Where I’m @

20050527

Windows Server 2003 SP1 Issue?
We just re-enabled ourselves to login via RDP to a server running Windows Server 2003, SP1. (We’re trying out SP1 on this one because it’s older and not critical, outside of certain times of the year.) For some reason, connections via RDP were failing with that three-part error dialog, where it suggests that RDP might not be enabled, or the max connections have been reached, or there’s a general network error. We solved the problem somewhat through the help of a newsgroup post on this topic. The solution for that person was to delete the RDP-tcp listener and recreate it. We had no option to delete it, so we simply reset it. And then reset it again, because there was no indication that the first reset did anything. (The sound of 1000 sysadmins sadly shaking their heads at our poor troubleshooting process is duly noted.) We could then use a Remote Desktop client to connect. Hurrah.

20050505

Access & VBScript Hard-To-Find Limitation
After having a big pain in the neck problem with updating a particular field in Access, we finally found a newsgroup posting that discussed it. The discussed issue was not exactly our situation, but we found that the core problem did. It seems that a user “can add records with more than 2048 characters in a memo field, but once a record has a memo field with more than 2048 characters, attempts to edit that record result in the Could not update; currently locked by another session on this machine error.” We rather saw the error of Could not save; currently locked by another user. But then again, we’re using Microsoft Access 2002. Our situation also involved our using VBScript classes/objects for the database updating, so our solution was to extract the relevant data from the instantiated object, kill the object, update the database directly, and reinstantiate the object. Not graceful, proper, or long-lasting, but effective for the problem at hand.