How to use Windows Mobile Sync Center on Vista with F-Secure Client Security
We’ve been using F-Secure as our virus/malware protection in our company for a little over a year now. I have been and continue to be impressed with the product and the company support.
Recently I purchased my new laptop with Windows Vista installed. More recently I purchased a new HTC P4300 smartphone with Windows Mobile 5. It’s been working great, and I love the phone. The only weird issue has been syncing with the USB cable. In order to make it work I had to temporarily turn off the firewall inside of F-Secure Client Security. Syncing via Bluetooth was working fine so I tended to lean on that.
Today I decided it was time to fix the issue. I gave a call to the business support line at F-Secure, explained the problem quickly to the technician. She told me right off the bat that this was an issue she had no experience with, so she asked if I minded giving her a little time to investigate. Of course I said that was fine.
Within 30 minutes I had an email from her outlining the solution. My total phone time was about 5 minutes and then another 5 to put the fix into place. Thank you!
The problem is simply that the Sync Center in Vista uses some ports over the USB connection that are new enough not to be included as a standard. After adding the ports and making sure that one of the applications was allowed, everything worked great. Since I do not believe they have a technical article yet, I thought I would outline the solution here in case anyone else needs it.
Please note that these steps only work if your security policy allows you to edit a few things. If you are running in a corporate environment you may need to give these instructions to your network administrator to include in the corporate policies for your virus protection.
Step 1
The first thing to do is to get into the Client Security configuration screen where we’ll be doing most of the work. Right click on the F-Secure icon in your system tray and choose Open F-Secure Client Security. This will bring up the main window. You will want to choose the Internet Shield menu option on the left, then click on the Change link next to Application Control.
Step 2
Next you need to add the application that does the communication to the allowed list in Application Control. wmdHost.exe is the component that performs the actual communication requests. It is possible that this application may already be there, but if it is not, simply click Add it to include it in the list. If it is not in the list it should be found in C:\Windows\WindowsMobile\ If you do have to add the file, I’ve noticed that my Client Security software will default to the access level of prompt for a new application. The other bit that is odd is that it will not let me change it when I’m adding the file. I complete the addition to the list, then go back in to the details to modify it. At this point it will let me change the behavior to Allow.
Step 3
Finally you need to create a new service and add the necessary ports. There are 5 inbound and 1 outbound port necessary.
Start by switching to the Firewall configuration screen, then to the Services tab and add a new one. I simply called it Windows Mobile Sync Center. Make sure to choose the TCP protocol.
On the screen where you add, there are two areas for ports. They are termed Initiator ports and Responder ports. These map to inbound and outbound. Here are the correct settings:
Initiator (inbound) ports:
- 990
- 999
- 5678
- 5721
- 26675
Responder (outbound) ports:
- 5 679
Once you’ve made all of those configuration changes you are ready to give it a shot. Grab your Windows Mobile device and your USB cable and hook them up. You should get the Connected check box and see it synchronize as expected.
I hope that helps you out!
A Milestone!
Apparently the Windows 2000 daylight saving issue is on the mind of many network administrators. My original post pointing to the patch that we used is getting quite a bit of traffic. It is understandable with the new date for daylight saving time looming only a few weeks away.
But that is not the milestone.
Most of the traffic that post is receiving is coming from search engines. I decided to check out how people were getting there by searching on Google for Windows 2k daylight saving patch and was surprised, very pleasantly I might add, to find the #1 link for that search term to be my post!
I know that the rankings on google are fairly fluid so I thought I would capture it for posterity. Thank you Google and thanks to all out there who may have linked back here to help get me a milestone such as this!
NFS Server on Windows; What a pain!
We use a nice open source package called BackupPC. It is a nice system with a powerful web interface that has many capabilities to interact with other nix and windows based hosts.
We had been using smb (Samba) to do most backups from windows hosts, however there was one problem with our Exchange Server. The backup file was huge, roughly 16GB using ntbackup. Samba has a limitation of 2GB files for transfer, so that was a killer.
Initially I took the “quick and dirty” route. I created a batch file that ran the backup and use the split command to split the backup file into 500mb chunks. It worked, but what a hack! Recovery means restoring the files and using join to get them back together. Not a fun prospect.
I recently ran across the the Windows Services For Unix (SFU) on a different server and found that it had the ability to add NFS server functionality to a Windows 2003 server. Hallelujah! No more 2GB limitations!
I looked up documentation on installing and configuring things. I found that I had to implement User Mapping in order for Windows to translate UNIX users to Windows accounts. No problem, it all seemed very straight forward. I set up my shares, made sure my permissions were correct and that my users were mapped. The drive mounted on my Linux box perfectly! Then I tried to list the contents:
Permission Denied
Dang, so close! I must have mucked up permissions, right? Wrong. I went through all of the standard troubleshooting, opened the share up to everyone including root access, mapped, remapped and changed other settings. Still nothing. Ugh! Time to search Google. I found many similar issues, but nothing that was what I really needed. Many people had permission denied problems that turned out to be issues with user mapping or root access. Not my problems, although I tried everything I found.
Finally I went directly to Google Groups and began searching. After a few pages of things I’d seen before, I ran across a post that pointed me to this TechNet article. I do not know why it was so hard to find this. Searches at the MS Knowledge base did not yield these results.
