Christopher Shennan's Blog

I wrote an article in April 2010 about VPN Issues with O2 Wireless Box II and it has come to my attention that O2 are now putting firmware version 8.2.7.7 on their routers which is supposed to resolve these VPN issues. Apparently this is not always the case and O2 are no longer downgrading the firmware because it is “fixed” in the 8.2.7.7 version.  Some people are finding it difficult to get any support, and the O2 CD which you can download no longer has the older 7.4.20.4 firmware.

Fear not though… I did a little digging around and managed to located the 7.4.20.4 firmware (RT-585v7_74K4EJ.exe) and I have upload it for you.

Download the O2 Firmware 7.4.20.4 (RT-585v7_74K4EJ.exe) for the O2 Wireless Box

Just remember and disable O2′s ability to come in an auto-upgrade you otherwise it will not be long till you are be back to square one.

Over the last month or so I have been busy migrating my sites from my old shared hosting to a new server in the Rackspace Cloud and it has not been without it troubles. The first site I transferred was my WordPress blog and after following various resources on setting up Nginx and spawning PHP FastCGI processes I managed to get everything up and running happily… or so I thought.

As it turns out I had followed the guide for spawing PHP FastCGI processes to the letter, and that is where the problem lay.  After a few weeks WordPress reported there were various plugins that needed upgrading but I could not do the automatic upgrade and I had trouble uploading new files due to the wrong permission being applied.  After some investigation this lead me to realise that I needed to spawn my PHP FastCGI processes as the unprivileged user the files belonged to, and not nginx as in the original documentation.
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I am one of those people who, despite knowing the risks, fail to make appropriate backups of my work and important data and rely on hope that nothing will go wrong.  Unfortunately I have been caught out on a couple of occasions and I have been after a nice way to backup my data (documents, websites under development, family photos etc) from my home Fedora Core server without me having to really do anything.

I have seen several online backup software solutions, however most have to be configured and managed via GUI applications installed on your computer however as I have been wanting to back up a Fedora Core server which is command line only, this options was not available to me.  A few people suggested Dropbox to me for sharing files between home and work computers and when looking into Dropbox I found that it can also be set up with a service on my Fedora Core server and configured to backup the data on my server.
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For the last few months I have been connecting to the VPN at work via my O2 Wireless Box II quite happily until it suddently stopped working about 2 weeks ago which has caused me no end of headaches (tight deadlines looming etc). Each time I tried to connect I got presented with a “Error 619 – Disconnected”

I have had my laptop checked out by the IT guy and everything connected fine when it was in at the office and even my iPhone could connect to the VPN when using 3G but this Error 619 kept appearing each time I tried to connect to the work VPN via my O2 Wireless Box II using either the laptop or iPhone.
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My Sony VGN-FE21B laptop has been having problems with performance over the last few months, applications were taking a long time to load and the hard drive was getting cluttered with obsolete files, so at the weekend I decided to re-install Windows XP Pro onto my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop.

The original operating system was Windows XP Home but since the laptop has been bought primarily for work purposes, I had also bought a copy of Windows XP Pro but each time I install Windows XP Pro on my Sony VGN-FE21B laptop it always has a missing icon for the memory stick in My Computer. I imagine this is because the hardware is specific to Sony and not a generic Windows XP driver.
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This Christmas was the quietest Christmas I have had in years in terms of the obligatory “if you have got the time” IT jobs as I only had 1 request for fixing a computer this year (instead of the 4 computers and a DVD player I had a few years back… all requested within 2 hours of arriving home).

Luckily this one turned out to be relatively simple and only took 5 minutes to fix although when I first heard about it I thought it was going to take a few hours. My aunt and uncle reported a problem with logging into their laptop (running Windows Vista Home Premium) on my uncle’s profile where it would give an error message “The User Profile Service failed the logon”, after which it would simply return them to the profile selection screen.
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A few months back both my Windows Vista (Business) computers would not longer print even though they had been printing fine for months.  I tried

1. restarting the workstations
2. restarting the server,
3. restarting the print spooler service on the workstations
4. restarting the printer spooler server on the server
5. deleting printers and tryed to re-add them

Regardless what I tried neither of the Windows Vista computers would allow me to printer and always presented me with the following error when trying to add a printer and almost always when the computer booted:-

The local print spooler service is not running. Please restart the spooler or restart the machine.

At that point I didn’t need to print much so I didn’t try too hard to fix it and simply resorted to printing from my only Windows XP machine I had.

Today I finally had enough and decided it was time to find a solution to this local print spooler service is not running problem.

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