Vista and Samba

Mandatory Shouting
Well ... nice trick of MS again to try and be incompatible with the rest of the world.

What's the problem?
You have a new pc (or already an old one) with Windows Vista on it and you are not able to connect to Samba drives, either by windows explorer or by the 'net use' command. A typical symptom you will notice on protected drives is the fact that the username/password combination is never accepted.

If you have Windows Vista Home you will not be able to connect to Samba Shared drives. Nice ... hmmm ... Just Microsoft alike.

How to solve it?
After looking around the internet some solutions are available but most of them seem not to be valid work arounds.

1. Upgrade Vista to a "Professional" level
The Vista standard installed on most private customers' pc's is a basic version from which MS has seen it appropriate to remove some tools from the more professional versions which you need to solve these kinds of problems.
An upgrade costs ... 100 € at least ... so ... to me not valid.
In case you have the more expensive version you should use a program which lets you handle the local securi!ty policies on Windows Vista: secpol.msc. This is missing from the Vista Home versions.

2. Go to a an OS which is worthwhile and not purely commercially oriented.
The solution can be reduced to a choice for the best distribution for your particullar situation.
Ubuntu linux has some flavors for any kind of objective ...
This is a challange too ... but it will work out fine unless MS-depending programs need to be run, which would be a strategic error since everything is moving to open-internet technology.

3. Change a registry value ...
Found this on the following link : http://forums.techarena.in/windows-vista-network/670498.htm and is valid for the Vista Home distribution
In short:
  • go to the registry (windows-R type regedit and press the run button)
  • select in the left pane registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/LSA
  • Select in the right pane the value LmCompatibilityLevel (the value will be 3, stored in hex)
  • Doubleclick on the LmCompatibilyLevel item, a box with the value will apear.
  • change the value to 2 (some say 1) I set it to 2 and this seemed to work (maybe this depends on the version of Samba your target is running)
  • press the OK button
  • exit the registry editor
  • Some say a reboot is required some don't. Quess the best thing to do is reboot.
  • Then try connecting by the command "Net use" from the command line or by mapping the network drive in windows explorer.
  • This should have solved it.
The fact is that MS is considering that a certain security protocol is in place for all external sources ... which seems not to be the case. This is where the '3' comes from. (see also http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS4434907782.html )

Hope this did the trick for you.

Oracle Jinitiator - Left handed mouse bug

As if I would like to tell that a mouse is a bug.

Problem:
See metalink bug 2200274
When the functions of the left and right mouse buttons are switched under ms-windows, the function of the selection mouse button, originally the left button, is lost, resulting in having only a context button on the left button.

Research< style="font-weight: bold;">Solution:
A valid solution is to go to a JPI configuration, for the newbies, 'a java plug in'.
This makes the deployment of Jinitiator obsolete but makes the presence for the correct JRE mandatory.
A test with version 1.6.0.10 worked very fine and solved the left-right mouse button problem.

Steps:

First,
Create in your formsweb.cfg file a new configuration section ... or better copy the one you were using. For those of you who did not use configurations ... this is a good time for starting doing so.
A config is identified by squarebrackets like this:
[ MyJPIConfig]

Second,
Point the basehtml files to point to the jpi files:

baseHTMLJInitiator=basejpi.htm
baseHTMLie=basejpi.htm
baseHTML=basejpi.htm

Third,
Configure the archives to be loaded by means of the archive_jpi tag:
archive_jpi=frmall.jar,laf.jar,

Fourth,
And ... this should come first ... But since people only remember the last thing they are told ... I'm putting this as the last thing to do.
Enable the correct download of the JRE to be used and set the set the correct identifications for the plugins to be used.
Normally you would download it and then put it on your intranet with the correct url.

Fifth,
This is optional ... but gives some additional configuration possibilities:
envFile=
form=
userid= if no connectstring has to be used.
pageTitle=
width=
height=
separateFrame=
lookAndFeel=
colorScheme=


Now you should have something like the following:

[ MyJPIConfig]
baseHTMLJInitiator=basejpi.htm
baseHTMLie=basejpi.htm
baseHTML=basejpi.htm
jpi_download_page=http://jan.hellings.be/jre/jpi_16010_windows.exe
jpi_classid=clsid:CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-0010-ABCDEFFEDCBA
jpi_codebase=http://java.sun.com/update/1.6.0/jinstall-6-windows-i586.cab#Version=1,6,0,10
jpi_mimetype=application/x-java-applet;jpi-version=1.6.0_10
envFile=ApplicationEnvFile.env
form=startform.fmx
userid=defuser/defpassword@defconnectstring
otherparams=buffer_records=%buffer% debug_messages=%debug_messages% array=%array% obr=%obr% query_only=%query_only% quiet=%quiet% render=%render% record=%record% tracegroup=%tracegroup% log=%log% term=%term%
pageTitle=MyPageTitleTexteke
width=1280
height=750
separateFrame=true
lookAndFeel=Oracle
colorScheme=blaf

Conclusion
It seems to me that performance is much better using the newer version of JRE than the one provided by Jinitiator.

Greetz,
Jan.