Archive for September, 2011

Gmail man!

Friday, September 30th, 2011

Yes – it’s Friday and here’s an interesting spoof video that Microsoft have done that seriously does show what Gmail do with your mail… quite scary for most that don’t realise what is going on.

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Exchange 2010 Migration Tip – Moving Mailboxes

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

In previous versions of Exchange, the move mailbox process was a pretty “dumb” process.  You selected the mailboxes you wanted moved and then moved them either immediately or at a later time you selected.  You had to leave the console running for the process to run.

Exchange 2010 / SBS 2011 Standard changes all that now.  With the moving of mailboxes, when you select the mailboxes to move, you issue a Local Move Request for the selected mailboxes.  This then puts those mailboxes into a Move Request Queue which is a serviced by the Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Replication service.  This service then processes the mailboxes in the order that they were placed in the queue moving them from server to server.

The cool thing about this is that you can grab a group of mailboxes in whatever order you desire to move them in  a specific order.  For example, on a recent migration, I used the Exchange 2003 console to identify which mailboxes were below 500MB, and then I used the Exchange 2010 console to multi select those and process a Local Move Request against those mailboxes.  This started the move on those smaller mailboxes and I was able to then select all the larger mailboxes and add them to the Move Request queue.

I love it when Microsoft make cool improvements like this – makes our life as IT Professionals easier.

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A tip for troubleshooting Web Apps and IIS server problems

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Here’s a tip for when you are troubleshooting web applications on an IIS server that I’ve found useful over time. 

When you access the web application from a client machine, the default Internet Explorer setting is designed to give the user friendly messages that really don’t give much detail.

However if you turn off the Friendly messages then you get a whole lot more valuable information that will really help you figure out what is wrong.

To turn off Friendly HTTP error messages use this procedure.

  1. Go to Tools > Options and then the Advanced Tab.
  2. Scroll down till you find the “Show friendly HTTP error messages” option and disable it.

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HTTP Error 404.2–Not Found when you access a website on an IIS 7 server

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

A customer of mine was doing an upgrade of one of their Tax applications recently.  The new application needed .Net v4.0 framework to be installed.  The client did everything the application vendor instructed them to do but could not make the application work.  He asked me to take a “quick look” at it.

I checked out the application vendors instruction first up and found that the client had done things to the letter.  I then thought about the error message being recieved and realised that this was the first application on this server that would use the new .Net v4.0 framework.

I opened up IIS Manager on the server and then drilled into the ISAPI and CGI Restrictions area and found that the ASP.NET v4.0 entries were set to Not Allowed.  It was easy to change this and then the site work as per the vendor described.  It would have been great for the vendor to include this in their instructions for the client though – would have saved a lot of time!

 

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SMBNation – Must See Sessions

Monday, September 26th, 2011

At every conference, there’s a few sessions that you really must see.  SMBNation is no different to that.  This year, my “must see” sessions list goes like this…

GS1 – Swing Migration v.2011: SBS or Exchange or Windows to Anywhere – Jeff Middleton

You just can’t get enough of learning how to migration and Jeff is certainly the master at it.

GS2 – Group Policy in SBS 2011 – Eriq Neale

Eriq’s knowledge of Group Policy is 2nd to none and he will walk you through the hard bits in both SBS 2011 Standard and SBS 2011 Essentials.

CS12 – RecoverAssist, iSCSI and BackupAssist onTheGo! – The nerds at BackupAssist have been busy! – Linus Chang

Yeah – I know he’s a vendor, but the guys at BackupAssist have been working on some very cool stuff that I’ve not seen from other vendors, so this is certainly worth a good look.

GS8 Crack the Creds. Breaking Passwords for Fun and Profit – Dana Epp

If you saw his how to hack a wireless network presentation last year, you will know Dana is a guy who not only knows his stuff, but can seriously scare the crap outta you while still smiling.  This is a must see session.

GS13 – Session: How the $#%@! do I setup email, calendar and contacts on this phone?! – Jessica DeVita

It might seem simple, but often in life, the simple things are not.  Jessica will take the hard work out of it for us all.

