monkeydust.net
the ramblings of a crazed IT administrator
Missing HP 3515 Network Driver
0So this week I hit a fun problem when building a new PC for a HP 3515 tower, this is the first one of these that I have built and I had thought I had loaded all the drivers from the HP website into our deployment tool (MDT 2012), however it turns out that the NIC driver was missing and wasn’t actually listed on HP’s website for the model and OS.
Some Googling later turned up nothing, apparently there was no record anywhere of anyone getting a working Windows 7 x64 driver for this model which sounded odd to me as it seems to just use a standard Atheros chip
so I decided to go with plan B and see if it was possible to force it to load.
Looking at the errors MDT was returning it wasn’t able to match the Device ID for the NIC with any in the inf files, checking the ones in the driver files I had downloaded turned up something similar though:
PCI\VEN_1969&DEV_1091&SUBSYS_2AE0103C
Since this seemed to similar to the one MDT was complaining about I decided to try changing it and seeing if it would work:
PCI\VEN_1969&DEV_1091&SUBSYS_2AE0103C&REV_08
After waiting a while for the drivers to load into my MDT install and regenerate the boot CD I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that they seemed to work so I thought I would package them all up and make them available for anyone else who needs them incase HP never get around to fixing their website.
I’ve edited the inf files so in theory the driver should work for Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 installs, however I have only tested them with Windows 7 x64, if you want to give them a go you can find them on the Downloads page here.
Do let me know in the comments if it does or doesn’t work for you and I can update this post as needed.
Removing old Per-User Chrome Installs
08 months ago
One of the fun challenges I’ve been meaning to look at for a while has been how to deal with old instances of Chrome that are sat in user profiles (we recently changed over and pushed Chrome out via GPO, but many users had the per-user install already on their PC).
While having these old installs isn’t a major issue as they aren’t being used (and are often left in profiles of users who have left the business), they do get flagged by security scanners such as Nessus as being security risks (I managed to find a copy of Chrome 3.0 installed somewhere!), and so cleaning them up has long been on my todo list.
Thankfully fellow reddit user bloodygonzo came to my rescue when I was asking about this on r/sysadmin and was able to provide the powershell script he had written to do exactly this.
Sophos Antivirus 9.5 and 10 Removal Script
09 months ago
So, really long time since my last post, lets see if I can do slightly more than 1 post per year from now on 
Just a small post today too (lets not get too crazy), documenting a quick batch file I had to throw together to remove Sophos AV from all our 200 or so workstations as we are moving over to ESET NOD32 (which unfortunately doesn’t yet have any built in tools to uninstall other AV products itself!).
Helpfully Sophos don’t provide anything other than basic “go script it yourself” responses (they used to offer a premade script for earlier versions but stopped supporting it), and no one else seems to have posted anything useful for recent versions of Sophos.
This is really basic, all it is is a batch file that stops the Sophos services and then calls the relevant msiexec commands to do a silent uninstall so you can either run it by hand or use this in a GPO to deploy it to multiple computers (either via logon/logoff script or by creating a scheduled task).
A big warning though: Don’t run this script on the server/desktop that has all the admin tools on otherwise you will break it all. For the admin tools machine do the uninstall manually and ideally do it as the last machine in your network.
Anyway, here it is, provided “As-Is” with no guarantees other than “it worked for me”:
REM Stopping Sophos Services
net stop "Sophos AutoUpdate Service"
net stop "Sophos Agent"
net stop "SAVService"
net stop "SAVAdminService"
net stop "Sophos Message Router"
net stop "Sophos Web Control Service"
net stop "swi_service"
net stop "swi_update"
REM Removing Sophos AutoUpdater
MsiExec.exe /X{15C418EB-7675-42be-B2B3-281952DA014D} /qn REBOOT=SUPPRESS /PASSIVE
REM Removing Sophos Update Manager
MsiExec.exe /X{2C7A82DB-69BC-4198-AC26-BB862F1BE4D0} /qn REBOOT=SUPPRESS /PASSIVE
REM Removing Sophos Remote Management System
MsiExec.exe /X{FED1005D-CBC8-45D5-A288-FFC7BB304121} /qn REBOOT=SUPPRESS /PASSIVE
REM Removing Sophos Anti-Virus
MsiExec.exe /X{9ACB414D-9347-40B6-A453-5EFB2DB59DFA} /qn REBOOT=SUPPRESS /PASSIVE
Setting up WordPress on Nginx
2
Just a quick post with a handy link for anyone looking to get WordPress running under Nginx (an awesome and much faster alternative to Apache!), one of the big differences between Nginx and Apache is the lack of .htaccess files and a different way of handling re-write rules which can cause headaches if you are used to using the “pretty” links in WordPress, or any other plugin that relies on Apache mod_rewrite rules (such as WPSuperCache).
Thankfully (and after many hours of googling and trying various less than ideal configs), I found the perfect setup guide in the most obvious place (and the last place I looked), possible – the WordPress Codex section, so for anyone struggling with Nginx and WordPress, or wanting to streamline their configuration, give this guide a read:
Slow Page Load Times with IIS7.5 and PHP 5.3
22 years ago
So today has largely been spent prepping a shiny new VM for our Sugar CRM and Intranet site which I’m hoping to migrate over soon however I have spent most of this afternoon trying to figure out why page load times have suddenly shot up to over 2.5 seconds! This is only a fresh install of Sugar CRM that I have migrated so there is no data and yet *every* page is taking well over 2 seconds to load.
Even testing with a fresh install of PHP from a zip file off of their website (rather than using the Web Platform Installer), still results in long page loads, which is annoying as it means I can’t blame MS!
Downgrading to PHP 5.2 (thanks Web PI for allowing side by side installs of PHP!), instantly fixes the problems and my page loads go from 2.5s to under 1s, this is odd!
Even Google doesn’t seem to have many suggestions, but there are people who seem to have similar problems too, what gets odder is the few people who claim to have fixed it seem to imply that the issue is MySQL????
After an hour or so of comparing various forum posts claiming to have fixed it I have finally figured out the problem, in the 5.3 builds of PHP there is a bug that causes the slowdowns that is caused somewhere in the MySQL module during the mysql_connect phase.
To fix this it is as easy as changing your database connection from using a hostname (such as localhost or server.com), and instead using an IP address (such as 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.1.2). After a quick restart of IIS to make sure the changes get applied page loads are back down where I expect them to be.
