Oh no! What have I done?

Having recreated and I think improved my website by using WordPress I wanted to the remove the problem of now having both the old and new sites running. The new site (I’ll call it .uk) looks nicer and is so much easier to update than the old one (I’ll call that one .co.uk). I had created the new site inside a directory (/blog) of my old site and I had set my domain name www.rayhutchings.uk to redirect to www.rayhutchings.co.uk/blog.

A simple change to one setting. What could go wrong?

Hindsight is always good, but at 7am in the morning applying the same redirection to the .co.uk domain sounded like a plan. Yes, I agree that there was the possibility that redirecting “www.rayhutchings.co.uk” to “www.rayhutchings.co.uk/blog” involved recursion, but far more superior minds than mine created this stuff. It was 7.05am when I discovered that “.co.uk/blog/blog/blog/blog …” was indeed the result and it was 7.11am when I deleted the redirect. Which I thought would return things to how they were before I started.

Unfortunately not to be the case. Neither domain names, .uk and .co.uk, were pointing at anything of use. I had to call 123-reg technical support, fine people they are too, who spotted almost immediately that in the process of creating the forward I had changed the DNS Address Record (A record) in my hosting table so my primary domain, .co.uk, was no longer pointing at my web hosting. A quick fix was to correct the A record – the fix took 2 minutes but it took a further 3 hours to propagate fully around the Internet.

Free Parking for homeless domains.

I discovered afterwards that the correct solution was to copy two files from “/blog” to “/” and change a setting in the WordPress control panel. Job done in 30 seconds and now both URLs point to the same web site.

Simplest solution:

If y=x^n then x=y^(1/n)

Or, if you have log tables:

If y=x^n then

• log y = n log x
• log x = (log y) / n
• x = e((log y) / n)

Who would have thought that running a simple pre installed application on my company laptop would cause me so many problems . . .

“running a simple, pre installed application”

I’ve had a Lenovo T440 that has a fingerprint scanner for about a year. It runs Windows 8.0 that is built to meet my employer’s security requirements. That scanner has never worked and has been about as much use as a match in a furnace. Last Friday afternoon just before heading out for a first Friday peal I came across the pre installed “Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro”. OK, lets have a look and see what this does was my first thought. (Actually, after a year I had just started to get an understanding of Windows 8).

“Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro”

On first looks it seemed the application would let me use the fingerprint reader and promised me logon and to access the laptop from the screen saver. Good! That could save me 20 -30 seconds a day. I haven’t got time to set it up now, but I must have a look at this next week. I closed the application in the expectation that I would carry on next week when I had a little more time. What I didn’t know, and what it didn’t tell me, was that on closing the application it was going to patch Windows 8 to disable domain logins, enable local login against a fingerprint I hadn’t trained and an account that didn’t exist.

I knew something was wrong when I tried to wake the laptop. Ctr+Alt+Delete didn’t give the usual boxes for username and password. Nope, just a blank screen with the fingerprint scanner turned on.

No way to enter username and password for a cached domain logon!

And that is pretty much when I knew the only way back was a total rebuild. The installed security software made it impossible to read the disk; so everything on there, which includes 17 years of mail archives and the last three weeks of work have gone.

“17 years of mail archives and the last three weeks work have gone”

It’s a bit of a blow! Even desktop support said, “ah, we’ve seen this before. You could probably do with the latest build.”