GS9 Sharepoint Connections: Let Us Count The Ways – Amy Babinchak

10 ways to access and interact with SharePoint – sounds cool and without needing to code anything according to Amy.

GS11 – Office 365+SBS 2011 Essentials… – Wayne Small & Robert Crane

Hopefully we can entertain everyone with a valuable session on not just combining Office 365 and SBS 2011 Essentials, but also the deeper dive under the covers of SBS 2011 Essentials with all it’s hidden tricks.

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How can I move my iTunes Library to another drive?

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

Recently my iTunes library on my C: drive was consuming too much space.  I decided to move it to another drive location but in the process made a mess of it and nearly lost some of my TV shows that I have season passes for.  Here’s what I did to do it the RIGHT way.

Firstly make sure you have a new drive location that has a large amount of free space.  My current iTunes Library was taking up around 40GB of my C: drive, so I decided to move it over to a drive with 500GB of free space. 

Secondly, make sure you have a good backup of your computer before you start – this was my saving grace as without it I would have been even more unhappy.

Next I followed this Apple document here on how to relocate the iTunes library to another drive.  This document is 100% correct, but after you move the folder pay particular attention to step 11 of the document.  It instructs you to delete the iTunes Media folder from the original location.  DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES DELETE THE ORIGINAL iTUNES FOLDER ITSELF.  This was my mistake as I did not correctly read this step and then lost the season passes etc. 

To fix my problem, I restored the original folder in it’s original location from my ShadowProtect backup and restarted iTunes.  I then deleted the data that was copied to the new location and started the process over again, but this time I ONLY deleted the iTunes Media folder, not the folder level above it.  Below you can see the CORRECT folder to delete once you are done.

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Hopefully someone else will learn from my mistakes.  The Apple article works fine, but if you mess up and DO NOT READ IT CORRECTLY as I did then well you can only blame yourself Sad smile

Apple have documented here exactly what the key files are in the iTunes library and you need to ensure you don’t mess with these.

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Don’t get stuck in the IT Past

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

Ok – this is a cool send up video from Microsoft relating to Cloud Technology, but could easily also be of your average SMB IT reseller out there (not the SMB IT Professionals though).  You know – the guy operating out of the boot of his car, offering the lowest cost for services that barely exist… yeah – those guys.

Anyway – take a look and have a laugh

 

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Acrobat X Prints Garbled Text

Thursday, September 22nd, 2011

This one is from Don Tibbits of Brainbox Solutions in Melbourne, Australia.  Don is a member of the SMB IT Professionals association here in Australia (www.smbitpro.org.au)

If you are using some versions of Adobe Acrobat and you print to PDF from a web page, you will often get garbled text instead of the text you see on the screen. 

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Changing the Adobe PDF Document Printer Properties and removing the “Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts” setting will resolve this.

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After the change, the same website prints just fine.

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Thanks Don this problem has bothered me for some time and I’ve not been able to fix it. It’s community answers such as this that help everyone.

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How can I tell what version of SQL I have?

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

I’ve had this question a few times now where I am trying to determine what version of SQL server I have installed on a computer.  This website here shows you all the versions of SQL based on the build number and the SQLServer.exe.

You can also use the SQL Management Studio to show the version as per below.

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Diagnosing blank screen in your WordPress Dashboard

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Last week, this website started to give me a blank screen when ever I attempted to login to it via the WordPress dashboard.  It was most concerning as aside from this the site appeared to be running fine.

I did some digging to figure out why and found it to be a common problem from a few sources that WordPress would do this due to a number of reasons.  I modified my php.ini file to enable logging of all errors to a file and then restarted the application pool that runs my website.

In the php-errors.log file I found the culprit – the line below showed me the issue.

[18-Sep-2011 23:57:18] PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function is_multisite() in C:\inetpub\www.sbsfaq.com\wp-content\plugins\backupbuddy\classes\admin.php on line 16

I went into the plugins folder and renamed the plugin folder backupbuddy to something else and then performed an IISRESET.  Voila – I could login to my WordPress console once more.  Now to dig into why BackupBuddy thought this was an issue.

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