The Scripting Guy blog has a great article called Beat the Auditors which is something that most Sys Admins want to do (and in some cases it might also be in more ways than one!). The article has a powershell script that audits the computers on the network for services and accounts that may have very old passwords (or no passwords) and provides the output into a nice excel file for reporting. The article steps through the script line by line to provide assistance in understanding the script which should allow you to tweak it as required for your environment. Subscribe to the blog posts to follow the next couple of articles in the series where the script will be expanded upon and developed.
I especially liked the tagline – “if the barn doors are wide open, why look for mice holes!”
Today marks 6 years of podcasting for Friends In Tech member Douglas E. Welch so he deserves a special mention and highlight on this blog. His blogs are listed below but be sure to check out the main website at welchwrite.com for more information and links to his other communities. Congratulations once again Douglas!
Friends In Tech was mentioned on the Mike Tech Show in reference to our Child Friendly Surfing Flier – here is the link and our original posting information.
It is the return and refresh of the Friends in Tech Child Safety Flier. Feel free to share this flier with anyone whom has kids and is concerned with online safety. We have links for everything from blogging, cyberbullying to advice for parents. We managed to toss in a couple of software and podcast picks that are family friendly. The flier looks great printed out as well as the electronic PDF. Please respect all the sites we cover and do not modify the flier if you share it. FiT nor any of its members derive any financial benefits from this flier or its mentioned sites. We are simply tech geeks with children, nieces, nephews and young friends we want to be safe and happy.
Most of the time my Firefox browser will have many tabs open, but at the minimum it will always have gmail and google reader open. This morning my memory usage for Firefox was hovering at 900mb and reached over 1gb. Needless to say the performance in the browser was horrible. Even closing Firefox took about 3 minutes. On restarting Firefox the performance would be better but eventually the memory usage does creep back up again.
I read in a recent blog post from The Windows Club about the free SpeedyFox – this compresses the sql-lite database that Firefox now uses for internal storage. Download the program, quit Firefox and run the small executable – no install necessary. It will show the default Firefox profile but it is also possible to select other profiles in a drop down box. It took about 20 seconds to run on my profile although the more information page mentions it could take 5 to 60 minutes to run.
The author also recommends that the program is also run about every two weeks. This can be done by creating a scheduled task using the case sensitive /default_profile switch or using /profile:name or /profile:path (needed when Firefox portable is being optimized. Slightly more information is available within the Help menu of the program. Note that if you were running this automatically you would have to exit Firefox first – this could either be accomplished using autoit or by just killing the program with “taskkill /im firefox.exe”
After the program was run I relaunched Firefox and the performance is so much better. Granted I’m running from a new launch of Firefox but I was able to stream a Youtube video immediately with no buffering requests, I was able to type this post in the browser without having to wait for the text to catch up with me and so far everything works great (my memory usage is currently up to 126mb with 3 tabs open.
I’m not going to promise that this program will do the same thing for everybody’s browser but it is definitely worth running. Currently the program is Windows only, but a Mac client is in development.
There may be a few of us left out there who don’t have an iphone, but WordPress for Blackberry v1.0 is now available. Although this is a 1.0 application, it has gone through several 0.xx versions so should be stable enough to use.
The blog posting at the Blackberry WordPress blog has the full details including the over the air installation link. This means you do not have to download the blackberry app store to the Blackberry just to download the WordPress application.
The one big feature I like about this new version is that it shows pending comments so you can now approve them from the Blackberry without having to log into the main website.
Microsoft have for some time made available virtual images of XP with IE6 and IE7 available. With the new beta version of IE8 now available for testing, the download page for IE on XP and Vista has been updated. You can also try the various IE’s in Vista too. Note that all the downloads will expire at the end of June 2008 (but new ones will probably be available to download before then.) Apparently IE8 won’t access Microsoft Update pages unless you run in IE7 emulation and restart your browser.
Most people have probably used the Microsoft knowledge base but did you know that Microsoft Certified Partners (anyone who has passed a Microsoft exam) has access to an internal database that may have more information and articles? As long as you are already certified and have a LiveID then you can access the Microsoft Partner Level Knowledge Base.
