Firefox upgrade problems – bookmarks and settings lost

The firefox 1.5 upgrade moves all the user settings and bookmarks to a backup directory and basically starts the user off with a fresh profile. Some people find this disconcerting and would like their settings back. Mozilla has a help page about settings files that is quite helpful. On my mom's linux system the settings file was slightly different, though. It is a file called prefs.js, not user.js as that page says. The bookmarks are in a file called bookmarks.html. Those two files were all that were needed to make my mom happy again!

cd ~/.mozilla_backup_200606062208/firefox/wrqqjf89.default

200606062208 is the date/time the software was installed, and wrqqjf89 will be different for other computers. It will be <some code>.default.

cp bookmarks.html ~/.mozilla/firefox/9g9jmv95.default/bookmarks.html

That will copy the bookmarks. Again the code preceding ".default" will vary.

cp prefs.js ~/.mozilla/firefox/9g9jmv95.default/prefs.js

That will copy the settings/preferences. That is not as important for many people, but the home page, etc are stored there.

MS SQL Server local file backup problem resolved

I recently ran across a problem twice with backup maintenance plans in Microsoft SQL Server (2000+). The following error started to appear when the file backup job started to run:

… – Message: The job failed. Unable to determine if the owner (DOMAIN\Administrator) of job DB Backup Job for DB Maintenance Plan 'DB Maintenance Plan1' has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user 'DOMAIN\Administrator'/ [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 8198)).

There seemed to be lots of people with the same problem but no solutions offered. Here's the solution that worked for us:

1. Go to Administrative Tools -> Services. Click on SQLSERVERAGENT and select Properties from the Action menu. Click on the Log On tab. Select Local System Account. Click on the General Tab. Select Startup Type: Automatic and hit OK.
2. In Enterprise Manager, go to Maintenance, and click on SQL Server Agent. Select Properties from the Action menu. Click on the Connection. Select Use Windows Authentication and hit OK (You may need to stop and restart the SQL Server service at this point).
3. In Enterprise Manager, click on the name of the local server and select Edit SQL Server Registration properties… Select Use SQL Server Authentication (we used sa), and hit OK. 
4. Delete the existing database plan and create a new one.