Messages

576

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: On importing data into Clipboard Help and Spell

« on: November 24, 2013, 09:54 AM »

Ditto keeps its data in a Sqlite database, and there's an option to export clips to a .dto file (the only format available).  Would you like a sample?

577

General Software Discussion / Re: CryptoLocker and CryptoPrevent

« on: November 20, 2013, 05:17 AM »

I have installed it on my home PCs and advised some client techs to install on PCs of.. umm.. "likely suspects"..

Have not seen any issues that it causes on Win 7 or 8. Same thing can be done with a GPO at business sites but this is an easy way to make the same settings at smaller sites.

I think if you're a business owner who employs non-technical staff this ought to scare the bejesus out of you. Unless all your work is done through a web proxy or something.

578

General Software Discussion / Re: Outlook PST Repair Recommendations?

« on: November 15, 2013, 07:48 PM »

Have you tried attaching them to Outlook?

If you just want to view the contents, you can use the Kernel PST viewer without having Outlook installed.

579

General Software Discussion / Re: NLB and Load Balancing

« on: November 14, 2013, 08:05 PM »

We implemented Microsoft's NLB freebie for an Exchange implementation a year or so ago.  The company wanted redundancy so we spun up two CAS servers with NLB in front (plus two pairs of mailbox servers in a DAG, but NLB is irrelevant there).  It's free, but is very basic in that it does not guarantee session persistence to a particular node.  A lot of applications are OK with that, others aren't.  A few years back we put a Big IP box up in front of a web app because the application vendor insisted on load balancing and stated the application needed the session persistence.

It sounds like you have a front end box (the specialized switch?) to do the load balancing, hopefully it'll handle that.  Should make troubleshooting a little easier if the client connection is sticking around on one machine.

580

General Software Discussion / Re: The Open Source debate

« on: November 12, 2013, 06:45 PM »

"Well, it's insecure. If the code's available to anyone, then anything could happen. A security nightmare."

-oblivion (November 12, 2013, 05:27 PM)

The most likely things that could happen would be the whole community could (a) test in a variety of situations and configurations, (b) find and test edge conditions in real life, (c) suggest improvements in workflow or efficiency -- and have a chance to suggest the code for it, (d)  find bugs -- and have a chance to suggest the code to fix them, ...

A real security nightmare would be if you use a closed source program and depend on it, and the company goes out of business (or gets litigated out of existence, or destroyed by a meteorite, or inserts a back door for the NSA or the Russian Mafia, or...), and you have no choice but to convert to another system at great expense and pain. If that's even possible.

581

Living Room / Re: Issues in Windows 8.0 and 8.1 migration

« on: November 10, 2013, 10:38 AM »

Thanks - it hadn't gotten annoying enough to make me do the edit yet, but would have soon!

582

Living Room / Re: Issues in Windows 8.0 and 8.1 migration

« on: November 10, 2013, 07:54 AM »

My 2 cents:

I bought a new PC, Win 8 preinstalled, when my desktop box suddenly crashed and burned. I had not played with it before, and I found it awkward, unintuitive and undiscoverable. However, with the addition of a start menu program (Start8 in my case though Classic Shell works well too) and some other settings, I'm happy now -- basically because it stays in the Desktop (Win 7) interface.

To this point, there is nothing that I have found in the Metro/Modern interface that is uniquely useful enough to me to make me switch to that interface. If I had a touchscreen I would rethink - but I don't. Basically, like a lot of other software, Win 8 works great for me, and it has "features" that I don't take advantage of.

Value judgement: I had two PCs for my kids recent enough that I could get the 9.95 upgrade price. Did not take advantage of it for either.

Regarding 8.1, Darwin's post scared me off (and that accursed "Please upgrade! Drop on by the Windows Store now!" blue bar across my desktop has popped up several times so far).   

583

General Software Discussion / Re: CryptoLocker and CryptoPrevent

« on: November 03, 2013, 04:43 PM »

PPS: Though it is evil, such viruses teach people to do regular backups.

-Raven (November 03, 2013, 02:28 PM)

Actually, it just teaches them what can happen if they don't do backups.

Among other things, our company sells a service that backs up client servers hourly and can spin them up quickly in the case of hardware failure or other calamity. We've already used it twice to restore client servers that were 'Crypto-Lockered".  (Not the same client both times!)  We also saw it hit at another site; we didn't have our backup system in place there so I'm not sure what came of it.  But if your company depends on its data, and the data gets honked, and you don't have a good backup, either you pay up or your company is gone.  To heck with ethics, I think most small business owners would not want to go out of business just to prove a point.

