Windows tips and tricks.
Welcome to Service Manager v1.0.0. The following application allows a user to easily start and stop services as required. I built this tool a few years ago when I was developing database software. I would have issues with the service and need to restart it. It was much easier to build a program to do this instead of going into the Service MMC. I will be adding and updating this application.
Download:
If you have any questions please comment below.
In the next few weeks, I am required to use one of my most scariest server products I have used. IIS. I use to manage a small network that used IIS for hosting internal mail interface and other web based products our company used. Back then, we were running IIS6 on Server 2003 R2, and what a scary machine that was. IIS6 wasn’t very intuitive compared to other Microsoft server products at that time. When you needed to add a site or add a CGI extension, it always felt you had to hack it to get something to work and you never went back to it after it was working.
I was required to install it for a programming class and what a change. For someone that never had proper training on IIS, the new interface has defiantly been improved and is now very intuitive.
To install IIS7 was open Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> “Turn Windows feature on or off”. I checked the “Internet Information Service” in the list and that was it. Windows installed the service without needing the disks.
It was that easy to get the new web server up and running on my local development machine.
I remember spending hours in the server room trying to get PHP installed on the old IIS6 machine we were running. I thought, I wonder how easy it will be on IIS7? Turns out very easy! Microsoft now has an installation you can download that installs PHP 5.3.13 into your IIS.
A few things need to be done first. Make sure you have installed CGI. Windows does not do this by default.
IIS is now ready for the PHP installation. Go to php.iis.net to download the executable. Once you have it download, run it and follow the on screen instruction.
That is it! You have now installed PHP on your IIS server. Create a phpinfo() file on the root of your web-server to make sure everything is working.
If you run into the error “Handler “PHP53_via_FastCGI” has a bad module “FastCgiModule” in its module list” it means CGI is not installed. Go back into Windows Features and check “CGI”.
Synergy let you share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers. In the following example, thewall is going to have our server and laptopnew is going to be our second computer. thewall, is to the right of laptopnew. thewall is also our linux box running Linux Mint (gnome). laptopnew is running Windows 7 x64.
First thing we need to do is install Synergy on our two machines. On the linux box run:
sudo aptitude install synergy
Next we need to install Synergy on our second computer. The version of Synergy in the Ubuntu repos is version 1.3 so we need to install that version. Click here for the download list.
Once you have it installed on both machines we need to create our configuration file. The following is an example of my configuration file.
gedit ~/.synergy
Configuration file:
section: screens thewall: laptopnew: end section: aliases laptopnew: 192.168.1.24 end section: links thewall: left = laptopnew laptopnew: right = thewall end section: options screenSaverSync = false end
For this to work correctly you must use the hostnames of both machines. Now we can open a terminal and run:
synergys
This will start the server; next we want to hit the start button on the client. You should now be able to move your mouse between the two computers! Synergy also allows you to copy and paste (text only) between the machines.
To get the synergy server to run on startup we can just add it to the gnome startup. Menu -> Preferences -> Start Up Applications.
The next time you reboot Synergy should start automatically. That concludes this tutorial, if you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
I have finally taken the Vista plunge! And I have to say it isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Me and another guy at my co-op placement decided we need to educate our selves for the growing Vista world. Working at a IT place saying “Vista sucks’ didn’t get us very far with customers that liked it. 😛 Anyway’s, I ran the upgrade script and only had 2 applications that didn’t work to well in Vista.
Still having a few issues with little things like Miro. Miro will not start at all, even after upgrading Miro. Second thing would be, the Documents, Pictures and Music buttons in the start menu. They just don’t work.
All in all it’s a good OS. The problems I just mentioned is enough to drive me to just do a fresh install. I’m hoping to do this next week.
Next Topic I want to discus is Visual Basic. I downloaded and installed Visual Basic 2005 Express the other day. I have to say that VB is one kick as language. Only took me a day to get the concepts although I’m still going through tutorials and stuff. I’ll post some of my applications later on.
Anyway’s that’s all for now see yall later.