Surviving the dumb transitions
Apr. 11th, 2009 06:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurToday's project was one of those silly Windows hassles: I decided that, five years after Applied Messaging ceased to be Applied Messaging, and 18 months after the company entirely ceased to exist, I really ought to stop having this laptop think that it was named "mwaks-lap1.appliedmessaging.com". It's been toddling along ever since the company died, pining for its domain controller, hoping someday to synchronize with the network, never quite getting to do so. But that's been getting in the way of networking at home (in particular, our new desktop didn't want to talk to a non-workgroup machine), so I decided to deal.
It was a rather tense process, and frankly I almost screwed up. Fortunately, it occurred to me *before* rebooting the machine that, if I didn't create a local account on the laptop itself, I'd never be able to log into it again; had I not thought of that, this post would be *much* crankier. I couldn't find a way to transition the old mwaks@AMC account over to a local one, so I created a new mwaks2 just on this machine, and that, blessedly, seems to have worked. (Of course, the fingerprint reader on this machine won't let me register one of my fingers for the new account, because it's already registered for the old one: need to figure out if I can remove the old finger from its records.)
Now I just need to transition all the data over. Nothing's been lost per se, since I'm switching from one admin account to another, but since it thinks I'm a completely different person, all those configuration settings need to get copied over. Fortunately, this is fairly straightforward for the important programs (like Firefox). And it *is* finally able to talk to our desktop machine, so yay...
It was a rather tense process, and frankly I almost screwed up. Fortunately, it occurred to me *before* rebooting the machine that, if I didn't create a local account on the laptop itself, I'd never be able to log into it again; had I not thought of that, this post would be *much* crankier. I couldn't find a way to transition the old mwaks@AMC account over to a local one, so I created a new mwaks2 just on this machine, and that, blessedly, seems to have worked. (Of course, the fingerprint reader on this machine won't let me register one of my fingers for the new account, because it's already registered for the old one: need to figure out if I can remove the old finger from its records.)
Now I just need to transition all the data over. Nothing's been lost per se, since I'm switching from one admin account to another, but since it thinks I'm a completely different person, all those configuration settings need to get copied over. Fortunately, this is fairly straightforward for the important programs (like Firefox). And it *is* finally able to talk to our desktop machine, so yay...