Years ago I came across Spammotel.com – a useful service that would generate random looking email address’s and then allow you to receive emails sent to those email address’s at your real address. A useful third party system that would allow you to quickly and easily change the destination of where the emails go and also block people who abused the address by deleting the address. In the past I had several email lists that go to my Spammotel and then are redirected to my work email address – when I changed jobs, I only had one location to change my email address and all the emails started coming into the new mail account. (This was before RSS feeds to allow you to go grab the content when convenient as opposed to having it delivered via email).
They have now decided to go pro only and charge $9.99 a year for the service – still not bad, but to be honest, it’s probably better to get a domain of your own and set up catch all email address’s and then dev/null any that get abused. That might sound a bit complicated for some users, but most people reading this blog will know what I’m on about.
Ironically, the email announcement about this change in service when to my Gmail spam folder and my corporate Postini filter.
I’ll be checking the web site to see which of my to see what email lists are active and see if I need to resubscribe to any (the list gives you the number of emails received which is a nice function).
For the short answer go here.
For those of you that follow me on Facebook, you may have seen my frustration with Microsoft support. I had to log a support call with their support as every time my computer rebooted, offline files were disabled. Unfortunately the technician attempting to support me obviously had no idea of what offline files were or even how to create a new user account in Windows7 (to troubleshoot if it was my account or not that was causing the problem). At no point in time did either of the 3 techs look at the event log, despite me trying to tell them there was issues reported in the log.
To cut a very long and frustrating story short, I initially followed the diagnostic steps at Jonathan’s blog and the follow up post but the setting was still disabled after a reboot. I did find that enabling the offline files service from disabled (or manual) and then starting the service, the offline files were temporarily enabled.
As part of this troubleshooting step, the issue was obviously something resetting the services on startup so off to the eventlogs. The Offline Event Logs section had nothing in it out of the ordinary but my Application log was full of Bootshieldsvc errors. One “offline files bootshieldsvc” search later
shows this is a known problem with Lenovo’s rapid boot software. The Rapidshield patch from Lenovo was downloaded, extracted, installed and the pc rebooted and sure enough offline files was STILL not enabled. Urgh.
clicking start, and entering RapidBoot confirms the version is 1.23 and the gui has an option to disable the feature. This requires a reboot so I used the opportunity to re-enable offline files again and rebooted – STILL disabled. After another reboot, just to be sure Offline files was still disabled. Checking RapidShield Gui, the software claims it is not running, but checking the application log after a reboot still shows the various errors – for example Event 256 for BootShieldsvc – “An error has occured (—query FLAG_AUTO_SVC_CHANGED key success failed with 1,The Code is:0x24.).
Apart from the fact that there is a “success failed” – it’s really not encouraging that software is still running and making changes despite it being disabled. Next stop was an uninstall (and enabling offline files again) followed by yet another reboot. It’s a good thing this machine is fast at rebooting.
So after uninstalling – the problem still occurs – arghhhhhhhh.
Checking the status of the Offline Files service I noticed it was still set to manual. Comparing against another machine where offline files works, the service should be set to automatic. I changed the service to automatic and started. Offline files was now showing it was enabled. Another reboot and the service was back to manual again and offline files disabled – more arghhhhhhhhhhh
Next stop is to try and hack out the Fast Boot Service of Lenovo. UNfortunately I get access denied when trying to stop the service. msconfig stops the service but it still somehow manages to try and make changes as evidenced by the events in the eventlog after a reboot.
sc delete “BootShieldSvc” from an elevated command line also removes the service but it comes back after a reboot. After a reboot into safe mode I was able to disable the Fast Boot Service of Lenovo, set the Offline Files to be automatic and now offline files works.
In Summary –
Uninstall the Lenovo Rapidshield software (or upgrade).
If that fails – boot into safe mode, disable Fast Boot Service of Lenovo, Set Offline Files to automatic.
During the past week my Firefox (v16.0) Autocomplete drop down box has had missing text appear when I start typing in the address bar as seen in the screenshot below.
Initially I thought it was Firefox using up too much memory, but the problem occurred on all of my machines even after a recent reboot so some troubleshooting was required.
