Ramblings o' Techie

Force Internet Explorer compatibility view to be used for your web site

2011-10-12T12:59:00.000-05:00

With Internet Explorer 8 and 9 you may have noticed some websites not working like they used to. It's been quite a while since the release of IE 8 so most of the major sites have probably caught up to this problem, but the easy fix is to setup the site to force IE8 and IE9 to use the compatibility view function with your site. You can do this through the use of a custom header, which is easy to

Can't uninstall McAfee Agent error 1714 or 1610

2011-10-10T14:04:00.003-05:00

The environment I manage uses McAfee EPO for its antivirus needs, and I ran across multiple events in the application log with ID 11714 and 1002 on one of the machines. The event description was "Product: McAfee Agent -- Error 1714. The older version of McAfee Agent cannot be removed. Contact your technical support group. System Error 1610." I tried to manually uninstall the Agent and it kept

Disable or enable an Active Directory account on a schedule

2011-09-09T13:26:00.000-05:00

I know Active Directory has log on hours and account expiration, but what if you need to disable a user account at a specific time? I found this can be useful when an employee quits or is terminated because as long as I know in advance, I can schedule their account to be disabled and don't have to remember to do it manually. The trick is to use AD command line tools that are available on Windows

OS X Lion not creating a local home folder for network users

2011-08-12T10:27:00.002-05:00

Update: 8/19/11 Apple released 10.7.1 yesterday, so I'm curious to see if it resolves these issues with network accounts. I'll have a chance to test it next week and will update this with what I find. If you're ready this and already tried it please leave a comment as to whether or not it works for you Original Post I use local home folders for the Mac users I manage, but the Macs are bound to

"Network accounts are unavailable" when logging into OS X Lion

2011-08-12T09:14:00.003-05:00

Update: 8/19/11 Apple released 10.7.1 yesterday, so I'm curious to see if it resolves these issues with network accounts. I'll have a chance to test it next week and will update this with what I find. If you're ready this and already tried it please leave a comment as to whether or not it works for you Original Post If you use Active Directory user accounts with your Macs, you may run into

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion scrolling is inverted

2011-08-11T11:53:00.001-05:00

After having my first hands-on experience with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, one thing I noticed right away is that Apple thought it was a good idea to try to change the way people use scroll buttons on mice. They've set the default to be inverted, so if you scroll down the screen moves up, and scrolling up the screen moves down. I I'd guess this is because of their new swipe gestures to control your

"Security log on this system is full" error when logging in

2011-07-14T09:44:00.000-05:00

If you're logging in to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 machine and you notice this message, it's a really simple fix assuming you have access to an admin account on the machine. If not, you won't be able to login until it gets resolved, so contact an admin. Here's how to fix it: 1. Login using an account with admin privileges on the machine in question 2. Right-click My Computer, then go to

OS X Disk Utility restore failed "Must be imagescanned..." error

2011-06-22T08:27:00.000-05:00

While trying to image some Macbook Pros I ran into a problem restoring the prepared image onto the Macbooks. Disk Utility said the image file needed to be imagescanned in order to continue. I didn't know what this meant, but luckily this turned out to be something very simple. If you get this error select your image file you plan to restore, then go to Images->Scan Image for Restore.. in the top

Turn Fn or function key lock on or off on newer HP laptops

2011-05-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

I purchased a stack of Compaq Presario CQ56-115DX laptops the other day because they were super cheap and fit their purpose almost perfectly. However, it would require using the F1-F12 keys a lot. I found that out of the box, you had to hold down Fn in order to do that. By default the special actions on each key was used instead. I did some searching trying to find a way to lock the function keys

"File does not have program associated with it" when trying to run any application in Windows

2011-04-07T12:36:00.003-05:00

Update 11/21/2011: After receiving a comment regarding this not working in the Run As Administrator mode, I did a quick search and found a Microsoft FixIt post that has a fix it for me option. You can find that link here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950505. If you can get the automatic fixer tool to run then that should clear up your problem, otherwise this article also lists the manual

Add custom field to tickets and email in osTicket 1.6

2011-02-15T13:29:00.000-06:00

I recently installed osTicket 1.6 for our property management group to use and have need to make some customizations. One of those customizations was how to create a custom field and add it to the tickets so more data could be captured. While the instructions to do this are out there, they seem to be located in different spots, so I'm going to try to consolidate a few useful links here for you.

