There is a little known feature in newer versions of Outlook. You can display favorite folders at the top of other folders and there are some special folders you can create – including an Unread Message folder and Here is how to do it:

1. In the Navigation Pane, click the plus sign (+) next to Search Folders to display its subfolders.
2. Click the Unread Mail folder.

Your unread items are displayed in the message list.

Tip To make the Unread Mail folder more visible, drag it to the Favorite Folders pane.

_TheUnreadAdmiN_

Have you ever seen the error that your SEL is full? Well here are some solutions to clear it on your Dell server. You will see an error during post and this error will be displayed in your LCD panel on the front bezel of the server:

I1912 SEL Full

1. If you have openmanage agents install run the command on service console: “omconfig system esmlog action=clear”. (You can also do it from the web interface)

2. if you have DRAC, you can log into the web interface and clear the log

3. If you neither have DRAC or openmanage. Reboot the system, go to the BMC menu and there should be an option to clear the log.

_theSELAdmin_

If you or a little one flipped your laptop display chances are you are freaking out. Stop… Don’t worry you can flip it right back to where it is supposed to be with the following hot keys:

•  Ctrl-Alt-Up – right side up
• Ctrl-Alt-Right – 90 degrees
• Ctrl-Alt-Down – 180 degrees
• Ctrl-Alt-Left – 270 degrees (If that doesn’t work try Ctrl-Shift-R)

_TheUpsideDownAdmiN_

The following post was written by Melissa Schraiber of FatWallet.com. We were not paid to post this and apparently we share a love for HostGator!

Check it out below:
 

 
In today’s digital world, it is vital to have a web presence. The success of a website is directly related to its hosting, so finding the right host should always be the first step. The following list outlines the attributes of a good host.

 Cost versus Value

There are many hosts who promise to deliver unlimited bandwidth and disk space along with 100 percent up-time, for a very low monthly fee. There is no such thing as unlimited in the hosting world and no host has perfect performance. There are often strings and hidden catches attached to such claims, as well.

A good host will have clearly defined limits on resources and will offer several levels of service for different needs. Those just starting out will benefit from GoDaddy promotional codes, which can be found online.

Technical Support

A proper host will offer support by phone, live chat and email. Support services should be available every day of the year, 24 hours per day.

A good way to test the level of a prospective host’s support is to contact them with pre-sales questions. How fast and well the company responds will reveal the quality of the service overall.

Uptime

Uptime is important to anyone hosting a site but especially so to businesses. Downtime equals lost revenue and reputation, so it needs to be avoided as much as possible. It should be noted that equipment and power failures happen and sometimes this is beyond the control of the host.

Quality hosts will offer 99.999 percent uptime over the course of one year, which would amount to roughly six minutes of downtime. This claim will be backed by a Service Level Agreement, which will provide a credit to the customer if uptime slips below the stated percentage.

Scalability

All websites need room to grow and this is where scalability comes in. A host should make make expanding and upgrading as painless an experience as possible.

A stable, established host offering services ranging from budget all the way up to dedicated servers is a good choice. Moving an account to a bigger hosting package or even a new server should take place with a few clicks and little to no downtime.

Along with the above guidelines, anyone considering hosting a site should first carefully consider the present and future needs of that site before embarking on the search for the right host.

What do you use for a web host? Do you have any questions? Hit us up in the comments below…

Greetings fellow Admins! It’s me, El Di Pablo from Bauer-Power and Tech Chop taking the reigns here at AskTheAdmin for a little while. I was chatting with Karl, and apparently he is working 70 hour work weeks lately, and hasn’t had time to keep up with the posts here. Me being the nice virtual online friend that I am, I volunteered to write up some posts for a week or two to give you guys some original content.

Now, today isn’t going to be one of those days though. Today, I am going to post my latest video from my monthly video show Tech Chop. In this episode I show you three ways you can send spoof emails using your iPhone, Android, and also from Linux. Spoiler alert! Sending spoofs from your iPhone or Android phone is way easier than Linux. However, since you are using the terminal to do it in Linux, that automatically boosts your geek cred by +5 and in turn makes you look cooler.