After restarting Firefox in safe mode (Click the firefox button, choose Help, Restart with add-ons disabled) I confirmed it was a problem with one of my extensions. It took several minutes to disable half the addons and see if the problem continued and then repeat the process until I could work out the offending solution.
It turns out it was the Delicious addon (v3.2.1). Disabling this I have a drop down box with url’s that I can see. The proper behaviour is shown below. The A’s are greyed out as that is the character I typed to start the autocomplete sequence off.
With only this extension enabled I get the problem so it’s not a combination of extensions having problems. I have reported this extension as incompatible.
Powershell 3 was released this week and is now available to download for Windows 7 (sp1) platforms. I tried to install it on my home machine this weekend and got
“The update is not applicable to your computer”. It turns out that this is actually because .net framework 4 (or higher) has not been installed.
The full .net 4 framework package is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17718 or you could install the newer 4.5 framework at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30653. Make sure that you close the false powershell installation before attempting the .net installation or the .net will try to install for about 5 minutes on your computer and then complain that another install is already in use and does not give you the option to retry. You can only abort and then run the whole installation again. All in all a pretty bad user experience for trying to install the software.
Thanks to the Troubleshooting guide for the beta version of Powershell 3 that tipped me off for the pre-reqs which are not mentioned on the original download page for Powershell 3 and unfortunately there is no place on that web page to provide feedback.
We had a request to provide a list of users who have Full access to a mailbox in Office 365. The get-mailboxpermission is pretty straightforward, but the results show the Windows username as opposed to the descriptive name for the user. The following script should provide the information needed. Note that the first 3 lines connect to Microsoft Online (you will be prompted for username and password) – the last two are the magic ones. Replace “User name” with the users first and last name ie “Andy Helsby” in my case
$LiveCred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session
$userlist = Get-Mailbox "user name" | Get-MailboxPermission | Where-Object { ($_.AccessRights -eq "Fullaccess") -and ($_.IsInherited -eq $false) -and -not ($_.User -like "*nt authorityself*") }
$userlist | foreach {get-mailbox $_.user}
If I can work it out, I’ll update the script later to provide a report for all mailboxes – in the meantime this works for 1 mailbox at a time.
Funnily enough, this report didn’t actually help the reason we were asked for the report – that was because the user had issues connecting to someone else’s mailbox. It turns out that the Microsoft Online password had been changed and outlook was using the cached credentials. By removing the stored passwords in the control panel, Outlook prompted for the password and everything started working.
Firefox updated itself to v15 this morning and now all my tabs are wrong.
If I open multiple tabs then the url that I type in on the right most tab actually gets loaded in the tab to the left of it. As you can see from the screenshot shown here, my current url is showing LogMeIn and the “Add New Post” screen is actually to the right.
Very confusing.
Interestingly, the far left tab does show my gmail content but the second from left only shows the google page – the bing results are not found anywhere.
Also anything I type in the current window (ie this blog post) only appears when my mouse goes up to the bookmark toolbar or above.
Update It doesn’t do it when running in safe mode so has to be an extension somewhere. Thats going to take some time to debug đ
Update 2 This issue is actually caused by New Tab King. Disabling this addon gets firefox working again
Today was the Columbus Color Run 2012 race, a great 5k race where you run through paint stations where dried color “paint” is thrown at you. Great fun, very colourful and an ideal opportunity for taking photos and video. I was there for about 3 hours before and after the run and took several photos. Towards the end, my phone suddenly asked me to put an SD card in the memory slot. I thought this was odd but maybe the card had filled up. Resetting the phone didn’t help. When I got home I took the sd card out, put it in two card readers and neither of the readers would recognise that a card had been placed in the slot as far as the computer drive letters were concerned (it detected the card was inserted but no disk was mounted – not even an unformatted disk).
Needless to say I was really annoyed as I had lots of photos and video on there that I hadn’t even seen yet. As it turns out, the quality of most of them wasn’t very good – shooting through ziplock bags is not recommended. I’m going to have to try plastic wrap next time. Anyway, this evening I remembered that I had Dropbox installed on the phone – this automatically synchs photos and videos taken from the phone up to the dropbox servers and then downloaded to your other dropbox client pc’s. Sure enough, when I checked my dropbox folder – all the pictures and videos had been synched – I had recovered all my photos. Needless to say I’m VERY pleased.
