Branching Out

Posted by beakersoft | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 23-12-2008

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Me and a couple of the guys i work with a decided to have a good at writing our own software, and making it available online. We are going under the (rather good i think) name of we3soft, and you can get at our website by visiting www.we3soft.com

We have got quite a few ideas/applications in the pipeline, and hope to start working with some of our local businesses on some of there projects. At the mo we have only one application (and its in beta) avaialble for download on the website. It goes by the name of SwitchWatch.

Basiclly, you can use it to tell you what ports in cisco switches have been unused for a period of time you specifically, this will allow you to tidy up the rats next of cables that lives in your comms room. At the moment the application is still in beta, and will only report on the first 5 unused ports per switch. In order to encourage people to test the app, we are giving away 20 free licences once it comes out of beta.

All you have to do to quailfy for a free copy is head over to www.we3soft.com/switchwatch, download the app and tell us what you think about it in our forum. Let us know if it worked fine, if you had any problems with it or if you have any feature requests. If your are in the first 20 to give us your comment we will send you a free licnece key as soon as we come out of beta, so head over there now!!

Report Services Printer Control Problem

Posted by beakersoft | Posted in SQL Reporting Services | Posted on 23-12-2008

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Not sure how many of you have hit this, but recently we have had a problem with users not being able to print out reports from the browser. When they hit the print icon after runnig a report, they are given the message

Cannot load client print control’

Turns out that one of the patches Microsoft issue out (on a seemingly never ending basis) breaks(well, blocks) the activex. The patch in question is the ActiveX killbit one (i cant remember the kb number), there appears to be a problem with the old version of the print control activex, and when the latest patch is applied to the clients it stops the print control working.

The way to get it working again is basilcly to patch your reports server. This is something i am always a bit cautious of doing, as in the past i have had problems (service pack one removed the ability to do a multi select parameter) but this time i had a virtual server i could snapshot, patch then test.

To get it working again, i installed first of all SQL 2005 service pack 2 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=d07219b2-1e23-49c8-8f0c-63fa18f26d3a&displaylang=en), then the latest hotfix rollup (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956854). On a couple of the client machines this seemed to fix the problem without having to re-download the control, but on others we had to remove the control first, then re-install it and it worked a treat