DLL problem with Wise Installation System and 8.3 filenames

This is from one the action item I deal with at the workplace. The user can install our software but when he tried to use one of the functions, the Visual Basic 6.0 application shows a message box indicating “Automation error.” This is a well-known Windows DLL problem which can be fixed easily using regsvr32 MyDLL.dll command. But I have to dig into the reason why the installer can’t get it job done correctly on the customer’s machine.

From what I known, the installer is created with Wise Installation System. I don’t know the precise version the development team used. But there is a known issue floating around the internet about the installer’s incompatibility problem with systems that disabled the generation of 8.3 filename.

I tried to reproduce the problem at work. The steps started with fresh installation of Windows Server 2003 and running fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1 command. You can also check the current value of disable8dot3 by fsutil behavior query disable8dot3.The important thing to note that you have to restart the machine once for this changes to make effect.

After that, I installed the product. And the problem is reproduced! The fix is easy. Just uninstall the software, set disable8dot3 option to 0, restart, reinstall, and everything works!

The disable8dot3 option is set to 0 on a default installation of Windows. But there is a well-known tweak to disable this 8.3 name generation to improve directory browsing performance. This would break the Wise installer from working correctly.

I can’t reproduce the issue in the first place because I don’t know I have to restart the machine :(

No Telnet on Windows Vista ?

Telnet is NOT installed by default on Windows Vista. You need to enable this by going to Control Panel -> Program and Features -> Turn Windows Features on or off and put a tick in front of Telnet Client. After the installation, you can load up Telnet client by typing "telnet" at the command line as you do in earlier versions of Windows.

Unwritable session save path in Joomla setup

I found a good fix at http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=12800 by Yohan. Thanks :)

My environment is PHP 4.40 with IIS 5.1 on Windows XP. First, I created new directory and named it sessionsave at C:\php\sessionsave. After that, I changed this directory permission to enable the IUSR_machinename to have full control over it.




Note: If you cannot find Security tab in your Windows XP system. You can enable it by go to the Tools -> Folder Options ... -> View -> remove the tick in front of "Use simple file sharing". Windows Server family enable this by default.

Finally, I edited my php.ini file. Back to the setup, Joomla can now write to the session save path.

[Session]
; Handler used to store/retrieve data.
session.save_handler = files

; Argument passed to save_handler. In the case of files, this is the path
; where data files are stored. Note: Windows users have to change this
; variable in order to use PHP's session functions.
; As of PHP 4.0.1, you can define the path as:
session.save_path = "C:\php\sessionsave\"

Windows username problem

Today, I have to install Netbeans 5.5, a very popular IDE for Java, on my friend's notebook. At first, the installer said that there is no JDK on this computer. So we find another Netbeans installer pack which included JDK 6. But the situation is almost the same. The installer asked to locate the "java.exe" file but after I select the correct file it said file is corrupted.

We try restarting Windows, reinstalling the JDK, but none of them worked. After a while, I noticed that my friend's Windows user name is a little weird (It contain "@" and "!"). So I try create a new Windows user account. And try install Netbeans again from there. Bang! It worked!

I realized that this is not the first time I experienced this problem. So, do not name your next Windows account with those weird characters :)