Use it up – Brother HL-3070CW Toner

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Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, or Do without.

There are some things that we can’t really do without. But good old Yankee thrift pains me every time I have to replace printer consumables.

I have a Brother HL-3070CW color laser printer at home, which I really like. I selected it specifically because it has an optional straight-through printing path, to reduce curl on heavier stock.

I’ve also discovered that it reports being out of toner based on page count or something, rather than a measure of actual toner remaining. I found two ways to make sure I get the most from my toner cartridges.

First, I found that there’s a menu for resetting the state of toner in the printer.

  1. Open the top cover
  2. Press the Cancel and Secure Print buttons together to bring up the toner menu
  3. Use the + and – buttons to select the toner cartridge to reset, and press OK (twice). Each color (CMYK) has two options, one each for standard and high capacity cartridges.
  4. When finished, closed the top cover.

In addition, it’s very easy to reset the physical switch on the toner cartridge, as shown in this short video:

Very easy to do.

(Both procedures from http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806 )

I’ve used the menu reset option several times, and I haven’t seen any problems with toner coverage on my printed pages.

When I do need to replace the cartridge, I have found the best prices on Amazon and NewEgg.

Script: Shadow Copy Report

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We use EMC NetWorker for our enterprise backup solution. Since we migrated our primary file server from a NetApp filer to a native Windows server, we’ve been having a recurring problem with all the Shadow Copies for a volume getting deleted. There are strong indications that the problem is related to the NetWorker backups.

As we have been working on this issue with EMC (since the first week in January!), I wrote a script to tell me two things each morning; how many snapshots exist for each volume, and what VSS errors were logged, if any.

I thought someone might find it useful, so I’ve posted it as a separate page (the script doesn’t fit nicely in the column on the blog).

PowerShell Script: chksnap.ps1

Webmail on a Netbook

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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 our browsing from a netbook. Specifically, we’re going to take webmail from this:

Webmail on a netbook - before

to this:

Webmail on a netbook - after

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Custom FSRM notification script

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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 provide more information about the kind of files that a user is storing, something akin to the output of the very useful and free utility WinDirStat.

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:

 

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Semisynchronous WMI

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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:

$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 should have known better

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vim_editor

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.

Prototyping Windows File Services

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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 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.

How to catch a phish

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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 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.

twitter-scam-ol

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What’s my IP Address?

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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 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.

win7-netcpl-0-annotated

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

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Edit a meeting you can’t see

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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 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.

OracleCalendar-InTray-AsDesignate

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.