Here’s the video:

Links for the apps and commands used can be found here: (Spoofing Email For Dummies)

Sending out these spoofs is actually a pretty funny prank you can play on someone. In the video I mentioned sending one to the desktop tech that works for me, and he almost had a heart attack. He says he is saving it for blackmail purposes now, so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. Anyway, still funny if you ask me.

If you want to check out more videos from Tech Chop, visit TechChop.com. If you want to watch the videos on your TV using a set-top box like Boxee, or Roku, you can catch Tech Chop on the Tech Podcast Network!

Know of other tools that will allow you to send spoofs? Are they easier to use? Let us know about them in the comments!

Here is a great recent post from our good friends over at Bauer-Power:
I am a huge fan of Microsoft’s VPN built into Routing and Remote Access. For me it is the easiest system to configure, and deploy. Plus it isn’t limited on how many users can connect to it like say a Cisco VPN where you might be able to have 10 concurrent users, and if you need any more you have to pay for more licenses. Lame sauce I say!

I also like Microsoft’s latest VPN technology, Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol, or SSTP for short. It’s as easy to setup and configure as PPTP, but it’s more secure because it uses SSL encryption. Plus the only port you have to open up on the firewall is 443. Easy peasy!

Finally, the last thing I like is that if you use a Microsoft VPN, you can use the built in Network and Sharing Center in Windows to configure your settings. You don’t need a third party client like you do with Cisco, Sonicwall or Netscaler VPN’s. That means less overhead, and less software you have to take care of. Pure win!

What if you don’t want to write up a tutorial on how to setup a connection in Network and Sharing Center for your users? Sure it’s easy for you to go through the Setup a New Connection or Network wizard because you’re the IT guy. For the young lady in sales though, you probably should have a PhD in nuclear physics to set the thing up. Why not configure it once on your computer, backup your settings, and restore it on her computer? Sounds like a good idea right? Well it,s actually easy to do.

• Go through the Set Up a Connection or Network wizard in Windows to configure your VPN settings (SSTP, PPTP, L2TP etc)

• When done copy rasphone.pbk from %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Network\Connections\PBK\ on your computer
• When you are ready to restore it, paste rasphone.pbk in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Network\Connections\PBK\ on the computer you want to restore it on.

Easy right? Since all you need to do is keep a copy of rasphone.pbk, which is just a text file that can be edited in Notepad, you can easily deploy your Windows VPN settings using a startup script or something!

The next time the user logs into windows, they will see their automatically configured Windows VPN when they click on their network icon in the system tray!

[Via Bauer-Power]

The information published below on AtA 3 years ago today still rings true. Check it out:

It’s an Admin’s worst nightmare (well one of them).

A server’s system disk is quickly running out of space for no apparent reason. You know that when the system drive fills the server is going to shut down and you’re going to have a lot of unhappy users. You need to find out what is taking up so much space.

There are several tools for looking around your drive and getting a visual image of what is on it. Tools like WinDirStat, Folder Size and TreeSize all do a nice job of showing you where all that space is going.

But sometimes you need a quick and dirty tool and (if you’re like me) you don’t want to install something on your servers unless you really need to.

That’s one great thing about SequoiaView, it gives you a nice visual map of any drive or folder without installing anything. Download the zipped version, unzip it and run the executable. There’s nothing to install or risk messing up your servers with. Delete the whole folder when you are done and there’s no trace of it.

Of course, I am using JFFNMS to monitor my network so I was able to learn about this impending disaster early enough to do something about it. In my case – I had forgotten to reconfigure the IIS logging on my Exchange server, so the OWA logs were slowly filling up the system drive since they default to Windows\System32\LogFiles.

What do you use to monitor disk space on your servers? Do you have any horror stories to share with AtA? Well that is what the comments are for!

_TheMonitoringAdmiN_

So out of necesisity (My little one really wanting to play NickJr video games on her iPad) I was able to rig up some working flash action. I needed to use a remote desktop application (VNC will work as well) and remote into a workstation on my home network. Using this computer I have full access to not only flash but also all of the Windows applications on the machine.

This works great for remoting into any of your internet accessible machines over your G3 connection or WiFi. I will throw together a tutorial in the near future but I had to share this with you in the mean time.