Remove orphaned Windows installer files to free up space

2011-02-09T16:46:00.000-06:00

Using Microsoft's msizap.exe utility, found in the Windows Standard Development Kit (Windows SDK), you can clean up orphaned installer files from your C:\Windows\Installers directory. I recently found 10GB of orphaned installers using this method on an XP Pro machine, and it was nice to free up that space for other uses. Here's how you check to see if you have any orphaned installers taking up

Deploying Quicktime fails with "A newer version of Quicktime is already installed"

2011-01-17T17:05:00.000-06:00

UPDATE 10/13/2011: iTunes 10.5 doesn't require Quicktime to run anymore, so hopefully this problem disappears, but if you're still having trouble this article should help. If this doesn't solve your problem you can also try using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility. Microsoft pulled this from it's list of available downloads citing the potential for problems (so this is your warning), but

Deploy iTunes 10.4 or 10.5 using group policy GPOs

2011-01-17T16:44:00.001-06:00

UPDATE 10/12/2011: With yesterday's release of iTunes 10.5, iTunes no longer requires Quicktime. You can ignore all references to Quicktime below if you'll be deploying iTunes 10.5. You can still deploy Quicktime if needed in your environment, but it should be treated as a separate deployment Original Post Having an organization filled with iPhones, I end up managing a lot of iTunes installs.

SQL Execution Error when creating a view from a linked server in Management Studio

2011-01-05T09:27:00.000-06:00

In my particular case, I'm using SQL 2005 SP4 to create a linked server to a SQL 2008 server. However, I know this happens in SQL 2008 as well. I was able to create linked servers without any problems in both SQL 2005 and SQL 2008, and I could query the tables on a linked server just fine, but if I tried to create a view using the Management Studio view creator I would get a SQL execution error

Fix event ID 13559 problem on a Windows server

2010-12-30T15:03:00.000-06:00

After migrating a standalone Windows domain controller to a VMWare environment, I noticed that some group policy objects weren't being enforced. It turned out some of the GPOs were missing from the SYSVOL share because it wasn't replicating on the newly virtualized DC. After checking the directory service event logs I found repeated entries for event ID 13359, stating "The File Replication

Deploy Google Chrome using .msi file and Group Policy

2010-12-22T10:57:00.001-06:00

To get started you can download an .msi installer file directly from Google at http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?msi=true. That's really about it. Then deploy like normal and you can either publish or assign Google Chrome. If you want to deploy Firefox using an msi, check out my previous post.

Create subgroups of contacts in Outlook

2010-12-02T11:44:00.000-06:00

If you have a lot of contacts in your Outlook Contacts, you may wonder what you could do to try to organize those entries. One suggestion would be to create subfolders of contacts so you can group them together so you have multiple smaller groups, which should make it easier to locate a contact. You could always just use the search feature as well, but if you're looking to organize your contacts

Setting remote desktop timeouts in the registry

2010-11-21T23:27:00.000-06:00

If you're using terminal server you should be using the terminal server settings, or even better, group policy. However, if you are running an XP Pro install without a domain the only option is to modify the registry. Or if you have a domain but just want to change one XP Pro install it can be easier to do the registry modification instead of setting up a GPO for the single desktop. In my case

Merge, extract, split, or rearrange your PDF files for FREE!

2010-11-09T14:14:00.000-06:00

I love free software that is useful, and today I found PDFsam (PDF split and merge). It's an open-source program available direct from PDFsam.org, or through Sourceforge, that allows you to perform various actions such as merging and rearranging on PDF files. Normally this would require Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is pretty expensive. Instead you could use PDFsam and accomplish most of the common

Viewing Illustrator files on a Windows PC for free

2010-11-09T13:04:00.000-06:00

Using free, open-source software, you can view Adobe Illustrator .ai files and .eps files on your Windows PC. It's pretty simple too. If you're looking to modify the files this isn't going to help, but as long as you need read-only access this is a great way to avoid paying for the expensive Adobe Creative Suites package. 1. You need to download three packages: Irfanview, the Irfanview plugins,

How to change the Microsoft Word 2007 default format

2010-10-21T16:43:00.000-05:00

If you want to change your Microsoft Word 2007 default format, it's pretty simple. In my situation, it was defaulting to extra line spacing that I didn't want. Instead I wanted all new documents to default to single spacing by default. In this example I'll show you how to setup single spacing, but this also shows you where to set any of the other default options too. 1. Open Microsoft Word 2007,

Deploy Firefox using an .msi file and group policy

2010-10-06T22:24:00.002-05:00

If you're looking for a Firefox.msi file in order to deploy Firefox using group policy, you don't have to look any further. Ok, I lied a little bit. You're going to have to visit FrontMotion to download one, but then that will be it. You can get the .msi file from http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/download_firefox.htm. Currently they're up to date with version 3.6.13. If you're looking to deploy

Rotating iPhone or Droid video that always shows sideways (aka landscape) in Windows

2010-10-05T15:12:00.003-05:00

We have a few iPhone 4s floating around in our environment, and I have one too. The video is nice, but whenever you try to view it on the computer it shows up in landscape, regardless of how you held the phone while taking the video. I did some research and this seems to be "normal", at least on Windows computers. If you're a Mac user, please leave a comment if this affects you as well. There are

How to flush the DNS cache in Windows and OS X

2010-09-30T15:10:00.002-05:00

If you're having problems with DNS, try flushing the local DNS cache. If you don't know what DNS is, this is the service that handles translating domain names, such as google.com, into IP addresses. This allows you to remember the domain name, but then allows the computer to use the IP address to communicate with it. Sometimes DNS settings get changed, but those changes can take a little while to