Amid the praise for and complaints about the newer version of webmail, we received a plea from a netbook user. She pointed out that the new layout made it very difficult to navigate among her mail folders. I use a netbook myself, and I thought I’d share some things that we can do to improve [...]
I’ve been working on a script to generate an informative message to users when they exceed quota thresholds on our file server. The features of the File Server Resource Manager (FSRM) provides a variety of useful variables that can be plugged into an automated email. However, we have found that it’s often very useful to [...]
Experimenting with querying WMI from Perl with Win32::OLE, I ran across the following WMI query options in an Perl example from Microsoft’s Script Center: After some digging, I found the following explanation of those options wbemFlagReturnImmediately, and wbemFlagForwardOnly: Because WMI manages the object, semisynchronous mode is more secure than asynchronous mode. However, if you use [...]
I spent a some time configuring the Eventlog-to-Syslog service on my domain controllers, yesterday. A bunch of that time was spent trying to figure out why the service wasn’t able to read the config file I had created. The upshot is that I had installed a 32-bit version of my text editor of choice. When [...]
After seven years of providing robust file service hosted on a NetApp filer, we’ve decided to migrate our services to native Windows File Services. We have encountered several issues with the interaction of newer Windows client operating systems and NetApp’s third-party implementation of CIFS and SMB2. We did meet with some staff from various units [...]
I’ve received several phishing attempts, recently, this time masquerading as mail from Twitter. I thought I’d share how I recognized this as an attack. Many list members already know this stuff, but I thought I’d share since we still see folks responding to these kinds of attacks. 1. Unexpected Before I even looked at the [...]
It’s one of the first questions that we ask clients when we’re helping diagnose a problem with a network resource. There are several different ways to determine your IP address. There’s even a website, whatsmyip.org which will show you what Internet servers think your IP address is. In this post, I describe how to determine [...]
The situation: I’m working in Oracle Calendar as a person’s designate, managing his calendar on his behalf. We’ll call him Sam. I create a meeting for Sam with some other attendees. Later, I remove Sam from the meeting rather than deleting it. Perhaps the other still want to meet but didn’t want to create a [...]
Recently, I was asked to talk with our Help Line staff about strategies for troubleshooting problems with Microsoft Office. I spent some time addressing the activation issues relating specifically Office 2010, which I wrote up in a separate post. The most important point I want to make about general Office troubleshooting is that reinstalling office [...]
Microsoft Office 2010 volume license edition use the Volume License 2.0 mechanisms to manage activation. Office 2010 will activate against our campus Key Management Service (KMS), without user intervention, in a manner similar to Windows Vista and Windows 7. Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. [...]
Geoffrey Duke
Sr. System Administrator,
University of Vermont