Anyway, it turned out the only problem was a single initial setting all the way at the top of the SFU snap-in. It is under the Settings tab and it simply says Server Name. It was blank! I would have thought that it would put the default name of the server in there, but it did not. No biggie, I changed it and viola, everything worked! I backed out of all my troubleshooting changes to give access only to Backup Operators and no root access to the share and things ran very smoothly.
Hopefully someone may find this pointer faster than I did, if so then my work here is done! Until the next problem of course. 
Bluetooth is da stuff!
I must say that Bluetooth technology is very nice. Now I understand that there are a lot of things that it is incapable of doing based in the simple protocol, however I like the simplicity! It makes my life easier!
My current phone is the Nokia 6820 and I recently purchased the Nokia N80 for my wife for Christmas (yes, she loves techie stuff too). Both are of course Bluetooth enabled which integrates into the hands free in the care nicely. It also enabled me to easily move her contacts from her old phone to the new one. I use it at work to send and read my text messages via the Nokia PC Suite on my laptop which lets me get my messages out there much easier.
There are folks out there critical of Bluetooth shortcomings as a wireless protocol. To them I say, pfft! For certain things, simple is better! Adding a lot of “robust” features to the protocol may degrade its usefulness as a personal area network device! If you want the robust feature set, go Wi-Fi and be quiet!
As a side note, the N80 I gave to my wife is extremely cool. I’m jealous now! While I do not need the 3 megapixel cameral in my phone, the rest of the feature set is great! I will try to write a proper review sometime soon.
Development Cycle
The company that I work for has a web-based product/service that we sell, a content management system that I feel (yes I am a bit biased) is a very nice, user friendly system that empowers website owners to keep their content fresh easily.
Now that my marketing spiel is complete (and not a good one at that. I am an engineer after all!) I will move on to my point. How do we keep adding new features, fixing existing bugs and maintain quaility in our product?
I will preface this with a few notes. First, we generally have a high satisfaction rate. Our customer service is excellent and the product works well. It is one of the more user friendly packages that I have seen that does not pigeon-hole our customers into “canned” looks.
Second, we are not perfect. We do updates roughly every month, and while many of them go smooth, once in a while we lay an egg. The severity of the bugs introduced and the number of customers that it affects determine if that egg is from a quail, or an ostrich.
The goal is to continue providing enhancements and features that our customers will find valuable while reducing both the number and size of the eggs that are laid, that is publishing with fewer and less critical bugs.
The way to make progress towards our goal is by using a dicipline in the development cycle to manage the risks. It’s not complicated, but there are caveats that I will discuss in a moment.
As stated before, we publish updates on a fairly aggressive schedule which averages about once a month. This means that the first step is to choose a target publishing date. For example we will say the next publish in on the 30th, a Thursday.
Now that we know when we are publishing, we begin to work everything backwards. We know that our product must go through a quality assurance (QA) cycle where users that are not developers will test and try to break the code, find the bugs and help get them fixed. As a rough estimate we will want a week of this. That is our next date, the 23rd. This is an important date. By the 23rd the development staff must be done fixing and adding features. If something is not complete by this time, and this is the important part, it does not make it into this cycle. This is perhaps the second most difficult part of the process which I will explain in a moment (again) with the other delayed topic.
Working off of the date of the 23rd, we have another date to calculate. Before the product goes into QA the developers need a certain amount of time, say 4 days. This means that by the Monday the 20th, we are only testing things that are complete. Once again, anything not finished in our minds by this time to the point where the developers are just testing does not make it into this publish. This is the most difficult part of the process!
So far we have the 20th where features and fixes may get dropped, and the 23th where features and fixes that were thought to be completed by the 20th but did not make it through the 4 day testing/fix/repeat process are once again dropped. The reason these to points are so difficult has no technical reasoning, but rather psycological roots. We (humans) want to make other people happy, and the way to do that in our business is by fixing tings and giving them more, therefor the mentality becomes, “I can add this one last fix tonight and John Doe will love it!” This is a good quality to posses, but it is dangerous if not tempered.
There is one more important piece to this puzzel that I have not yet mentioned. Defining the items to be worked. This is a two-fold process. First bugs and features must be combined into a prioritized list. The driving foce behind this list needs to be customer service since they are on the front-lines talking to the people using the system every day. By the way, customer service should also be heavily involved in the second QA portion of the cycle. Second, management budgets a certain amount of time/money for the product. This determines how far down the priority list we think we are going to on this cycle. Note that the dates of the 20th and the 24th may decrease or increase that number.
The point is sticking to your guns and being honest about the drop-off dates. We have learned that as we add features and fix bugs in an attempt to make people happy at the last minute, those items do not get the attention necessary in QA to ensure a smooth release. They will ususally result in an egg, and sometimes it’s an ostrich that is laying it.
The difficult part in those dates comes from the fact that we must say “no” to something, which means that we are effectually saying “no” to someone and that goes against our nature. It is a necessary “evil”, if you will. Saying no may dissapoint, however saying yes many times will cause many more people to become frustrated and unhappy.
Someone once told me, we are defined not by what we say yes to, but rather by what we say no to. I believe that this is true and that it defines our product. The more we say no, the better the product becomes with increased stabilization. The features will get added, the bugs fixed, but at a pace that is managable and does not compromise the stability by introducing more bugs that were fixed.
If you have other ideas that work for you, please feel free to comment. I do not believe that this system is perfect, but at the time it seems to be a fairly solid process.
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