Salient Soft

I have often used file sharing on OneDrive. This can be used to create a shortcode url link which can be passed to anyone else for use. The following options are available:

• A link may be emailed to a set of people, or copied directly as text and forwarded/send using any other means you like. It can also be used as the target of another url, such as a bit.ly one or in my case, a sailent soft shared url.
• A link may be view only or editable
• A link may be password protected by clicking the settings gearwheel on the intial share dialog for a file, and an expiry date may also be set. Note however that these options are only available for a paid for office 365 onedrive service, i.e. you must pay to upgrade a free account before you can password protect.

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We have had this issue a number of times, where the cover keyboard just won’t work, even after rebooting several times.

This appears to be a common problem which is griped about online, and the solutions are varied, not that clear/consistent, and do not always work. I even replaced the cover keyboard, which did fix the problem at the time, but I then later found that the original one still worked!

IMO this looks like some kind of underlying bios problem.

After trying a number of ideas which did not work, including removing the keyboard driver, and disabling/re-enabling the keyboard in the UEFI bios, I found that booting into the UEFI bios (hold +volume button whilst pressing on button), and then rebooting again, seemed to work.

This site here appeared to have some helpful ideas, including running the keyboard troubleshooter, which I had not seen previously. As the troubleshooter initially said that there were no problems (!), I had to run additional troubleshooters and then select keyboard, as per the post, for it to work. In my case, the troubleshooter ran fine, but the keyboard was already working, so I’ll have to wait until next time to see if this helps to solve the problem, should it occur again.

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This is straightforward. If you have a collection of font file to preview and install manually, this can all be done from Windows Explorer.

Just view the folder and select a view of medium, large, or extra large icons, and the actual font appearance is shown in the icons. Extra large gives the clearest and largest view of the fonts. The same view choices are available when viewing control panel/fonts.

To install, just select the fonts you wish to install in explorer, and the right click context menu gives you install options – either install for current user, or install for all users (the latter is my preference).

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I created a simple batch file to run a number of npm build commands in succession.

However, the file exited after running the first npm command. This appears to be a side effect of the way npm runs – when you run npm, you actually end up running npm.cmd, which exits after completing. This is detailed on StackOverflow here.

A simple workaround as per the post is to prefix the npm commands with call – I did this and everything worked fine and all the builds were executed.

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I had issues with this – the method proposed everywhere online was to hold the volume up key down whilst booting from cold with the power button, but I could not make this work at all, and could not enter the bios/UEFI either.

In the end I used the method detailed here fff. Right click on start, pick settings, then Update and Security, then select Recovery. Then click Restart Now from under Advanced Startup.

This worked fine, and gave a number of options which I did not explore, but the one I used was boot from usb device which gave the option of booting from a flash drive, which worked fine.

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This is fairly straightforward, but appears to be subject to the fundamental limitation that the Fritz Box cannot make use of multiple external IP addresses for the port forwarding, even if you are on an 8 port subnet like I am. I made absolutely sure that the Fritz Box was aware of the subnet by accessing its menus, then navigating to Home Network/Network on the left menus, and then clicking on the Network Settings tab. You then click on Additional settings to reveal some extra settings, and then scroll down and then click on IPv4 settings. Finally, if you scroll down and look under Public IPv4 Subnet you will see the public subnet visible/allocated to the Fritz Box, as a prefix and network mask.

In my case this was clearly an 8 port subnet, but unfortunately the fritz box only allowed port forwarding using the primary router public IP address.

I managed to work within this limitation however, as you can still forward multiple different ports to multiple different local devices. For example, to enable inbound RDP access to a PC as I did, do the following:-

1/ Visit Internet/Permit Access on the menus, and then click the Add device for sharing button.

2/ Select the target PC/device at the top, then at the bottom click New Sharing, which configures the desired sharing for the device.

3/ Then Click the Port Sharing radio button (as opposed to the default My FRITZ! sharing). Under application, I selected MS remote Desktop as the Fritz box was aware of RDP. You can select Other Application and enter the ports manually if you are working with an application that the Fritz box is unaware of.