Have you had any luck getting

Today I had to connect to a Windows Live Meeting without my headset. So I had no normal way of muting and unmuting my call. I went and searched. It took me some time but I finally found some codes that can help. Basically I needed to type *6 to mute my voice and *6 to unnmute when I wanted to speak.

When connecting to any type of Microsoft Conference call via a normal touch tone telephone you can make use of the following touch tone shortcut keys:

• Chairperson codes:
  • #1 Participant roll call
  • #2 Participant count 
  • *2 Stop audio playback
  • *5 Mute/unmute participant lines
  • *7 Lock/unlock conference
  • *8 Record start/stop
  • ## End conference
• Chairperson and participant codes 
  • *0 Operator assistance
  • #0 Conference help menu
  • *6 Mute/unmute own line 

There is an awesome writeup on Synergy by Adam Pash over at LifeHacker today. I have been using it for sometime now and you should check out the post and applications.

If you have two or more computers at one desk, you don’t want two or more sets of keyboards and mice cluttering up your workspace, too. You can buy a hardware gadget that lets you share a single keyboard and mouse with several computers (which involves a mess of tangled wires), or you could use a free software solution called Synergy. The Synergy application runs on all the computers you’re using—the one that has the keyboard and mouse connected and the one(s) that do not—and lets you control all of them from that keyboard and mouse. That means you can move your mouse off one computer’s screen and it will appear on the other, where you can type and work as well. Synergy also lets you share Clipboard contents between computers. If you copy information to the Clipboard on one computer and move your mouse to the other, you can paste it there, even though they’re two different systems.

Read the whole post at Lifehacker here or grab the app here.

I orginally wrote about this way back when in 2006 when AskTheAdmin was just born. Now here I am 4 years later writing about the same tool! This is not just any tool though this is the Offline NT Password Recovery Boot CD. By downloading this ISO and burning it to a cd – you can then boot to this CD and change or blank out passwords by loading the SAM database offline hence the name offline password recovery.

It is as simple as booting to the CD, choosing the account and doing the deed. You write your changes back to the drive and reboot.

When you are back at the Windows login screen you will now be able to use the password you enetered or a blank password (just hit enter)

Here are the links to download the image:

• cd100627.zip (~4MB) – Bootable CD image. (md5sum: 6d80cdfbba97457e413f95a3554d9524 cd100627.zip)
• cd080802.zip (~3MB) – Previous version CD image. (md5sum: 33ecd38263f935b82e7b2e3e9f5de563)

and there is even a Floppy Disk release that is no longer updated:

Floppy release (not updated anymore), see below on how to use them

• bd080526.zip (~1.4M) – Bootdisk image (md5sum: 37889e4c540504e59132bdcdfe7f9bb7)
• drivers1-080526.zip (~310K) – Disk drivers (mostly PATA/SATA) (md5sum: 72ac1731c6ba735d0ac2746a30dbc3ee)
• drivers2-080526.zip (~1.2M) – Disk drivers (mostly SCSI) (md5sum: 30172bec657c85a5f1a0b43601452fb7)

This CD has saved my ass a number of times! Do you have another method of recovering lost passwords? We would love to hear about them in the comments! You can also check out their website for FAQ’s and other helpful hints here.

Have you seen this post on opening a command prompt during a windows install? Using this you can start a recovery install jump to a command prompt and run:

control userpasswords2

and bingo bango you can change your passwords!

_TheUnlockedAdmiN_

I use Photoshop daily and until today I have never used a free application that would allow me to kick Adobe’s Photoshop to the curb.

Being able to use Photoshop filters and the ability to use masks and layers were a necessity and sure enough those are both features of this application called Photobie.

Upon discovering Photobie 7.2.1 I think I have a major contender in the graphic design freeware war. First of all the download was a mere 4.4 MB. That’s right a full fledged layered graphic editor weighing in at under 5 MB!

After installing the application I was greeted by a Photoshop like interface and this message:

Photobie is completely free and has a community behind it that is constantly publishing tutorials and how-to’s. For this simple fact Photobie makes a great image editor for beginners. Reading through what the application can do I was amazed. It says that it can do Gif Animation, Screen Captures, Photoshop filter imports (.8BF files), it can make beautiful digital scrapbooks and more!