Did you know that Microsoft have some free online training courses for Office 2003 and 2007? The Office Training Homepage helpfully shows you popular and new courses – worth checking out and referring your end users to. If you have Software Assurance then there are additional courses available too under the Microsoft e-learning scheme. To access these courses you will need to request access from the person who administers your Microsoft Licensing. In my experience, getting the e-learning access for my users took about 4 weeks or repeated emails and phone calls with Microsoft before someone could fix the system to allow my users in, but the content was worth it.
I’ve just posted a detailed guide on how I set up a Dell server to notify me whenever events such as hard disk failures or warnings occur on the server. The GUI web front end is painfully slow to setup with a lot of mouse clicking and pasting and is prone to error and can result in a non standard setup. By following the instructions in the Dell Open Management Server Administrator (OMSA) alert guide, hopefully you will see how quick and easy it is to ensure all of your Dell servers are setup in the same way.
Microsoft’s SteadyState 2.5 is now in Beta and supports Vista. Admittedly the application is in Beta but for those of you who need the ability to lock down a pc so that any changes made by users get removed on reboot, then SteadyState is well worth investigating. This application was last mentioned back in July, but the new version has recently been released.
Following on from my previous post on disposable email addresses, here is a post on disposable email addresses that come to your REAL email address.
Services such as bugmenot and mailinator are really temporary email address that you check for 5 minutes and do not bother with again. However sometimes you may want to check or receive email for an extended period of time which is where a service such as spammotel.com comes in handy. This service provides you with a random email address such as asda12fasa@spammotel.com that redirects to your predefined real address. It is possible to add prefixes to the email such as SPAM or FWD so you can filter on the incoming emails. A web interface is provided for creating new email addresses (you don’t create one up yourself) and this screen also allows you to put a description for each email set up.
Two added bonuses that come with this system is that if you reply to an incoming email address the email will go to spammotel.com where they scramble your from address so the recipient still does not know your original email (unless you forget to remove it from your signature) . The other benefit is that you can change the destination email address so that if your work email address changes, or you change employers then you have one website to change the email address at and all your subscribed email lists will continue to work.
A screen shot of the interface is below to give you an idea of how it works.
Hopefully you are all aware of bugmenot.com which provides a list of valid usernames and passwords for sites that insist you register before downloading or accessing content. The most common example quoted is the New York Times articles but other (technical) sites might include APCC and techrepublic. If you need to access and article or posting on this site, head on over to bugmenot, enter the site url and it provides you with a username, password and the likelihood that this combination will work. If it works, you click the Yes button, if not you click the No button and a new combination(s) will be offered for you. You can also add your own.
Anyway, if you want to access a site temporarily but do not want to share the details with other people OR get on the sites email distribution/spam list then you can always give a fake email address but typically most sites send a confirmation email to the email address you provided. Clicking the link in the email then authenticates you as a valid user.
Previously I’ve always used a service such as mailinator.com. When signing up you pick a nonsense (or rude) email address ending in @mailinator.com such as IDontThinkSoSpammers @ mailinator.com, check the web interface to read the email that you send, access the site and then forget about it.
Now bugmenot provide a similar service at email.bugmenot.com but the advantage is that you can instantly access the emails from a webpage by adding your email address to email.bugmenot.com/view. In the above example you would go to email.bugmenot.com/view/IDontThinkSoSpammers
A very useful service – it is interesting to see the conflict between using a service such as this and the “morality” of using it. Personally I will provide a valid email address from my own domain to a site most of the time if I expect I will continue to use the site as I can always blackhole the email address if they start spamming but for sites that want your life history when signing up OR I expect they might spam me then this is a good alternative.
What do you think – do you/would you use a service like this – have you used alternatives that may be useful? Do you think providing fake information is naughty or is asking for too much information immoral and companies deserve all the bogus information they get?
Earlier this year Microsoft ran a promotion called Exam Insurance which provided you with a free retake on a failed Microsoft Exam or a discount on the next exam if the first one was passed successfully. A subscription to TechNet was also included (if you passed) but you had to pay extra for the Exam Insurance but the extra was well worth it to get a discounted copy of Technet. Unfortunately this offer expired at the end of July but Microsoft have come back with their 2nd Chance promotion again. This time you get a free retake if you fail the first exam.
This offer runs until the end of January 2008 which provides 4 months of insurance so now is a great time to get cracking on your Microsoft certifications and try those tests that you’ve been meaning to get done but not got around to it just yet.
