Tuesday January 22, 2008

Got my Pocket PC connected to the network and the Phone system finally. I did a hard reset of my Pocket PC, put everything back the way I wanted it. I did NOT use any of the hacks to get the cert installed but instead installed it cleanly by my previous instructions (no problem) then connected to the network with no problem. Installed the Soft Phone and used the Road Warrior profile and it works. My only problem is that the Pocket PC does not like to let go of the AP until the AP is out of range. So there is a moment of silence and then the connection comes back up with no connection loss, just a pause in the conversation.

Then I went on to my laptop. Since my "good" work laptop died I brought in my old one from home. Installed the wireless card on it and imported the cert. No connection. Heck, I couldn't even see the guest network. Fiddled around and still couldn't get it to work, tried a couple of reboots, nothing. Finally uninstalled the driver, rebooted and re-installed the driver. Now I could see the guest network. Then I found a tutorial at the U of Texas/Dallas that explained that in Windows 2000 you have to turn on the 802.1x service. Did that and everything started working.

Ran into another interesting problem that has kept me busy today. A PC was brought in, maybe 4 or 5 years old, with Win2K installed, wouldn't boot, had a strange error message on it. I looked up the error message in the M$ KB and learned something interesting. Because of limitations of the hardware and software, Win2K on Intel cannot use more than 16M of RAM at the beginning of the boot process, during which time the OS must load the System Registry hive, the boot loader, HAL, and kernel. In this case, the System hive was over 34MB in size! So, I copied the default system hive in and booted the PC. It still has other problems, but I didn't know that there was a memory limit during this part of the boot process, makes sense though. The problem has been fixed in W2k3 by moving the size limit to 200MB and by moving some items that are not essential to the boot process from the system hive to the software hive (see KB articles 269075 & 302594). I will have to keep my eyes open for this problem, there are quite a few W2K PC's still in service that have been around this long and could expect to see this issue.

Time to go home now. I was just figuring, here it is only Tuesday night and I have already worked for 27 hours this week. Yeeesh!