, unfortunately Vista won’t be out until the end of 2006 (maybe) and current Macs use 32-bit Intel processors, so they are unable to run the x64 version of Windows XP.

XP Won’t Run on Intel MacBook, iMac

written by eppler

I’m going to check this out a bit further…

“Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 are available completely FREE! No catch, they can be used for commercial use.”

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written by eppler

“Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear from a friend or colleague with a monumental Windows problem,” Paul Andrews writes for The Seattle Times. “I tell them I’m glad to help, on one condition: Next time they buy a computer, they agree to consider a Macintosh.

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written by eppler

We use a program called SolarWinds to monitor our network usage and statistics. But lately, I’ve been getting “The requested resource is in use” while trying to view our network monitoring and statistics page. Not a very helpful message, thanks Microsoft…

This is on a Windows 2003 Server, so it uses IIS (Internet Information Server) and ASP (Active Server Pages) for its graphing and network overview features.

To fix this error, I just made a backup of the server’s configuration, uninstalled IIS, and then reinstalled. That fixed IIS, but SolarWinds couldn’t connect to the database anymore. I re-ran the configuration wizard that comes with SolarWinds, and everything came back.

I’m glad all of my pages are hosted with Apache on CentOS 4.

written by eppler