AskSHANK.com - Useful tips

WHAT

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 01:47:56 +0000

No Updates today? Yesterday? Last week? Last 5 months? I have TONS of information to share. I’ll find a time to post it. Trust me, you will thank me.

DELL E1420 CPU BUS PERR ERROR on front LCD

Syncronizing files with different computers

Shankaran — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:50:42 +0000

There have been several software packages in the past few years which did pretty much that: synchronizing data with different machines. If you have a few computers, it’s hard getting that data between your machines. So for example let’s say you have a laptop and a workstation. Microsoft released Groove a few years back which basically synced your data to each other. The problem is, if the 2 machines weren’t on simultaneously, and on the network, then the data would not sync.

Google docs is there, but the problem is that you have to login etc to get the data. The company I’m currently looking at is Dropbox, http://www.dropbox.com. So far, I am impressed with their software. You can use it both through a website or the application that is installed on your machine. You can even SHARE documents folders etc with particular users. Another huge benefit is that it stores the data on their server. So your laptop and workstation don’t need to be on simultaneously to synchronize data. If you don’t have either of your machines, so what. Log in to the website on some other machine and you can see your data.

It works on windows, MAC, Linux, and even your phone. They support Iphone, Ipad, Blackberry and Android.

The free plan comes with 2GB. They also have a $10/month package which has 50GB and a $19.99/month package that has 100GB.

Other technical goodies

Restore previous versions
30 days of undo history
Data is stored AES-256

Acronis True Image hangs on boot

admin — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:49:02 +0000

There have been a number of machines that I tried to boot with the Acronis True Image Rescue CD only to find that the booting would hang. What you need to do is press F11 when you are taken to the screen which gives you the screen selection of boot to windows or acronis. A window will popup with quiet written in it. What you need to do is enter the following:

quiet acpi=off noapic

quiet suppresses startup messages.
acpi=off disables the advanced configuration and power interface.
noapic disables the advanced programmable interrupt controller.

Exchange 2007 allow relay

Shankaran — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 16:10:36 +0000

I ran into an issue where I was unable to send email to external clients from my Xerox Workcentre 7435 Multifuction Printer. This machine was used to basically scan documents, create a PDF, then email to a recipient. I was able to do this to internal addresses no problem, but the moment we tried to put in an external address, we were not successful.

The reason for this is because in Exchange 2007, open relay is disabled by default. What I had to do was under receive connectors, create a new connector, specify the IP of the device, then on the authentication tab select externally secured. Under permission groups tab, I selected Exchange servers.

Immediately it was solved.

More researched showed that the default permissions for externally secured option are:
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Authoritative-Domain}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-Bypass-Anti-Spam}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-Bypass-Message-Size-Limit}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Exch50}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-Accept-Headers-Routing}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Submit}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Recipient}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Authentication-Flag}
MS Exchange\Externally Secured Servers {ms-Exch-SMTP-Accept-Any-Sender}

Exchange not accepting email from outside to distribution groups

Shankaran — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 16:08:19 +0000

In Exchange 2007, by default no one from the outside is allowed to send to your distribution group. So in your exchange message tracking, you will see this the message. In the message tracking log you will see this:

2010-11-30T19:20:24.175Z,,EMAILSVR,,,,,ROUTING,FAIL,239826,,shank@myserver.com,’550 5.7.1 RESOLVER.RST.AuthRequired; authentication required’,2302,1,,<5f111f5c-c9d0-4709-8fd4-e6d496732bd8>,RD Contact Us request,ase@wer.com,rdigroup@server.myserver.com,

To fix, you must goto exchange mmc, recipient configuration, distribution group, properties of your distribution group, mail flow tab, message delivery restrictions, and uncheck require that all senders are authenticated.

Problem solved

Please restart windows before installing new programs.

Shankaran — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:04:00 +0000

I received this error while trying to install Siemens Step 7. To get around this issue, open registry and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ Delete the key PendingFileRenameOperations” Should be all set Related posts:Livemeeting 2007 Add-In, error when scheduling a meeting with Outlook. An error has occured on the server. For details, please check the event [...] Related posts:

Exchange resource booking past 180 days

Shankaran — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:00:55 +0000

By default, Exchange 2007 sets calendar resources booking to 180 days. The error you may receive is the following.

The end date of this series of recurring meetings is too far in the future. This resource can only be scheduled up to 180 days in advance. The end date must be before.

You can verify this by the following.

Get-MailboxCalendarSettings |fl

You will see the following

BookingWindowInDays : 180

To change this put in

Set-MailboxCalendarSettings -BookingWindowInDays

ADMX central store for group policies

Shankaran — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 21:10:11 +0000

Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 all have the ADMX files locally on the system. In your systemroot folder, you will see a policy definitions folder. This is what you are looking for.

Now what you want to do is create a central store. If you go to GPMC and try to create a new GPO and then click on administrative templates, you will see that it says that it is retrieved from the local machine.

For consistency, what you want to do is copy the entire policydefinitions folder into your \sysvol\domain\Policies\policiesdefinitions folder on your domain controller. Once you do that, you will notice that the administrative templates shows it is retrieved from a central store.

Also you must run Remote Server Administration tools (RSAT) and not an older OS.

Apply group policy to windows 7 or XP

Shankaran — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:53:09 +0000

When you utilize group policy, there are different administrative templates for Vista, XP, and 7. Instead of having to create a new OU for XP vs Vista and 7 clients, you can use WMI filtering to apply the correct policy based on OS.

To accomplish this,

Launch GPMC
Right click on WMI filters on the left hand side
Choose new and enter a name ( I use Windows Vista or later)
Click add
In the query box type in

select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where Version like “6.%” and ProductType = “1″

The 6.% represents the version and the 1 represents the type of windows. See chart below.

Click ok and save
Goto a group policy object and on the WMI filtering select this one you created
This will ensure that the policy only applies to Windows Vista or greater

Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7	6.1%
Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista	6.0%
Windows Server 2003	5.2%
Windows XP	5.1%
Windows 2000	5.0%

Client versions of Windows	1
Server versions of Windows that are operating as a domain controller	2
Server versions of Windows that are not operating as a domain controller (typically referred to as member servers)	3

Windows only recognizes 10GB of space

Shankaran — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:53:41 +0000

Sometimes we overlook the issue that is presented to us by not looking at the simplest things. So I ran into an issue where the machine was running Windows XP 64bit and things were running great. All of a sudden my computer reported 10GB for the drive.

So what’s the deal? Checking the obvious, BIOS showed the 74gb disk. Disk manager in windows showed 74gb. Attaching the drive to another machine as a secondary showed the full 74gb drive. So what was it..
QUOTA. Right click on the drive in my computer and goto properties. The quota tab, and you will see quota enabled. Disable it.