Thomas M. Turner's Tech Ramblings  

Final revision:

Back in August 2004, when Microsoft released SP2 for Windows XP, I found that many (but not all) of my patched PCs were no longer accepting Remote Desktop connections. The error message was simply this:

"The remote computer has ended the connection."

Many hours of investigation and testing resulted in no definitive answers. Months went by and several people were e-mailing and posting on various newsgroups and forum boards about the same problem, but no one seemed to know what the cause was. One workaround was to copy back the termsrv.dll file from SP1, but clearly that was not desirable in the long term.

Eventually, it came to light that the cause of the problem was having the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Mup\DisableDFS registry value set to 1 and that setting it back to the default value of 0 fixed the problem.

Nearly a year after SP2 was released, Microsoft came out with a hotfix and workaround information (KB898713).

Posted by Tom at 12:13 PM links to this post

I’m not fond of Dell’s Windows installations and since we have a Microsoft Campus Agreement, I prefer to just wipe the systems and put a clean copy of NT on them.  For some reason, though, a new Dimension 9100 model gave me fits.  It hung up during the “installing devices” part of the XPsp2 install, which led me to Microsoft KB article 828267.

Unfortunately, although a reboot did get it to continue the install and get past whatever the problem device was, it did some crazy thing where it apparently automatically set the computer name, administrator password, and even set the default user password.  The end result was, after XPsp2 was installed, I couldn’t login to the system.  The closest Microsoft KB article I could find about that was article 318026, but I couldn’t find a password in the file it said to look in.

So, I tried a clean install again, but this time I first disabled the Intel Pro/100 LOM from the BIOS menu.  The XPsp2 setup then worked as expected.

Posted by Tom at 8:56 PM  [0 comments] links to this post

Google’s Gmail web-based e-mail service allows one to download their Gmail account messages via POP3.

Once logged into your Gmail account, click on “Settings” and then click on “Fowarding and POP”.
“Enable POP” and choose how you want downloaded messages to behave (stay in Gmail’s inbox, move to the archive folder, or send to trash).

The last step is to go into your e-mail client of choice and configure it to download your Gmail messages. Google provides a link with configuration instructions for various e-mail clients, including Mozilla Thunderbird. One client they do not explicitly list instructions for, however, is Pegasus Mail, although they do provide the necessary information under the “Other” Mail Clients link that should work with any modern e-mail program.

In order to use Pegasus Mail to get Gmail messages, you must have version 4.11 or later, which first included SSL support.

To configure Pegasus Mail to download Gmail messages via POP:

• Click on the [Tools/Internet Options] menu, click on the “Receiving (POP3)” tab, click the [Add] button, and click the [New] button.
• Type a name for this new Pegasus Mail POP3 definition, such as “Gmail”.
• Server host name: pop.gmail.com
• Username and password is of course the credentials to your Gmail account.
• Server TCP/IP port: 995
• Click on the “Security” tab and select the “Via direct SSL connect” option.
• I also recommend check-marking the “Enable server certificate fingerprint tracking” option.

Now, I’m not going to go fully into how to send out e-mail through Gmail’s SMTP servers, as that would then lead into writing about Pegasus Mail’s “identities” feature, to use it in a way that would make any sense. I assume existing Pegasus users have their outgoing e-mail configured to use their ISP’s SMTP server or, in my case, sometimes I also use my employer’s SMTP server (which really only makes sense for me, because my default Pegasus Mail identity uses my work e-mail address as my “Internet e-mail address”.)

For those who just want to know how to configure Gmail SMTP use in Pegasus Mail, though, it works by either setting the “Server TCP/IP port” to 587 and selecting the “Via STARTTLS” or by setting the “Server TCP/IP port” to 465 and selecting the “Via direct SSL connect” option. Regardless of which port and security option one chooses, the “Server host name” is smtp.gmail.com and one of the “SMTP Authentication” options must also be properly configured (the easiest is to use the “Login to the SMTP server using a POP3 username/password” and selecting the POP3 definition created above.)

UPDATE: Someone said they had problems with GMail downloading in Peagsus after updgrading to v4.41, but it still works fine for me after the upgrade.

Posted by Tom at 2:57 PM  [3 comments] links to this post