Note that you don’t have to synchronize videos and if I remember right the defaults are only to sync video when on a wireless connection but fortunately I had turned this to sync on wifi and 3G đ
If you’ve not used Dropbox yet, then I highly recommend you check it out. It will allow you to backup contents of your phone automatically (and if you process the photos on your computer they will already be there when you get back to the computer – no need to fiddle with hooking the phone to the computer). You can also use it to keep your documents stored offsite safely – even if you only have one computer, you still have a copy in the cloud that you can access from a webpage if required.
The good news, it is even free to start with – you get 2gb for free and we both get an extra 500Mb because I referred you if you use this link to Dropbox
Incidentally my Columbus Color Run photos are on Facebook here – you don’t need to be a Facebook member to view them.
I’ve been fighting working with SharePoint for about a week and trying to get the Search Service started on my SharePoint Server. The only thing that seemed consistent in all the troubleshooting was that the SharePoint error messages were only slightly more helpful than “An error has occurred”. I ended logging a PSS support call with Microsoft and didn’t get very far for a while. My SharePoint farm consisted of the SharePoint Server and a separate SQL server to host the data and attempting to start the service I would get ‘Could not access the Search administration database. A generic error occurred while trying to access the database to obtain the schema version info.’
There are several other posts out there on updating the version of SharePoint to the latest Service Pack, Installing the latest cumulative update(2598321) and ensuring that the protocols were enabled on the SQL instance. All things I corrected, applied and did not fix the issue. (Note that installing the latest cumulative update DOES require a reboot and may stop SharePoint working until you do reboot – so make sure you install this out of hours.)
Upgrading the database is done with ‘psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force -cmd applicationcontent -install -cmd installfeatures’ After running this command I noticed that the checking the status of the server with (get-spserver servername).NeedsUpdate would work fine on the SQL server, but running against the SQL server from the Sharepoint Server, it would tell me the database needed updating.
On one of my servers, Add/Remove Programs said that the hotfix was not required yet the Admin console on the website said it was. This issue was fixed with a “psconfig -cmd installcheck -noinstallcheck” (Thanks to http://tinyurl.com/7pkrbem)
After starting the service on the sql server instance, we wanted to get the SharePoint Server working as originally intended. After a long time of troubleshooting, our next step was to uninstall the SQL Native Client and reinstall it. As I went to uninstall the Native Client, Add/Remove programs told me the package was not installed. A repair or modify would not work either. Opening Regedit and searching for Native Client under HKey_Classes_Root\installer and deleting this key meant I was then able to reinstall the NativeClient.
We then tried starting the service and this time it worked. The strange thing is that some communications between the SharePoint server and the SQL server were obviously working fine – the database on SQL was created with no problems and SharePoint could see the data – it’s just weird that the initialising/upgrading of the database required the SQL native client but did not give any useful information that pointed to this fact.
Even when running the Windows setup from within Windows, this is the option you get when upgrading from Windows8 developer preview to Consumer Preview. What a User Friendly screen! If I can “chose” what I want to upgrade, why only give me one option – which is nothing? Interestingly I could keep settings if I was upgrading from Windows7 – so it’s weird how you can’t keep settings from the Developer preview to the consumer preview. The Windows 8 faq has a table of what can be kept when upgrading from previous versions of Windows.
| Current operating system | What you can keep |
|---|---|
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview |
|
| Windows Developer Preview |
|
| Windows 7 |
|
| Windows Vista |
|
| Windows XP |
|
It might be a good idea to have the upgrade options within the application itself and not as a link to an external website – this way the user gets to see what options they have.
Occasionally you may have a need to remove an additional ip address that has been assigned to a network card. For example you might have a card listening on two ip address’s – say 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.3
You can remove this from the gui but there may be reasons where the gui is not available but access to the server via psexec (or the Windows 2008R2 core mode) is the only access to the server that you have.
To remove the ip address just type in
netsh interface ipv4 delete address “Local Area Connection” addr=192.168.1.3
Simple as that but it took a while stepping through the netsh commands to get the correct syntax for this. I use netsh for switching my laptop to customer ip ranges for troubleshooting when on their lan or when configuring switches, but this is the first time I’ve had the requirement to remove an extra ip address.