584

Living Room / Re: Android upgrade ... help ... lost internet page shortcuts

« on: November 01, 2013, 08:25 PM »

Whenever I have a link I think I might want to look at again, I just email it to my Gmail account. That way I can find it later, plus it makes it easier for both Google and the NSA to find out what I'm up to easily. (Not like there's any way to prevent either from happening!  )

585

Living Room / Re: What made you smile today?

« on: October 18, 2013, 05:14 AM »

My sleeping kids.





Then I remember I have to wake the kids up. 

586

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Networking, help me understand.

« on: October 16, 2013, 07:57 AM »

Or run two DCs, one physical on cheapo hardware

-Stoic Joker (October 15, 2013, 11:14 PM)

+1 on that... a DC by itself isn't that heavy a hitter, an old desktop machine should handle it fine in most cases. Just don't put other stuff on the DC (which I always recommend against anyway) and it's quick to spin up a replacement if you need it.

587

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows Networking, help me understand.

« on: October 15, 2013, 08:35 AM »

Replacing a DC is no problem really, just build a fresh server and run dcpromo to make the new one and then dcpromo the old one to remove it.  Just make sure to have DNS installed on the new box before promotion and point it to the old one for DNS, then when the new DC is happy (always seems to take an extra reboot for me) point everything to it for DNS instead before decommissioning the old one.  I haven't worked in a single-DC environment but I'd set the new box to be a global catalog too.

Of course if you're replacing it after 5 years you'd want to update the forest and domain schemas to the latest.

Much nicer now than the days of NT4 domains.  (Though we found the Upromote utility late in the game, that makes it a little easier...)

588

Living Room / Re: Core Internet Institutions Abandon US Government

« on: October 14, 2013, 09:33 AM »

a new, trustworthy and international custodianship...

-IainB (October 13, 2013, 08:08 PM)

... and of course we've never seen a trustworthy custodianship usurped...

589

General Software Discussion / Re: Adobe does it again with a revised 'boot' policy - kick customer in teeth.

« on: October 09, 2013, 06:49 PM »

I guess they figured if you were too cheap to up for the whole suite, then you aren't gonna jump on the whole Creative Cloud suite anyway, and this is a chance for another revenue stream.

(If you really want to take advantage of their kind offer, I'll send you my CS3 key. Anything I need to do can be done in CS2 or in something else, and I haven't even fired it up for a few months now.)

590

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory of folders inside a folder limited by depth showing complete path

« on: October 05, 2013, 08:58 PM »

Good deal!!

Now, time to fix that Notepad (ugh!) problem... Grab Notepad Replacer and install it and point it to your notepad++ exe, and you won't have to worry about Notepad Original popping up its ugly head any more... 

591

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory of folders inside a folder limited by depth showing complete path

« on: October 05, 2013, 05:16 PM »

The Unix utils "find" is attached to my message (7-zipped), since it comes in a much bigger package and it is buried inside that package.  I think also that SFU is really much bigger than you want and is more intrusive on your system, especially when you just want a little utility.  The gsar program was linked in the text of the message, it's at http://home.online.no/~tjaberg/, I can attach it too if you have any trouble getting it.

The gsar lines can be edited and modified if they don't do what you need, just let me know!

592

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory of folders inside a folder limited by depth showing complete path

« on: October 04, 2013, 08:35 PM »

You should be able to get the list easily enough with the "find" program from the ports of Gnu utilities.  I think I attached just that file below, 7-zipped (please see the site for the appropriate license).  A command line like "find -type d -maxdepth 4" would give you four levels of directories.  Then add gsar (general search and replace) for your edits.  Run this from the top level of your folder structure:

find -type d -maxdepth 4 > ~1.txt
gsar -sC:\Websites\ -r ~1.txt ~2.txt
gsar -s"empty directory\" -r ~2.txt ~3.txt
gsar -s\ -r/ ~3.txt final.txt
del ~1.txt
del ~2.txt
del ~3.txt

Is this close to what you need?  (Forgive if not, it has been a long week!)

593

General Software Discussion / Re: LastPass - What are your thoughts?

« on: October 03, 2013, 05:16 AM »

Thanks Iain.  Momentary heart stoppage here when I increased the iterations (from 42? "Don't Panic" I guess) up to 5000 and it re-encrypted everything, then the vault showed up empty... they should have posted a note about needing to log back in afterward...  

594

General Software Discussion / Re: LastPass - What are your thoughts?