Ok it sounds too good to be true so I downloaded it and gave it a test drive. Let’s see what I was able to do and how easy it was. This is what your application looks like:

It has a main window on the right hand side where you can work, it has a free floating layer manager that allows you hide, show or modify layers, and other tool palettes on the right hand side. Just like Photoshop the palettes are moveable and can be rearranged to your hearts content.

You can see the author’s demo/walkthrough of the application via YouTube here:

Out of habit I hit Control – N to create a new document and sure enough it popped up! You can also create a new document by hitting File –> New.

You will then be shown the new image wizard. You will need to specify a width, height, resolution, default file type and you can set your background to a color, image or texture. Not too shabby!

If you are wondering you can save the file as .pob, .jpg, .png, .bmp, .gif, .tif, and .ico.

You can create a transparent background by checking the box for a transparent background. When you are happy with your settings you can hit ok. You will then have a empty canvas per your specifications to work with like so:

When you start you will have one layer that is called the background, which happens to be the same in Photoshop as well. As we either paste images in or draw on our canvas another layer will be created. To demonstrate this I will choose the pencil tool  like so:

Then I drew a line using the colored pen. I used the selected color of black but I could have just as easily switched it by clicking on another color in the color palette below the paint selection.

You can then remove the layer or add a new one from the layer manager, as well as control opacity, hide the layer, create a mask and so much more. This application will leave amateurs looking through hundreds of tools and experts happy that they can do almost anything that they can do in more expensive applications.

You can use the gif animation feature by clicking on GIF_Animation on the top menu and then Animation control panel. That will take you here where you can drag and drop frames to be used in your gif file. You can load a animated gif to be able to dissect it and use pieces of it in your own creations.

You can set up the screen capture tool by hitting the screen capture button at the top of the menu and then setting the hot keys.

By default the hot key is Control – Alt – 1. This will grab the active screen and open it as a new document like so:

There are loads of tutorials up on the Photobie website that will teach you how to use basic or advanced features as well as a full feature list which will demonstrate each feature. These tutorials are available here.

Do you have the urge to create a collage out of your digital photography collection? Maybe you have an upcoming event that you would like to show off your images for or to create a nice sign or banner. Well now we found a very cool, tiny, easy to use application that will make your dream a reality.

Using the program’s built in options and your own images and a background you can create awesome collages in a manner of minutes or seconds.

We can start by visiting their website and downloading the application. The download is 4.79MB and once it gets installed, run it and you will see the screen below.

You can add your images from here as well as setting up your layout options. To start adding images you will need to click on the add button in the bottom left hand corner.

Once you hit that button it will bring up a normal Windows Open dialogue box. Here you can select the items you want to add to the collage. Note: You can use Control + Click or Shift + Click to highlight multiple items in one shot. This should cut down on your setup time – especially if you are using sequential images.

Once you have all your items selected hit the open button and the images will be transferred into Collage It. You will then be able to see your images in the left hand pane. There are buttons to remove one or multiple images as well as the option to clear out all selected items. This is what my photo list looked like after selecting 6 pictures:

Next we will want to configure our other settings to make our collage into our own creation. You can see the options below. They are displayed on the right hand side of the interface. You can choose to use all the photos you have selected or just a specific number of pictures. If you have more than the selected amount the images will be chosen at random.

Spacing tells the application how much room should be between images and the margin is how much space to leave on each side of the collage. You can set the images to auto rotate and to what degree on the auto rotate section.

You can also enable shadows and frames around the images with the checkboxes below.

And then we can set our background by hitting the background button located at the bottom left hand side of the application. That will bring up this screen:

You can set the background to just use a gradient fill, top to bottom or left to right. You can use a solid fill or an image. If you use an image you can set the opacity of it or in layman’s terms the ability to see through the image. When you are finished hit the OK button.

Now we want to see what we made, right? So go ahead and hit the preview button at the bottom of the screen and let’s see what we have:

That was the collage that Collage It spat out at me and you can also save it as a JPG when you are happy with it. There are people’s collages posted on the Collage It website as well for you to check out and get some inspiration from.

In the past I have covered other collage applications including Shape Collage.  But what collage apps do you prefer?  Let us know about them in the comments.