Personally I’m hoping to get my MCSA by the end of the year – I already have my MCDST (Desktop Support Technician) and Small Business exams, the former qualifies as an elective for the MCSA and the latter an elective for the MCSE which will be my next milestone. It is tough getting the time to sit down and do the studying for these exams as work is very busy but obtaining the qualifications is often part of a professional development plan and often comes up in annual review discussions (which I am about to have very shortly.)
Update This post was actually written a couple of days ago and intended to be released later today but the information has already been posted on In The Trenches and on Mike McBride’s blog so I am now posting it here too! My first exam is scheduled for Friday morning.
I’ve recently had to conduct two interviews for a Network Engineer at our company and at both interviews I asked questions about keeping up to date with technology. I was surprised at the answers considering the job role. I asked if they listened to any podcasts or subscribed to any blogs. Both answered in the negative. I was really surprised as I can’t see how a person can effectively keep up to date with all the latest updates, patches, bugs, tools, software and tips that a network or systems engineer needs without subscribing to a podcast or at the very least some technical blogs.
Sometimes the excuse given is that people don’t have the time to listen to a podcast or read several blogs but they have the time to watch a couple of hours tv each night or spend 30 minutes at the coffee machine discussing the game or their drinking exploits!
Hopefully the Friends In Tech site helps with little tidbits of information that don’t take up a lot of time but do provide useful feedback – and this tip is about Microsoft’s new Technet Webcast Express – webcasts on various subjects lasting about 10-15 minutes to gain a quick overview on a product or it’s features. Currently there are 9 webcasts, 7 on Sharepoint and 2 on the Office2007 document format but keep an eye open for new Webcasts. If Sharepoint doesn’t get you excited then spend 10 minutes catching up with some product news from other bloggers in an area that you are interested in – and if you have an interview in the future – don’t forget to mention Friends In Tech as the blog you read to keep up to date!
For those of you who followed the suggestions in the recent ITT Minute about Microsoft downloads, you should know all about Microsoft Steadystate. This is the new version of Microsoft’s Shared Computer toolkit – a very useful utility that allows you to freeze, rollback and control the configuration of pc’s in schools, home or kiosk machines. The new version has several new features and can be downloaded from the Microsoft Steadystate download page. A handbook for Steadystate is also available.
A long time ago back in July of 2005 on the In The Trenches Podcast, Uniform Server was mentioned as a free to download Windows Web server. From the Uniform Server website – “The Uniform Server is a WAMP package that allows you to run a server on any MS Windows OS based computer. It is small and mobile to download or move around and can also be used or setup as a production/live server. Developers also use The Uniform Server to test their applications made with either PHP, MySQL, Perl, or the Apache HTTPd Server”.
The new version, 3.4 was released earlier today and is well worth checking out. One advantage of this WAMP (Windows, Apache Mysql, PHP) application is that it is completely portable, no installation required so it can be used on a USB thumbdrive on multiple computers with no problem.
Update – Version number changed as it was 3.4 not 3.3 that was released.
Or if like me you were using the beta version of the software in order to find out what it does and how useable it is, Microsoft have now released a virtual image of Vista (30 day trial) so you can play around in a virtual environment without breaking anything.
Beejive have opened up their beta test to the public prior to launching v1.0 of their multi client chat program for the Blackberry. This client application supports gtalk, msn, yahoo and aol so is pretty useful. Several changes have made recently to improve the notification of new messages and the release notes are worth reading.
The installation information has now been moved to their website at www.beejive.com To install the application OTA, you can just point your BlackBerry browser to www.beejive.com/download.Do you use your blackberry to IM people – do you use it for corporate use or personal use? Personally I use it for a combination of both, although if I had all my friends on the blackberry account I’d never get any work done, so I have a work account for google (my primary chat client) that I use.
One useful feature that I use is the ability to send a text message to another gmail chat account that is normally offline and everytime I arrive or leave a client I send it an IM so I can then later go back and fill out my time sheet. This is quick and easy and always available – my computer may not be turned on, or I may not have my timesheet paperwork with me, but the Blackberry is nearly always by my side. A quick “L company1″ or “@ company2″ gives me good tracking capabilities.
