Andy – Page 9 – Absoblogginlutely!

Fixed: Remove extra ip address from commandline.

By Andy on Tuesday, April 3, 2012

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.

Howto: Remove Roku from Amazon account (or other devices)

By Andy on Thursday, March 29, 2012

Amazon and Roku seem to make it hard to delete a Roku or other device from your Amazon account and most people say to go to the My Digital library and remove the device. However at time of writing (March 2012) this advice is incorrect.
Instead sign into your amazon account and then go to https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/pin
You will have your roku or other device listed, select delete and then confirm the deletion. Seconds later you will be able to register your roku with Amazon again. Of course if you don’t have access to the original Amazon account then you will need to factory reset the Roku first.

Greasemonkey

New Greasemonkey Script – Add Google Reader to Google navigation bar

By Andy on Tuesday, February 21, 2012

I am a heavy user of Google Reader and find it annoying that it is one of the sites that does not appear on the top of the Google Navigation Bar when you are on other Google sites such as gmail, Google Plus etc. Instead you have to click the More button, then select Reader from the drop down menu.
I managed to hack together the Greasemonkey script AddGoogleReader that adds the link to Reader next to the Gmail link. What I’ve not managed to do is get the Reader to appear in line with the other buttons – I’ll play around with that later, but in the meantime, if you use chrome or have Greasemonkey installed, then let me know what you think. Follow up posts can be found in the addgooglereader tag

Firefox

Fixed: Google Music not working in Firefox

By Andy on Wednesday, February 15, 2012

I’ve never been able to get Google Music working in Firefox. Ironically, IE was the only browser that I could get it to work in. I could log in, see all my music but whenever I clicked on a song to play, I would get “Oops, we have a technical issue:Please refresh this page in your browser to get back to listening to your music. If issues persist, make sure you have Flash enabled and working.” Naturally I am already at the latest version of flash and clearing the cache etc didn’t work. I searched this afternoon and came across this thread which recommended adding music.google.com to the flashblock whitelist and sure enough it worked. Thanks to JackieGleason who posted the question on their linux box, fixed it themselves and then posted the solution.

Exchange / Outlook Work

Fixed:Corrupt contacts in outlook but they appear ok on phone.

By Andy on Monday, February 13, 2012

Had a weird problem this morning with a user that had issues with incorrect data appearing in their outlook contacts. When you looked at the contacts in Outlook 2007, the Full Name was typically somebody else, yet the email address and name displayed in Outlook would be correct. Occasionally things like company name would appear incorrect. Looking at the phone, the data looked correct however the phone typically does not seem to use all of the fields that outlook2007 displays.
When I looked at the contacts within OWA the data looked ok. In OWA I changed the middle name on one of the corrupted contacts (although it looked correct in OWA) and then switched back to Outlook – the contact was now showing the middle name as expected, but the rest of the data was also coming across correctly. I took out the middle name within OWA and sure enough Outlook removed the middle name too and the contact was now correct.
The next stage was just to open the contact in OWA and hit save and close. This fixed the contact in Outlook too. I have no idea why this issue occured, and thankfully there are not *too* many contacts to open (only 170 in total) but just opening and then doing a Save and Close fixes the issue.
It will be interesting to see if this issue reoccurs.

Microsoft Technet Work

Fixed:MDOP download on Technet

By Andy on Thursday, February 9, 2012

One of the advantages of a Technet subscription is access to the (MDOP Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) software including the Diagnostics And Repair Toolkit (DART). Unfortunately it took me a while to find it under the downloads today as MDOP does not appear under the list of downloads. However searching for Desktop Optimization Pack finds it. (You need to log into the Subscriber Downloads for this link to work). You’d be surprised how inaccurate the Google results for MDOP download on Technet results are.

