to this:

I’m using Firefox in my example because that’s the browser that the original querent was using. However, most modern browsers support similar kinds of options.

When the new webmail first was deployed, the folder list was confined to the bottom part of the sidebar. On a netbook, this was a really small area. SAA’s Scott Dellinger already has made some major improvements in the layout of the webmail window.

Originally, the list of folders was confined to a small area in the sidebar.		With Scott’s improvements, there’s more room to view folders.

Even with the improved layout, there’s still a lot of the precious vertical space — usually 600 pixels — eaten up by parts of the browser that we can reclaim.

Turn off the Menu Bar and Bookmarks Toolbar

Right-click in the blank space on the menu or tool bar to get the menu below, and then click the Menu Bar and Bookmarks Toolbar items in turn.

By disabling the Menu Bar, we get a Firefox menu in the upper left that gives us all the functionality we need, but tucked out of the way. Turning off the Bookmarks Toolbar turns on a small Bookmarks button. We can also access bookmarks through the Firefox menu.

Here’s what those menus look like when we click on them:

Notice the bookmarks sub-menu…	The bookmarks menu is quicker, though.

We now have two fewer menu bars, the tabs are sharing the title bar with the Firefox menu, and bookmarks are still a quick click away, which makes a lot more room for the content we actually want.

Here’s one more tweak to try. On the Firefox menu, there’s a Full Screen option. Select that option, or hit the F11 function key, to make the Firefox menus autohide as well.

There. Now we have all 1024 x 600 pixels devoted to webmail, or to whatever site we want to browse. We can move our cursor to the top of the screen to make Firefox show the menus and address bar. The regular keyboard shortcuts continue to function, as well (e.g., CTRL+T for a new tab). To exit Full Screen mode, we can hit F11 again or right-click on the Firefox toolbar.

We can perform a similar tweak to Windows so that even programs without a full screen mode can use the whole screen. We’ll set the Windows taskbar to autohide, so that it only appears when we move the mouse cursor to the bottom of the screen. Just right-click on an empty portion of the taskbar and select Properties from the context menu. Next, check the option labeled Autohide the taskbar.

I hope this is helpful. Most of the options we explored above are available on other modern browsers, too. I use Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 on my netbook.

Whatever your choice of web browser, make the most of the space you have on your small screens.

Browse happy!

I’ve made progress on the script that generates the email. However, I’ve run into a snarl in trying to configure the quota notification to run the script. The script runs just fine from a command prompt, even from a command prompt running as the Local System account. But when I trigger an FSRM event that should drive the script, I get an error in the Application Log:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        SRMSVC
Event ID:      8197
Description:
File Server Resource Manager Service error: Unexpected error.

Operation:
   Running command line action.
   Quota limit reached.
   Processing File Server Resource Manager event

Context:
   Action type: Command Action
   Account: NT AUTHORITY\LocalSystem
   Executable path: C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe
   Arguments: C:\local\secure\notify-test.ps1 -path [Quota Path] -email [Source Io Owner Email]
   Working directory:
   Quota path: K:\homes1\g\gcd
   Threshold percent: 100

Error-specific details:
   Error: AuthzInitializeContextFromSid, 0×80070005, Access is denied.

After spending hours searching online, I finally stumbled on a couple posts on the TechNet Forums. The first one described a problem very similar to mine, in which the poster worked around the issue by using a local admin account, rather than a domain account that’s a member of the Administrators group.

One of the responses to this post included instructions for modifying the ACLs on the FSRM XML data files. The first step is to use psexec to launch a command prompt as the Local System account. I didn’t feel like mangling the ACLs on the FSRM on the production file server. I did like the reminder of psexec’s capabilities.

I ran psexec -i -s and then ran my dirquota quota modify command as Local System. And when I triggered a quota event, my script fired successfully.

I will want to confirm with Microsoft Premier Support that modifying the ACLs is a safe operation before I do so, but at least I have a work-around until then.

$colItems = $objWMIService->ExecQuery ("SELECT * FROM Win32_Share","WQL",wbemFlagReturnImmediately | wbemFlagForwardOnly); 

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 semisynchronous mode with more than 1,000 instances, instance retrieval can monopolize the available resources, which can degrade the performance of the program or script and the computer using the program or script. Each object takes up the necessary resources until the memory is released.

To work around this condition, you can call the method with the iFlags parameter set with the wbemFlagForwardOnly and wbemFlagReturnImmediately flags to instruct WMI to return a forward-only SWbemObjectSet. A forward-only SWbemObjectSet eliminates the performance problem caused by a large data set by releasing the memory after the object is enumerated.

