Had to add some new terminal server licenses today for a client of mine and had a whale of  a time.  Installed the licenses which seemed to work no problem, then when I tried to connect to the remote machine kept getting the error that it couldnt connect due to “No Terminal Server License Servers”.

Then tried to ring Microsoft to see what they would say about it, firstly normal thing, ring a number that my license reseller gave me and go through to India or somewhere similar, and they were license activation rather than license help, the guy couldnt even understand me saying “can you give me a techinial support number”.  Then when he did understand me the other number was also somewhere else in India who said yes they could help me but I would have to purchase some technical support, now I know you dont get nothing for nothing but I have just purchased licenses surely I should be eligable for some help installing them oh no !!  So basically decided to try to fix the problem myself with the aid of google. 

Any way back to the problem, it would seem that the terminal services manager on the box couldnt resolve where the terminal services license server was in the domain so I had to tell it specifically by adding a registry key to that effect.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

\TermService\Parameters\LicenseServers\

in my instance I put the ip address of the license server rather than the netbios name and rebooted and worked a treet.

Had some bother with the extensions of php5, php_mysql.dll and libmysql.dll under my latest installation on windows 2003 server.  When using the mysql_connect function to connect to a mysql database kept getting the error message

“mysql_drop_db could not be located in the dynamic link library libmysql.dll”

Now I had moved the libmysql.dll into the c:\windows\system32 directory, uncommented the extension in php.ini but was still getting this message, eventually realised that the new libmysql that comes with versions 4 & 5 of mysqlsql dont have these functions in them any more.  Therefore when you use php5 you must put libmysql.dll from the php5 zip file into the windows directory otherwise you get the above error.

I am not sure if you will lose functionality or not by doing this as the mysql engine will still use what ever version is in mysql/bin (from installation) but the current version php5 is compiled against mysql version 3 and still needs the function defs of that version.

Looking for details on asp.net 2.0 and its official release date I stumbled upon the article on MSDN about “CRUD why you cant afford it”,  this article talks about everything that I have disliked about CRUD for a long time. 

I have never really talked up about it though as most people rave or say “you must have CRUD”, when having written systems with and without CRUD, I dont believe it works that well for the reasons the author of the article mentions. 

The components at Tesco.com were built around exactly what we were doing rather than having generic CRUD methods and this seemed to work very well.

The MSDN article can be found here

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/CRUD-afford.asp