Tech Support Journal

After joining a Sony notebook to the company’s domain & promptly restarting the notebook, I am able to login but I am unable to change anything that requires admin rights like making changes to User Account type, activating software, etc.

It seems that even domain admins have no rights on a newly joined Vista machine. The local administrator account have to explicitly give admin rights to domain administrator for him to be able to make any changes.

You will have to log out, then instead of selecting the default user shown, click other user then type localmachinename\username followed by your password. Then go to Control Panel, User Accounts to add your domain admin name, the domain & set his rights as administrator for the local machine before any control is given to him.

While you’re at it, you may also wish to Turn Off User Account Control if you have other softwares to install because you may face problem installing CS3 & others that may require activation, which is restricted by UAC.

You can turn it back on only after you have completed the initial setup of your new notebook.

When installing the driver for this phone, which is actually an application you have to run from the CD, halfway through the process, you will be prompted with an error of the software not able to register oleaut32.dll file & then later another .tlb file which I cannot remember the exact name.

If you ignore both the error prompts, your phone will still work with Skype but the controls on the IPEVO2 Phone like scrolling & calling out would not function properly. In order to able to scroll through your contact list on the phone & making outgoing calls from there, you will need to install the software again but this time round, instead of ignoring the error, do the following steps;

1. Click on Start button (which is on at same location but a Windows logo on Vista)  & at the Search portion type CMD,

2. In the list of programs directly above it, you will see cmd  (which is the command prompt icon), right click on it & select run as administrator.

3. When the black command prompt box appear, type regsvr32 oleaut32.dll at the blinking space.

4. It should show registration successful but if it did not, type cd \windows\system32 and the try again.

5. Close the black box & then go back to the software installation portion & click ignore or the current prompt and any subsequent prompts.

You should be able to use the IPEVO phone upon restarting the PC.

A Asus notebook that was already configured to be a member of a company domain suddenly loses it connectivity to the Internet and file and printer shares. The two computer icon on taskbar shows connected but when you place your mouse over it, it says Local Only Access.

Seems to be IPv6, which is the default protocol selected by Vista, that is causing the problem. After disabling it and doing a restart, it was able to grab an IP address from the DHCP server which is also the router.

Unfortunately, the router (Comtrend or something) seems to be confused with who the already issued IP addresses to & there seems to be IP address conflict all over the office. The first occurence was on another notebook which was having address conflict with another node with the IP of 10.0.0.3 but when I ping it, it came back with request timeout response.

Checking every single system in the network doesn’t show any node that has that address. Suspect it could be either a node on the network has dual network cards or someone from outside the network is connected via our wireless access point. However, the router (COMTREND!!) doesn’t have any logging capability that I am able to check on.

In the end, I have to disable the DHCP server on the router & use DHCP server on the Windows 2003 Server to issue the IP addresses. The rogue node also seems to have disappear or maybe its lease has not expired thus it hasn’t request for an IP renewal from the server yet. Eventually, if it does attempt to renew its IP, I am able to see it from the server log.

This router is amazing, a save (^S) doesn’t actually save the changes to the ROM thus when you switch it off & on again, the previous settings you’ve have made are all gone. Reminds me of Alcatel ST510 (config save), Cisco (write mem) & the Aztech routers.

And yes, after all these checking & running around, the first machine with the IPv6 disabled, is working OK now.