A client reported issues with the Five9 Agent client not working correctly. The agent.jnlp file would download, and would initially open but would error out before the splash screen went away. After some troubleshooting, we determined that there were three semi-problems working in tandem creating one big problem.

Problem 1: Chrome no longer supports NPAPI-based plugins, of which Java is one

Problem 2: The default save location for Chrome is %USERPROFILE%\Downloads, which in this instance has been redirected via group policy to a network drive subfolder

Problem 3: The Five9 software does not like it when it is run from a network-based location

Add all these up and you get the following: when the user clicks on the “Agent” link, instead of instantly opening because Chrome “understands” Java, the agent.jnlp file is simply downloaded to the users “Downloads” folder and then a second click is required to run the software from the download bar in Chrome.

Since we couldn’t change the default download location in Chrome for other political reasons, we needed to find an easy way to get Chrome to “understand” that .jnlp files are executable rather than necessary to download. Our solution was to install the “IE Tab for Chrome” extension.

IE Tab works by taking the entire viewable size of a tab and running an instance of Internet Explorer within it, more or less transparently to the user. You can define the sites that you wish to have IE Tab intercept from Chrome and reload in this IE-ish window so that you don’t have to toggle a button each time you visit the site. Since IE still allows NPAPI-based plugins such as Java, it means that when viewed in IE Tab, the Five9 site will automatically launch the .jnlp file since it is only downloaded to the user’s Temporary Internet Files location which is on their local C: drive, and will open correctly.

Steps to solve this issue:

1. Open Google Chrome
2. In the Omnibox, search for “IETab”
3. The first link should be “IE Tab – Chrome Web Store” – select that link
4. Click the “Add To Chrome” button at the top-right
5. When prompted, click the “Add extension” button
6. You may close the “IE Tab Documentation” tab that appears
7. Login to the Five9 website but do not attempt to run any of the apps
8. Once logged in, click the IE Tab button next to the Omnibar as shown
   
9. On the “One-time installation steps” page that opens, click “Keep” on the download prompt on the download bar at the bottom of the window, and then click the downloaded program “ietabhelper.exe” to run it
   
10. If the publisher is listed as “Blackfish Software”, click “Run” on the Security Warning window that appears
11. The tab should reload and now you will need to login to Five9 again
12. Once logged in, the Five9 applications (e.g. Agent, Administrator, etc.) should all open correctly in IE Tab within Chrome

For the longest time, I’ve wanted to use Plex to organize my family’s local media but due to our library’s rather large size, it’s been difficult to use for one particular reason: searching.

We have a Logitech Harmony One remote which has worked great with Emby and Windows Media Center because using the number pad at the bottom of the remote, you could jump through the media list via letter, similar to the old method of T9 texting. The one thing holding us back from using PleX has been the fact that while everything else on the remote works natively with it, jumping by letter didn’t. This meant manually scrolling through hundreds upon hundred of titles if the movie started with a letter in the middle of the alphabet.

Thanks to DeadEyeFlint on the PleX forums, I finally have a solution!

NOTE: I believe these same instructions will work for Kodi as well, but as I do not use it, I cannot confirm that

Now you should be able to jump from letter to letter, using the keypad on your remote!

We deployed a number of new machines this week, and we received this error on every single one of them whenever we tried to add printers. If you tried to start the spooler and then tried to add the printer, it would just crash again.

After some investigation, it turned out that the VMware Tools software had mistakenly been deployed to these machines (obviously in error, since they are not virtual machines). That in and of itself isn’t a problem – you simply uninstall it and you should be on your way. However what *didn’t* happen during the uninstall was there should have been a registry key deleted which wasn’t and was causing issues.

The key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\ThinPrint Print Port Monitor for VMWare

By deleting that entire key, we could start the print spooler and add the drivers correctly.

I was getting error A12E1 as soon as the download would finish and the app would try to start installing.

While I’m still not sure why it was failing, the solution was pretty simple:

1. Open C:\Users\username\AppData\Local
2. Copy the “CreativeCloudPackager.zip” file from that file to any other location on my computer (I used C:\Temp, but just get it out of that folder)
3. Extract the .zip file
4. Run the extracted Setup.exe file

While I can’t guarantee that it will work for you, it did work for me and since I couldn’t find any other instructions like this online, I thought I’d pass it on.