A couple of my workmates have been pointed towards this blog when they need technical data that I’ve come across in the past. We were also discussing the need to let other techs know when our tools subdirectory is updated with new content (such as the mbsa visio plugin mentioned in the previous directory). I mentioned that a blog was needed and we thought that we could use one of the notes blog templates that is out there. We then thought that it would be a good idea to use the blogging facility within sharepoint as we do not have much experience with the software and this would give us real world experience in using sharepoint AND having an internal (and possibly an external) blog at the same time. Hopefully this will get approved next week and we can start to use it. Now I just need to find a RSS reader for Lotus Notes to read peoples updates. (We were originally going to use the KnowledgeBase discussion template within Notes but that doesn’t notify us whenever there is new content like it is supposed to do)
There is a great tool for integrating Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) into Visio network diagrams but this is almost useless for the consulting side of things. MBSA requires that it is run as a user with credentials on the domain which is not possible to do on a consultants laptop as it is unlikely that it is going to be a member of the customers domain. Therefore MBSA will not scan the machines and the benefit is lost. It would work if the customer had a copy of visio, but this is unlikely for most of my customers.
I don’t have admin rights on the network back in the office so I can’t even try it out on my office network either 🙁
However, if you are not a consultant and have visio, then this tool is well worth checking out as it will give you colour coded status for each server on the network within visio. From first impressions it does look like you need to have your servers in visio as a server object – you can’t use one of your own objects like a dell rack mount object.
Had a customer whose ntbackups suddenly stopped working on Small Business 2003. On further investigation ntbackup was trying to write the backup to the miniqic type of tape drive yet the actual tape that was in the drive was the travan tape (bearing in mind these tapes have been in use for a long period of time). Apparently there is a known problem with NTBackup incorrectly choosing the backup tape type on a drive that supports multiple tape types (KB article 831664).
When a backup starts, it immediately fails with the error “The requested media failed to mount. The operation was aborted”, even if the tape is in the tape drive. Some tape drives support tapes with different block sizes. Windows Small Business Server 2003 backup chooses the first tape type available, which may not correspond to the tape type of the tape in the drive.
This problem is most commonly seen with the Travan 20 tape drive. Windows Small Business Server 2003 backup chooses the MiniQIC tape type instead of the Travan Tape type.
Applying the hotfix makes it work (and it didnt need a reboot). I’m mystified as to why its suddenly started doing this – I did apply another tape related hotfix about a week and a half ago but backups have run correctly since then. Very strange.
hmmm – I got an email this morning stating that they were going to change my skype password in the next 24 hours due to a upgrade of their software. Why they can’t tell me that they have changed it now, instead of me waiting until I can’t log into skype and then changing it myself I don’t know. This also sounds suspiciously like one of the websites was hacked or compromised. I really can’t see any other reason that they would need to change passwords for so many people. There is more information at SkypeJournal and it seems like a lot of people share my concerns AND have trouble trying to get the password changed.
The funny thing is that they try to convince you that this is not a hoax by saying that there is a copy of the email on the share.skype.com website…Now if I was a scammer with a website such as share.5kype.com it wouldn’t be difficult to host a copy of a phishing email that I am sending out to all my target customers would it?
I spent the best part of yesterday playing with Asterisk – a free PBX for the home (or business).
This cartoon from speedbump (one of the comics I read on a daily basis) is going to be very apt in the early part of December
Finally succeeded in deleting a delegate from outlook. As per this post where the delegate remained in the permission lists I had another user who had the same disabled person as a delegate and I was unable to remove the deleted person. Seeing as though the kind of people who have delegates are managers (in this case the head of the company) I really didn’t want to mess around with deleting the mailbox and recreating it.
However, it turns out that by re-enabling the disabled user, creating a mailbox for this user, logging into outlook as the person with the problem meant I could then delete the delegate for good. Then it was delete the mailbox and the user again.
Update See HelloMate for a script that will list who has delegate access in AD. By using this, I should be able to modify our disable user procedure.
windirstat is a great utility to work out how much disk space each folder/file is using. When you get down to the file level it will show you in a graphical format as the larger the file, the larger the colour block on display. Using this utility it was very easy to find out where the 12gb of disk space had suddenly gone on a server – it quickly showed me that a particular user had a large docs & settings and within that was the desktop and on the desktop were 2 6gb .tmp files!
Remove relocate_server.php file from your website if you are running coppermine gallery 1.4.x
Tomorrow (Fri) is Absoblogginlutely’s second birthday so we gave it a birthday cake
The Brother in law,Dave, is in the background. We then discovered that pumpkins are made of magnets
(No we weren’t drunk when we took these photo’s and it was actually Katies birthday yesterday – hence the “cake”)