[from: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384832(v=vs.85).aspx ]

I wanted to put this somewhere, because I’m sure I’ll forget.

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 I created the config file in c:\windows\System32 using 32-bit Vim, the WoW64 file system redirector on Server 2008 R2 was transparently relocating that file to c:\windows\SysWOW64. Then, when I tried to start the service, it failed to find or load the config file because it didn’t exist in the correct location.

So, I have replaced the standard gvim install with the native 64-bit version.

We did meet with some staff from various units on campus to discuss the current state of file services, especially the current pain points, and outlined our current plans. The main themes that emerged from our discussion were as follows:

1. Make the service simpler
   1. H: drive is just confusing; merge it with My Documents
   2. The duplicated folders within user profile directory (e.g. c:\users\netid) create lots of confusion. Any way to address this?
2. Provide more options (increments) for home directory quotas
3. Provide notification to departments regarding storage usage and quotas

We are currently prototyping a new design for our Campus File Services — dare I call it CFSv2 — hosted in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Failover Cluster. It’s still early in the process, but the design look promising.

1. Unexpected

Before I even looked at the content of the message, I was suspicious because I don’t have any twitter stuff associated with my UVM email. I could have deleted the message then and, if I was using twitter, logged into my twitter account directly to see if something was going on.

But I wondered how the message was crafted, so I opened it with awareness.

2. False link

A false link is shows a web address in the message, but the link that is attached to it is different. Below, my mail program shows that the link will actually send me to pachitanglangbarcelona.com.

Thunderbird actually throws a warning about the suspicious nature of the message. Also, when I hover my mouse pointer over the link, the real address is displayed in the status bar on the bottom of the Window.

Webmail shows a warning, and my web browser displays the real link address at the bottom of the screen.

That’s enough for me to hear Admiral Ackbar in the back of my head.

3. Strange headers

If you look at the full header information, you can see some interesting details about the email message. Here are some of the headers from the message above:

Return-Path: <hedrick@chipotle.com>
Received: from warthog.uvm.edu (warthog.uvm.edu [132.198.101.92])
    by penguin1.uvm.edu (8.13.7/8.13.7) with ESMTP id p2M6r9Qj004516
    for <gcd@pobox.uvm.edu>; Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:53:09 -0400
Received: from s15339449.onlinehome-server.info (s15339449.onlinehome-server.info [87.106.10.20])
    by warthog.uvm.edu (8.14.4/8.14.4) with SMTP id p2M6r7vT022753
    for <geoff.duke@uvm.edu>; Tue, 22 Mar 2011 02:53:08 -0400
Received: by mx005.twitter.com (Postfix, from userid 1181305386)
        id 026EA983D3C; Tue, 22 Mar 2011 07:24:17 +0000 (UTC)
X-Mailer: MIME-tools 5.427 (Entity 5.427)
From: "Twitter" <twitter-notify-geoff.duke=uvm.edu@postmaster.twitter.com>
Subject: You have notifications pending
To: geoff.duke@uvm.edu

Looking at the Received: headers, we should see an entry for each email server that handled the message from origin to destination. I note that the first Received header (bottom one) is missing the from phrase that’s part of the others. So even though it says mx005.twitter.com, it’s a crudely forged entry, but makes for a good example.

Also, in the second (middle) Received header, I see that UVM’s server warthog actually got the message from a computer called s15339449.onlinehome-server.info. That’s not twitter. And what’s with the Return-Path address, hedrick@chipotle.com? More junk.

I hope this is helpful info. Here are a few links with more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/phishing-scams.aspx

Let me know what you think.

In this post, I describe how to determine your IP address(es) on Windows 7 using the control panel. You can also use the ipconfig command-line tool, but if you know about that tool, you probably don’t need me to tell you about it.

Network and Sharing Center

One of my favorite aspects of Windows 7 is the search feature in the start menu. As you type a search term, Windows will show you matching programs and documents.

As a case in point, you can type Network in the Start Menu search box, and click the Network and Sharing Center control panel item in the search result.

Alternatively, you can open Control Panel, then Network and Internet, and then click the Network and Sharing Center item.

Once this Control Panel applet is open, you should see a list of your network connections in the middle-right of the Window. The image below shows that my laptop has two active connections, Local Area Connection (an Ethernet cable plugged into my laptop), and Wireless Network Connection (using the UVM wifi network).