Work

Fixed: Connectwise and roaming profile permissions issues

By Andy on Thursday, January 26, 2012

A while back we started using Connectwise for our Helpdesk system and we use roaming profiles for our techs. Unfortunately Connectwise has to write to the appdata directory and the permissions were not set for Connectwise to write the files correctly and it also assumed that your appdata directory was going to be on c:\ rather than \\server…..
It took some digging and trial and error before we were able to get this working – the solution is to do the following from a command prompt –
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\caspol -machine -addgroup LocalIntranet_Zone -url “file://server/user$/%username%/appdata/*” FullTrust -name Andy-PsaIntranet

I think the name parameter can be anything but we set it to firstname-PsaIntranet. Also note the appdata has the path to appdata but with forward slashes instead of back slashes.

Connectwise is a great tool but whatever you don’t do, don’t use the hosted version – the performance and the lack of options and features that are crippled in the hosted product makes a very frustrating end user experience. Last night we switched over to an inhouse version and I found that I had to create a new data directory in the connectwise directory. Note this was after doing the incredibly annoying “clear cache” function in Connectwise. Create %appdata%AppData\connectwise\psa\cache\companyurl.com\companyname\connectwiseuserid\data

Group Policy Work

Group Policy Naming Conventions?

By Andy on Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Jeremy Moskowitz from the GPAnswers website posted a good question today – How do you name your Group Policies? Strangely enough it had never occurred to me to have a naming convention for the GP’s – normally I just make sure they are descriptive enough in the name and use the comment fields in 2008 and newer to provide a changelog of the Group Policy and details on what it should do. However, this does rely on EVERYONE updating the group policy and I know this doesn’t always happen – even I sometimes forget to fill in this information when making a quick change, so have a standard naming convention seems a great idea. Having the author (or initials) is also important so other people can easily ~~hunt~~ track you down to get clarification or assistance on the settings.
Do you have any naming conventions that you use?

OneNote

Onenote Calendar and clipping tool

By Andy on Friday, December 30, 2011

I use Onenote extensively at work and love the ability to take freeform notes in meetings and organize stuff into the separate folders. One of the things I use it with are the various projects that I’m running in the office and these notebooks are shared amongst the project participants so we all are working off of one realtime document. This has the advantage that most of the data is in one place and we have a historical record but it is hard to tell what documents have been changed recently and with the proliferation of notebooks, it’s hard to remember which notebook contains a particular document that I worked on last Tuesday for example.
Previously I was using a toolbar icon that shows me the notebooks changed in the last 7 and last 14 days of use. This was really useful, but recently I stumbled across Omer Atay’s Onetastic addin. As the name suggests, this is really good addin (should have been in the shipped product) that enables you to tidy up the print to onenote output AND also has a built in calendar display option that shows you the documents that have been changed on the day, week or month that you select. The Calendar option is also available as a standalone application, but you might as well have the web clipping (which also contains a cropping tool too) add in too.
Highly recommended – especially if you share your OneNotes with other people or you are not that organized in filing your documents 😉
Note this does require OneNote2010 – but you are on that already right?

Gmail Security

Bypass two factor authentication to gmail?

By Andy on Friday, November 11, 2011

Update – Never mind – see bottom of article.
Discovered an interesting flaw in the requirement for two factor authentication with gmail today. I like to use the application on my cell phone to ensure that only I have access to my account – and if somehow a keylogger was in place, my password to gmail is not any use as the 2nd factor authentication would also require access to my cell phone.
However, today I logged into google reader first (which doesn’t support 2nd factor authentication) and used my username and password only. I then clicked the gmail tab at the top of the reader – and hey presto I’m into gmail.
Bottom line – don’t think that just because you have enabled 2nd factor authentication you are safe from keyloggers on a pc or network sniffing/man in the middle attacks. I’ve not reported this to Google yet but it will be interesting to see what they say.
Update After signing out AND restarting firefox I was prompted for the 2nd factor password. Interestingly I wasn’t prompted until I restarted the browser – so as usual – always restart browsers once you’ve finished with them.