4/ You then have 3 ports to configure, which is slightly confusing – I was not clear on all of this and the online help was blank on some of this detail. When I selected MS Remote Desktop, Port to Device and through… were both set to 3389, which was the correct internal port to use for RDP. Below this was Port requested externally, which is the actual external port you want to use. In one case therefore I left the defaults, but for a second PC, I set the external port to 3390, which allowed me to use the same external IP address for 2 different RDP configuration to access 2 different internal PCs successfully. I was not clear however what the distinction between Port to Device and through… was all about, but did not need to touch it.

5/ When accessing via the MS android RDP app, I was able to configure multiple PCs as required, and could also configure both Lan and internet configurations of the same PC so that I could access it both ways from my phone. A key trick here is that this app does allow a different RDP port to be used. Under PC name for the internet, I set the target IP address (the public IP address of the router), and appended a different port using e.g. :3390 notation to use port 3390 instead of 3389. You are able to give an additional friendly name for the PC when doing this, which is useful when configuring external IP access. Internally on the lan you can just use the standard windows network names. This then all worked fine and I was able to use my phone both to remotely access the fritz box to wake the PC, and then remote login using the MS RDP app to access it.

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As I found previously, there were a number of things to get right to make this work, as follows:-

1/ The bios settings for the motherboard need to be set correctly to enable it, and whether/how to do this varies depending on the motherboard. My older Gigabyte Z77-D3H at version F18 did not have a setting to enable this, but it turned out that it worked anyway once all the other issues were correctly address as below. My newer Asus Prime Z690M-Plus D4 did need a setting changed, and this was somewhat subtle. For this motherboard, from the home page you need to visit Advanced Mode/Advanced/APM Configuration/Power on by PCI-E, and enable this option. Note that you only find out from the prompt when you actually visit this option, which is labelled as PCI-E, that it also affects the onboard LAN as well as any PCI-E adapter. This was not clear.

2/ In Windows 10 and 11, open the control panel and visit Hardware and Sound/Power Options, and then select “Choose what power buttons do” on the left menu. Then click “Change settings that are currently unavailable” at the top, and this enables the “Turn on fast startup” option, which should be disabled. Whilst I am not certain that this is required, it was cited in this post re wake on lan, and turning it off did not slow boot time noticeably on my PCs, so I left it on.

3/ You then need to change the network adapter settings. Open the device manager and located your network adapter. Check the advanced settings and ensure that Wake on magic packet is enabled. Then, under the power management tab, allow this device to wake the computer, ensure that Only allow a magic packet to wake the computer is enabled. Again, I am not certain that the latter is absolutely required and I did get some intermittent behaviour when testing wake on lan, but in the end I have left this enabled, as I have no current requirement for any other way to wake the computer.

4/ On the Fritz Box 7530, wake on lan is built in. Navigate to Home Network/Network using the menus on the left, and then select the device that you want to wake. Note that it may be under active connections or idle connections in the list, and it is not clear what an idle connection means – a pc that is on/booted can appear in the idle connections list. Either way, this does not matter. You just click on the pencil icon as if to edit the settings for that device (even though you are not changing anything, this is where you will find wake on lan). Scroll to the bottom and you will see a button labelled Start Computer, which will successfully perform a wake on lan if all is in order. Note that to the left of this button is a check box labelled Start this computer automatically as soon as it is accessed from the internet. Whilst it might be convenient to enable this to save a manual wake on lan via the fritz box when accessing from the internet, I have elected not to do so at present as my needs for this are infrequent and it gives additional protection for the lan, as a remote fritz box access is needed to trigger this, which is of course password protected. However, doing it automatically would be a lot more convenient as accessing the fritz box remotely to do the wake on lan is perfectly possible and relatively straightforward, it does require several steps.

Once all this was done, I achieved consistent wake-on-lan behaviour using my Fritz Box 7530 to perform the wake on lan, as per this post here.

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Update/Fix 24/2/2022

It appears that in the end much of this issue was down to a basic error on my part! I have previously documented here and here about the collision of object namespaces when loading multiple webpack bundles for separately deployed web components/angular elements. My solution is to perform a custom post build step to rename the root webpack objects to be unique for each webpack deployment.

This requires building to be done using npm via npm run build rather than the basic angular/cli ng build. Unfortunately I did the latter when initially rebuilding the microapps, hence the post build step did not run and I suffered the consequences I have seen previously due to namespace collisions. Once I rebuild everything correctly, all the microapps worked fine.