« on: September 30, 2013, 06:53 PM »

Same here, I'll third Dezoaan & Carol. The browser plugins all behave a little differently and I've had some issues with Firefox not dropping down the menu when I want it occasionally, but other than that no issues.

595

General Software Discussion / Re: extract lines containing

« on: September 23, 2013, 07:45 PM »

qgrep -y findme *.txt > results.txt

That's on a Windows platform with qgrep (from one of the old resource kits).  The -y means case insensitive, findme is the string to find (you could look for multiple words with "one two" instead, it will find lines with either), you're searching through all the .txt files and directing the output to a file.

Of course there are more options with a real grep, depending on your platform.

596

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« on: September 21, 2013, 05:58 PM »

^ awesome stuff! 

597

Developer's Corner / Re: Odd/Fun Ways You've Learned Programming

« on: September 18, 2013, 08:20 PM »

I played with a Sinclair ZX80 for a month or two (it was only $88!), then upgraded to an Atari 400. Soon after that someone (company name lost in the mists of antiquity) released a language cart called "Action!" that I pounced on. Among other things it allowed you to call assembly routines stored as strings, so I crafted a whole library of string handling functions in lovingly hand-assembled, relocatable tiny 6502 assembler... I think the most exotic routine was probably around 40 bytes of code. Ah, those were the days! (Moving up to an Atari ST with a good assembler and an IDE and debugger seemed luxurious, satisfying in a different way; not as intimate with the code as the hand assembly was, but a whole heap more productive...)

(Coding was my key to a sysop post on Compuserve for a few years too, back before all that newfangled WWW stuff...  )

598

Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« on: September 15, 2013, 10:40 AM »

Does it have the latest BIOS & ESM installed?

599

Living Room / Re: Hardware Question: Baseboard Management Controller communication failure

« on: September 14, 2013, 03:28 PM »

This from Dell forums:

Good Day,

I have a PowerEdge 2950 server that has been down for 6months, just booted it up today and i'm getting the following error at post "Baseboard Management Controller Communication Failure".

I can still boot into the server, but my fans are spinning out of control and generating some serious noise. I checked under the Open Manage Server Administrator and i'm not seeing my fans at all.  

Just wondering if anyone encountered this problem and what solutions they used to rectify this problem

Thanks in advance

Darryl
-----------------------
Posted by theflash1932  
on  10 Jan 2011 8:46 PM
Verified Answer
Verified by darryl325

Was the server set aside because of this error, or is this a new problem?
◦Remove anything unnecessary from the server (drives, expansion cards, etc.).
◦Reseat all cable connections (power, data), especially the riser card(s) on the left hand side of the chassis.
◦Using the jumpers on the  motherboard, clear the NVRAM.

-----------------------
darryl325    
Posted by darryl325  
on  11 Jan 2011 11:49 AM
  
thanks for the fast response .

Reseating all cable connections (power, data) did the trick for me Yes

Many thanks
darryl

Maybe something similar will do it for you. Sounds like the BMC can't talk to its little monitoring minions so it's assuming it needs to run the fans on high.

600

Living Room / Re: Microsoft ending TechNet subscription activations effective august 2013

« on: September 03, 2013, 08:16 PM »

Ooh, look. Finally they have come to their senses. Yay.

We have extended your TechNet Subscription for an additional 90 days.
 
On July 1, 2013, Microsoft announced the retirement of the TechNet Subscriptions program. Since then, we've been listening to your feedback on how we can better support the IT professional community through this transition.
 
 Additional Information:
More background on Microsoft's decision to retire the TechNet Subscription service and the implications for current subscribers is available on the TechNet Subscriptions FAQ.

 Two of the most common pieces of feedback we heard are that you need more time to prepare for this change, and ongoing access to prior versions of Microsoft software. As a result, we're announcing the following updates:
•Eligible subscribers with active accounts as of September 1, 2013 will receive a free, one-time, 90 day subscription extension. You can continue to access your product downloads, use your professional support calls*, and get priority support in TechNet Forums through your updated expiration date, which you can find on the My Account page of the TechNet Subscriptions benefits portal.

•As TechNet Subscriptions customers begin to transition to the free evaluation resources Microsoft provides, we're improving the TechNet Evaluation Center by making prior versions of products available for trial. Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and others are available now. We will add additional products over time.

We appreciate your feedback and will continue to invest in free evaluation, learning, and support resources to meet your business needs and career goals.

- TechNet Subscriptions Team

* The professional support calls benefit is only available to TechNet Subscription Professional subscribers.

 Microsoft respects your privacy. Review our online Privacy Statement.

Microsoft Corporation
 One Microsoft Way
 Redmond, WA, USA 98052