If you click on one of the connections, a status window will open. While this does list some useful information, you need to click the details button to get to the IP address information.

The Network Connection Details window list all the information relating to the IP configuration of the system. I’ve highlighted a few of the commonly important details in the image below.

What isn’t obvious is that you can hit Control-C on your keyboard to copy the info in this window as text, which you then can paste into an email or other document.

I hope this helps you get the information you need to solve your networking problems.

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 new meeting. Later still, those folks decide they want to reschedule the meeting.

The problem:

If a person isn’t listed as an attendee, then that meeting doesn’t appear in their calendar. However, in Oracle Calendar, only the person who created the meeting can edit it or delete it. This person is listed in the details of the meeting as Proposed by.

So Sam owns the meeting, but it isn’t displayed on his agenda for me to manage it. How do I edit or delete a meeting I can’t see?

The solution:

I need the In-tray Window in Oracle Calendar. This window is something that most people ignore or disable, but it will display the calendar entries you’ve sent out, including once that you aren’t attending. In addition, if I’ve been granted rights to work as someone’s designate, there’s a folder for their entries in my In-tray as well.

In this screenshot, I’m looking at a meeting that I created as Sam’s designate and from which I then removed his as an attendee. If the meeting isn’t recent, you may need to adjust the display options (Tools – Options – In-tray – Sent out) to allow you see the particular event.

Another work-around would be to have Sam open the calendar of one of the attendees, find the meeting and edit or delete it. But since I can get to it via the In-tray, I don’t need to bother Sam at all.

I hope this is helpful.

The most important point I want to make about general Office troubleshooting is that reinstalling office will rarely fix a problem. Office will kick-off a repair operation automatically if it detects problems with core Office files. Application, heal thyself.

More importantly, a repair operation or uninstall/reinstall process will refresh Office program components, but it won’t touch templates, user and system specific registry information, and add-ins that are the most frequent cause of problems.

Safe mode

The first step in troubleshooting should be to start the application in safe mode. Most versions of Office applications support a safe mode, which doesn’t load templates, registry info, and add-ins. This step quickly determines whether the problem lies with Office itself or elsewhere.

Invoking Office safe mode is as easy as adding the command-line parameter /safe. Usually, I open the Run window (WindowsKey+R), and type the name of the office executable and add the /safe parameter. If you don’t know the executable name, you can find it with the browse button, and then add the parameter at the end:

If the app doesn’t start, then you probably do need to perform a Repair installation. If the application starts successfully (sometimes without opening a document in safe mode), then you know that the core office files are fine, and a reinstall isn’t likely to help.

Figuring out what’s wrong

While is safe mode, you can look at the application options to see what templates and add-ins are installed, and currently disables. In Office 2007, there’s the Office button, and in 2010, the File menu. From this menu, select Options.

Look at the list of add-ins and templates to see if there’s anything that isn’t part of Office. I would attempt to disable them and then see if the application starts without safe mode.

If you aren’t able to determine the culprit, Microsoft provides step-by-step troubleshooting guides to Office startup problems. They are thorough, but should identify and resolve the problem.

• How to troubleshoot problems that occur when you start or use Word 2010, Word 2007, Word 2003, or Word 2002
• How to troubleshoot Excel 2007 startup problems
• Microsoft’s Fix it Solution Center

I hope that you find these tips helpful. Good hunting!

Occasionally, the activation process doesn’t work. Problems are usually related to network communication with the KMS. Below are some steps to identify and resolve problems that might occur during activation.

Gather Information.

Gathering data is essential to fixing problems. If you ask me (or other IT staff) for help with Office 2010 activation, the first thing I will ask from you is the output of the commands in the steps below.

There are a few steps that will make it easy to collect all the output of your troubleshooting steps.

• Open an elevated Command Prompt (Run As Administrator)
• Change the Properties of the command prompt window to increase the Screen Buffer height to, say, 3000 lines. This will prevent you losing earlier steps as the lines scroll off the screen.
• Run cscript /h:cscript, which changes the default script host to cscript, so that output will go to the command prompt instead of a pop-up dialog box.

When you are ready to copy the text from the command prompt, right-click the title bar of the window, select Edit > Select All, and then Control-C to Copy the text to the clipboard. Then you can paste the text to any place you want; a webmail message, a footprint entry, or a text file in notepad.

