Is there such a thing as a Throw Away E-mail address?

How many times have you been asked online to provide your personal information, such as your name, number and e-mail address? If you are like me, thousands of times, almost everyday. Each time you do it too, you have this aching feeling in your stomach, because you know you are about to get about a thousand spam e-mails now.

So, what are you supposed to do? Give them a fake e-mail address? Perhaps, but what if they require verification. You know, they send you an e-mail and you have to open it up and click on some link. What are you supposed to do then?

I'll tell you what I do, I go to a little website called 10 Minute Mail. The name says it all, they give you an e-mail address that is literally only good for 10 minutes. If you need additional time, there is a link that resets the timer. After the time is up, the e-mail address self destructs. No muss, no fuss, and more importantly, no spam!

This service is absolutely free. However, if you decide to use it, they ask for a small donation through paypal. The donation isn't mandatory, but it is a nice gesture.

By El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power.net

PIC: We got network problems over here..

Happy Mother's Day!

For today lets figure out how to clean up your wires and gear to make the women our inner neat freaks! in our lives happy.

What does your rack or server room look like? Shoot us some Pics of your gear to Pics at AskTheAdmin Dot Com.

Here is a picture of what your network rack should NOT look like! I would hate to have to trace cables from the patch panel to the umm whatever other equipment is under there! Looks like it might be time to get a cable management solution!

How do you do cable management?

_TheManageThisAdmiN_

Recover your Windows Account Passwords!

Great open-source utility to recover lost Windows account passwords or to break into a locked machine.

In some cases, you can use special tools that reset your forgotten password (which I'll write about in my up-coming posts..). but there are cases, where you don't want to risk harming the system even more, or where you must know the original password- especially if your NTFS file-system is encrypted using EFS. Another case could be where you have a local-profile of a user and you want to be able to log in to it to recover specific settings of the user.

For all those cases you can use this tool called: ophcrack

these are actually a bunch of tools that can be installed on Linux, Windows & Mac. but I want to focus on the Live CD version of the application. the ophcrack team has compiled a complete all-in-one Linux boot CD that automatically loads the tool and starts the cracking process.

- No installation necessary

- No admin password necessary

- All you need is the ability to boot from a CD !

It can crack passwords from a local or remote SAM file of Windows 2000/XP and even Vista!

Use it for troubleshooting and testing purposes only! ;-)

YaronM

Happy Mother's Day Everyone!

How do I manually back up my Outlook PST file?

So I got a frantic phone call yesterday from a buddy of mine who lost his PST file due to a crashed hard drive.

The thing is this guy normally backs up EVERYTHING! I was shocked he didn't have another copy ready to go.

When I asked him why he didn't back up his PST file regularly he kind of stared at me like a deer caught in my headlights and e said:

"Whats a PST? Is that like pssssst?" He made a come here gesture with his finger and I laughed.

So here we go! Your PST file is where Outlook stores your information like email and calendar information, on your local machine. These directions will do for all outlooks 97 or better.

First things first; we need to shutdown outlook and locate your PST file. So just follow these easy steps and you will be golden.

1. Search your PC for *.PST and make sure you select search hidden files and folders is checked. Also make sure there is a check box next to search system folders.
2. Highlight your PST file on the right it will be the one with the most recent access date.
3. Right Click --- Copy
4. Paste your file to a USB memory stick, dvd, cd-r or a network share. (Make sure outlook is closed or you will not be able to perform this step!)
   

You can now rest easily that all of your contacts and saved email pictures of your friend with a felt tipped mustache will be saved forever - or until you destroy the disk!

Come back for how to archive data out of your PST to make it smaller.

_TheBackedUpAdmiN_

Can you open a command prompt during a Windows install?

I don't know how useful this actually is but I thought I would share it with you guys anyway.

You seem to like useless information... Right??

This trick threw me for a loop. I was watching a junior admin install Windows Vista from a CD and he turned to me smirked and said

"Want to see something cool?"

I shrugged my shoulders and he hit a key combination and brought up a command prompt over the gui that was installing Vista....

I said "Whaaaaat?"

We went back and forth like that for a little bit until I asked him what he uses it for. He shrugged his shoulders this time and he didn't know but he likes that it makes him look cool.

You can open a game of Pinball or Solitaire during an install. Sound appealing to anyone? That's what I call multi-tasking :) So Shift + F10 will get you to the command prompt during an install like the shot below. It works on XP as well.


It only works from the GUI portion and not the white text on blue background parts. I googled it and saw some speculation on using it to inject drivers or folders during your install. But isn't that what Nlite is for?? :) Microsoft themselves said the following:

In some cases, it may be helpful to have access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup for the purposes of troubleshooting, copying drivers, starting and stopping services, starting tools such as Task Manager, or other for other needs.To gain access to a command prompt during GUI-mode Setup, press SHIFT+F10.

Do you use this? Did you know about this? Why didn't you tell me? Sheeeesh!

_TheLearnsSomethingNewEverydayAdmiN_

Use a free Exchange server to sync up your calendar with one person and task list with another.

Hi boys and girls,

Do you remember when Ask The Admin covered a very interesting topic of Free Exchange services? For those who don't, you can look here, here and sometimes here.

In a nutshell, this article talked about how me and my fiance' had to plan our wedding and had tons of appointments flying in from both directions.

In order to get our two phones talking to one another and playing nicely, I used a free Exchange hosting service called www.Mail2Web.com to enable my WinMo PDA and my fiance's Blackjack to sync calendars every 10 minutes logging into the service through ActiveSync, as if they are the same phone. As a result, both phones would have the same calendar information, and keep it that way every ten minutes.

I've had this system going for some time now, and it's been working just fine. I haven't even had to login to the control panel for anything!While figuring out this howto, I noticed in my own phone that WinMo gives you 4 categories of info items to sync, (as illustrated by the image so cleverly placed on the top of this blog) - Contacts, Calendar, Email, and Tasks. I realized that my fiance's BlackJack also had the choice of 4 different points of info to sync. This meant that every WinMo device can choose which information to sync with an ActiveSync Server Source and more importantly, which information NOT to sync with an Exchange Server. So we've established that my fiance's BlackJack and my ATT 8525/Hermes were acting as if they had the same calendar - consider them synced.

So this was a real world problem solved by the fact that 2 people have phones with WinMo and Activesync, and the availability of a free exchange service @ www.Mail2Web.com.
Now onto the next real-world problem: The Admin and I have a lot of tasks involved with keeping our beloved website up and running, current and fresh. Throughout the months tasks have come and gone, but certain tasks fell through the sieve and got replaced by more current, more urgent tasks that took precedence at the time. So basically tasks were getting lost. Since neither of us used the built in Tasks application in WinMo, this presented the perfect opportunity to put my theory to the test.

I know that I already have 2 people logging into MY Mail2Web account to sync calendars. But what would be wrong with 3 people logging into that same account - except that my Fiance' will only sync Calendar information, and The Admin will only sync Tasks information (and NOBODY syncs Contact information).

So I had the The Admin log into my Mail2Web account through his ActiveSync Server Connection and sync only Tasks, and I had my own phone begin to sync Tasks with the same service it was already syncing to for Calendar information, which coincidentally my Fiance's phone was simultaneously syncing Calendar information with as well.

Problem solved:
Me and the Admin with synced Tasklist,
Me and the Fiance with synced Calendar.
Free.
Automatic.
Just the way we like it.

AskTheAdmin.com.
Free Tech Support for the Masses.

Commodore 64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on.)