Original Post

I had reinstalled a PC from scratch with Windows 10, and this required rebuilding my whole dev environment from scratch. I hit some issues when I just simplistically tried the latest node via nvm install, and the latest angular (14) on projects previously run under angular 11 – builds failed and would not complete. Initially I had failed to install node-sass, so installing this helped, but I was still getting webpack errors on building.

I reverted to angular 11, but also reverted node as well. Finding a compatibility matrix for the versions was tricky but this one on stack overflow was a real help. I therefore reverted node to 12.11.1 using nvm install 12.11.1., and reverted node-sass to 5.0 due to some build errors that stated that 4.0 or 5.0 was needed.

Having done this, I was able to do a build using ng build, but this would not run using http-server, which gave the error “Error [ERR_HTTP_HEADERS_SENT]: Cannot set headers after they are sent to the client”. My next action was to suspend/pause Kaspersky Antivirus, which helped, as it revealed a firewall port that I needed to enable. When I then immediately tried running directly using ng serve, this worked fine and I was finally able to successfully run my microapp fabric.

I then uploaded the built microapp as a test version under my zen hosting and tried running it from there. This ran fine with no errors, pointing to a local issue with my http-server. This likely needed an older version. I reverted to 0.12.2 to correspond with the current version when I last worked on the microapps, using the http-server version list here,  but this did not work.

I then checked exactly which versions of key components had been used successfully under Windows 7, and reverted to exactly those versions. These were v15.5.0 of node.js, and v0.12.3 of http-server. This worked successfully, and I was able to run compiled versions of both the fabric and the dataview microapp. Whilst I could have checked the versions used previously more carefully, this certainly highlights the potential brittleness of the environment as a whole to version changes.

I then upgraded http-server to the latest version and tried again, and everything still worked fine. Therefore, this definitely appears to point to an issue with the version of node.js alone. It also highlights issues with the version matrix I hunted down previously as above. I ended up using a later version of node which was technically incompatible in terms of the above version matrix, but which worked successfully, whereas a version mandated by the version matrix failed completely with the above error.

This whole area of versioning can certainly prove to be an unexpected and ill-documented minefield!

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I had some issues when upgrading to windows 10 – when sleeping/waking I sometimes got a blue screen error which forced an immediate reboot. I was running bios revision F18, so elected to upgrade to the latest non-beta version which was F22 at the time.

Reflashing was fine using qflash straight from the bios having placed the new bios image on a flash drive. It was also safe as the motherboard was dual bios so wouldn’t brick itself if I accidentally had a power fail whilst flashing.

However, Windows 10 would not boot after the reflash. The reflash reset all motherboard settings to default, so after some investigation I noticed that the Peripherals, SATA mode selection was set to IDE rather than AHCI, the latter being required by Windows 10 (and also used by my Windows 7 installation previously). Changing this allowed the system to safely reboot, only needing a slight repair fix by windows which took only a few seconds. All was then well. I had also tried to set the OS type to “Win 8” rather than the default of “Other”, but this was in fact a red herring – not sure what this setting does exactly (claims to allow certain Windows 8 features but does not elaborate), so in the end I just left the setting at “Other”.

This fixed the issue. 

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I experimented with mounting a backup image from a particular backup point on a job, using the Backup software.
This worked fine, and a new drive letter was created which could be browsed directly via windows explorer.
I was not clear how to dismount the image, and the documentation said that it would only remain mounted until a reboot anyway.

In fact, after rebooting, the image remained mounted in error even if the backup disk was not available (obviously it could not be fully browsed). I managed to remove it consistently by de-assigning its drive letter in disk management, then rendering it offline in disk management, and then using device manager to delete the UIM device for the mounted image, which appeared under disk devices. This worked ok providing all the steps were done in the right order, otherwise it appeared to remain around after a reboot.

After trying again in the backup software, I found it was a simple user error – the mount screen allows selection of a drive letter, and if one is already selected you can select “None” again to remove it and dismount the image. This was not immediately obvious the first time around – I failed to notice that “None” was available in the list as it was hidden and you need to explicitly scroll to the very top of the list to see it.

Once I dismounted the image this way, it worked immediately and completely removed the image and the device even without a reboot.

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