Microsoft posted a screenshot of some new Exchange2007 options which made me laugh. Well worth a visit to check out this tool and read the comments too.

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.

Some of the members of Friends In Tech present the CanCan….

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.

With all the fuss about Daylight Saving Time a couple of weeks, there seems to have been very little said about the affects or problems that people had after the event.

I had several issues with out of date clients not being patched, the main ones being Windows XP service Pack1 clients that are not supported by Microsoft anymore and therefore not receiving non security patches via Windows Update. Instead we ran the daylightsavingsfix program from IntelliAdmin with a batch routine to run on affected desktops. Another desktop issue was caused by people somehow unchecking the observe Daylight Savings checkbox within Windows so their time was still an hour out!
The other issue that I had was with Kronos releasing patches right up to (and beyond) the DST timezone change but the instructions were not complete and it didn’t even update the timeclock machines out in the field so they were one hour out too.

Thankfully, the DST period is over…or is it?  Next weekend, is when the original time change would have taken place - do you have any plans in place to check that  machines do not change their time again?

Previously in this mini series, in my previous posts (part 1, part2) the question was asked - What are the likely dangers if all of the users were in the domain admins group and what pitfalls could occur if the users were removed from this group.

The answer? The users profiles would get deleted when they logged out of their machine! A very unexpected result but as mentioned in part 2, the previous administrators decided to add everybody to all of the domain usergroups to ensure that everybody could do anything on the network and so the network administrators would not be bothered with user permission requests. Unfortunately, adding everyone to every group includes the Domain Guests group. It is a VERY little known fact, that if you are a member of Domain guests, your profile is deleted when you log off the network - after all, you are a guest in the domain so why keep your settings? The saving grace for the previous company was that if you are also a member of Domain Admins, your profile is not deleted. See Microsft KB Article 165398 for documentation on this fact.

By removing Domain Admins from the users group, the users were now part of Domain Guests and as they logged off the network, their profile was deleted. This includes all files in My Documents, their archived email, desktop icons and the current work they were using (stored on their desktop) as all these files were stored in the default location, c:\documents and settings - on the desktop machine, in their profile.

Once it was discovered that the profiles were getting deleted after logging off, everyone was told not to log off whilst I did some research to find out why this was happening and the above knowledge base article was found. Everybody was removed from Domain Guests but the problem still existed for the users who were currently logged on as group membership is refreshed at logon and so everyone was still a member of Domain Guests and therefore the profile would be deleted! For the first time in my life I was actually telling people to turn off their computers at the power switch rather than logging off and shutting down their computer. By pulling the power, the logoff functions would not run, the profiles would not be deleted and the subsequent logon and logoffs would work as originally intended.

As you can imagine, the solution to this perplexing problem was very welcome after a VERY long weekend. I hope you have enjoyed this mini series. Let us know whether you would like similar series to run. What did you like/not like about the series. My goal was to make you think, impart a little known fact that might help someone else and give you an answer to Mike Mcbride’s question - What did you learn this week?

In my previous post I posed a problem where all the users were in the domain admins group and asked what dangers this could pose.  The responses included the fact that removing people from the domain admins group could cause issues with programs running on the local desktop if the previous setup relied on the administrative rights to allow users to be an administrator on the local pc.  This is a correct statement, but there is another gotcha that has yet to be revealed.

From my analysis of the network (after the gotcha was revealed) it was discovered that the previous administrators had been lazy and actually added everybody to all of the groups in  the domain so they wouldn’t have to worry about people not being able to do things. I removed them all from the domain administrators group to lock down security (they would need to be in the power users for some old applications to work)
So now you know all the relevant details that may lead you to the gotcha, what do you think is the problem?

A couple of weeks ago I had the experience of working a long weekend to upgrade a clients network from an old NT network to Microsoft’s Small Business Server 2003. The actual upgrade went fairly smoothly but something arose that I thought would make a good puzzler for the Friends In Tech Website……

You come to upgrade a domain from nt4 to sbs2003 and do a swing migration. This transfers all the existing users, groups, email address’s and configuration to a new hardware platform with the minimum of downtime. The old network domain was previously set up by a different IT company so you thoroughly document the setup prior to the upgrade. As part of this routine you notice that all the users are in the domain administrators group. You know this is a very bad idea and plan to remove the users from this domain administrator group.

Judging from the fact that all users are in the domain administrators group, this could imply a certain procedure for how users were setup in the past. What could this procedure be, how risky is it to remove users from the domain administrators group and what unforseen consequences could this have?

Please comment to this post or in the Friends In Tech Forums and an answer will be posted after a week and a clue given if nobody gets it. The idea of this post is to stimulate discussion, brainstorm ideas and warn others of a potential pitfall! You may want to subscribe to the comments feed to see what other suggestions have been made.

I had a fun experience when working at a client site on Friday night - all names have been erased (apart from mine) to protect the guilty……

A customer needed to switch to a dsl line for their internet connectivity which meant a disruption to their website, incoming email and outgoing internet so it had to be done out of hours. As it also involved changes to externally hosted dns it was better to do it at a weekend so that by the time users came back to work on Monday all the dns servers would be returning the correct data.

I picked up the key for the building earlier on in the week and agreed with the customer that they would not set the alarm that night (I’d be arriving shortly after they would have left for the weekend) and I’d just have to arm it when I left.

Friday night I turned up at the client site, unlocked the front door and hear a beeping noise coming from the alarm control unit - this was not going to be a good start to the evening.  I fumbled in my coat pockets for my phone and also for the customers cell phone number on a piece of paper to try and get the code before the alarm went off - those alarm sound bombs are painful. I literally dropped everything and ran out of the door to where I could stand without my ears hurting. Fortunately I still had the key in my possession and the phone was in my jacket pocket (as I hadn’t been able to get it out in time).

I called the contact number for the client and received a “hello” and then the connection died. When I redialed I just received the voicemail so I then called our office to see if someone had a home phone number but they didn’t. In the meantime the client calls me
back but each time I call them I have to wait ages for them to answer. By the time I get to speak with them the alarm has stopped ringing but I didn’t want to open the door in case it set the alarm off again. The client gives me the code to enter and I go inside, reset the alarm and then hang up the phone.  Just as I do this the police show up! I explain what is going on, show them that I have the key to the building so I’m not a burglar and have to produce id for him.

The cop leaves and I go and apologise to the cat that must have been in
REAL pain (turns out there is actually two pet cats in the building), and
start work. As I have to sit on the floor as there is no desk space I
spread my stuff out and the cats promptly come and sit on the pieces of paperwork making it hard to read the various passwords and details needed to complete the job. The job was actually a bit more complicated than I expected but I obtained some pdf’s from the manufacturers website and was able to move their internet connection across ok.
A very memorable evening but there are several things to learn from this.

• Ensure you ALWAYS have the alarm code for a customer site if working out of hours - do not rely on them turning it off before you arrive.
• Ensure you have at least one contact number for a client - preferably two in case the first does not answer.
• Carry some id with you - a company business card is good to prove that you are not just a member of the public - although I didn’t have a business card to hand (they were all in the computer bag inside the building) I had driven the company car with all of the advertising stickers on it.
• Cats love to sit on papers spread out on the floor - try and organise a desk to sit at when working - it can also get uncomfortable sitting on the floor for long periods of time.
• If you are allergic to pets check that customers don’t have animals roaming around the premises (especially if the customer is a zoo!)
• An external source of internet connectivity is great for testing and looking up results on the internet without having to revert to the customers network (which may or may not be working properly at the time)