On to gathering information. Several of the following step use the ospp.vbs script, which is located in the C:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office14 directory (or Program Files (x86) for 32-bit office installed on 64-bit Windows).

1. Run ospp.vbs /dstatus to show the current Office 2010 activation status

An example of a successfully activated installation of Office 2010:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14>ospp.vbs /dstatus
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.</p>

---Processing--------------------------
---------------------------------------
SKU ID: 6f327760-8c5c-417c-9b61-836a98287e0c
LICENSE NAME: Office 14, OfficeProPlus-KMS_Client edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 14, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
LICENSE STATUS:  ---LICENSED---
ERROR CODE: 0 as licensed
Last 5 characters of installed product key: H3GVB
REMAINING GRACE: 176 days  (253443 minute(s) before expiring)
---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
---Exiting-----------------------------

Note the remaining grace days. An activation is good for 180 days (six months). Office will renew the activation every seven days, bumping the remain grace days back to 180.

Office 2010’s license status before activation looks like this:

C:\>"Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\OSPP.VBS" /dstatus
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

---Processing--------------------------
---------------------------------------
SKU ID: 6f327760-8c5c-417c-9b61-836a98287e0c
LICENSE NAME: Office 14, OfficeProPlus-KMS_Client edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 14, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
LICENSE STATUS: ---OOB_GRACE---
ERROR CODE: 0x4004F00C
ERROR DESCRIPTION: The Software Licensing Service reported that the application
is running within the valid grace period.
Last 5 characters of installed product key: H3GVB
REMAINING GRACE: 20 days  (29077 minute(s) before expiring)
---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
---Exiting-----------------------------

The Out-Of-Box (OOB) grace period is 30 days. We can tell that this installation is the correct version of Office (“Office 14, COLUME_KMSCLIENT channel”). The next step is to determine whether there’s a problem with communications between this system and the KMS server.

2. Run ipconfig /all to collect information about the current network configuration

C:\>ipconfig /all
[...]
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : localdomain
   Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Network Connection
   Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-0C-29-9C-67-CE
   DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
   Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::102c:2249:dac0:46e%11(Preferred)
   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.81.134(Preferred)
   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
   Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Friday, December 10, 2010 10:15:36 AM
   Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Friday, December 10, 2010 10:45:34 AM
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.81.2
   DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.81.254
   DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 234884137
   DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-14-85-C5-C0-00-0C-29-06-6D-3B

   DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.81.2
   Primary WINS Server . . . . . . . : 192.168.81.2
   NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* 9:
[...]

Communication with the KMS is restricted to the UVM networks, including Wifi and VPN. As you review the network configuration, look for nonstandard IP addresses and DNS servers. In particular, some NAT configurations interfere with activation.

3. Run this DNS query to make sure the system can locate the KMS.

c:\nslookup -q=srv _vlmcs._tcp

(Note the space between srv and _vlmcs)

4. Run ping kms1.campus.ad.uvm.edu

C:\>ping kms1.campus.ad.uvm.edu
Pinging kms1.campus.ad.uvm.edu [132.198.102.40] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 132.198.102.40: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=127
Reply from 132.198.102.40: bytes=32 time=3ms TTL=127
Reply from 132.198.102.40: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=127
Reply from 132.198.102.40: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=127

Ping statistics for 132.198.102.40:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 6ms, Average = 3ms

5. Run ospp.vbs /act to trigger office activation.

C:\>"Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14"\ospp /act
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

---Processing--------------------------
---------------------------------------
Installed product key detected - attempting to activate the following product:
SKU ID: 6f327760-8c5c-417c-9b61-836a98287e0c
LICENSE NAME: Office 14, OfficeProPlus-KMS_Client edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 14, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
Last 5 characters of installed product key: H3GVB
ERROR CODE: 0xC004F074
ERROR DESCRIPTION: The Software Licensing Service reported that the computer cou
ld not be activated. No Key Management Service (KMS) could be contacted. Please
see the Application Event Log for additional information.
To view the activation event history run: cscript OSPP.VBS /dhistorykms
---------------------------------------
---------------------------------------
---Exiting-----------------------------

It will either activate successfully, or return an error code. This information needs to be included in requests for assistance. Sometimes, the output will include a description of error code; other times, it will tell you to run another command to get the verbose description.

At this point, if you’ve ruled-out network communications issues and still there are errors, we ask that you create a footprint and include all the output from the commands above.

References:

Troubleshoot volume activation for Office 2010
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624355.aspx

Tools to configure client computers in Office 2010
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee624350.aspx