Today I had the need to launch an application in a minimized mode. This meant I needed to change the shortcut of the application I wanted to launch using my batch file. I also found out that you can launch a application maximized. This is great for those programs that you open and then automatically click on the maximize button. 

Hopefully this will save some users grief over getting rid of the extra clicks.

_TheShortcuttingAdmiN_

I have been doing a lot of side web work recently – times are tough! So I have needed to do some SSL testing for a client and instead of requisitioning for some certs I discovered a free source of them on the web thanks to our good friends over at Bauer-Power.

Check out the post below:

So I get an email from Disqus the other day like I always do when someone comments on a blog post. Often times if someone posts a link in the comment I get an approval email from Disqus. Most of the time if there is a link it is spam and I mark it as spam via email and I’m on my way, but occasionally someone will post a comment to something very useful, and that is how this article begins!

I received a comment from a reader by the name of Tony Jobson on my article on how to setup SSTP VPN in Windows server 2008. In that article I mentioned how you can get an SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $12.99. I thought that was the best deal in town, but I was wrong!

You can get a FREE, fully functional SSL certificate from StartSSL! Yes, I said free, and it works with most browsers and services! I signed up for a free account, and tested it on my home SSTP VPN, and it worked without issue! I even setup a StartSSL cert on my personal start page for the hell of it! It’s free, why not?

From their page:

What?

Security and encryption is getting ever more important in today’s computer networks, being it SSL secured web sites, encryption of data or mail, secure logon to mention just a few. But security is expensive, right? Not anymore….

StartCom, the vendor and distributor of StartCom Linux Operating Systems, also operates MediaHost™, a hosting company, which offered its clients, SSL secured web sites with certificates signed by StartCom for many years. That’s where the idea originated: Free SSL certificates!

How?

Most web servers, such as Apache and IIS are capable of running the 128/256-bit secured and encrypted SSL protocol. Most mail clients can encrypt and sign your electronic mail messages. All you need, in most cases, is a SSL or S/MIME certificate to make it work. StartCom provides certificates through an easy web based interface wizard and sign up process – free of charge. With our installation instructions, you’ll have your secured web site running or your email exchange secured within minutes.

Why?

Because we believe in the right to protect and secure information between two entities without discrimination of race, origin and financial capabilities. By applying a completely different and new business model compared to traditional certification authorities, we are able to prove here, that digital certificates can cost much less or may be even free of charge! Instantly! Furthermore, every certificate from StartCom is insured up to US$ 10,000 if your customers were to suffer financial loss as a direct result of relying on a certificate that was issued through our negligence! This and other measures permits the visitors and customers of your site to fully rely and trust in StartCom.

Where, when?

The StartCom Certification Authority is today supported by most important platforms like Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh OS X and many Linux operating systems and browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Google’s Chrome provide built-in support. Should you be using an older or unsupported browser you may import our CA certificate.

The next time you or your company are looking to secure a website, create an SSL VPN, setup a simple secure mail server, etc. You don’t have to waste gobs of money when you can get it for free!

Do you or your company use StartSSL? How do you like it so far? Any reason why you wouldn’t want to use them? Let me know in the comments!

I have to admit when I first read about F.lux I did not think much of it. According to its website, the application is used to change the color of your display depending on the time of day. It uses a technique similar to warming or cooling an image.

It goes on the principle that your computer’s display was created to simulate the sun or a bright day. When it is 10.00pm or even 3.00am we do not want to be looking at the sun. We should tone down our colors so that our eyes can look at images normally.

The example the author gave was what sealed the deal for me. Have you ever tried to jot down an idea on your computer at 3.00am only to be blinded by the bright monitor and walk away without using the computer? I can relate to this as it has happened to me countless times.

Now what if your computer knew that it was 3.00am and it toned down your display so that your eyes would be able to adjust to the light? Wouldn’t that be simply awesome? It sure would. So I proceeded to download the 546KB file and once it was finished installing I saw that I had a new system tray icon.

The settings for the application popped up on my screen. It appeared to be already configured for me as those co-ordinates are for North America. You can click on the arrow next to the co-ordinates to get more specific. You can also see the red arrow pointing to F.lux’s system tray icon below:

After clicking on the arrow or right clicking on the tray icon and selecting change location you will see this screen:

You can type in your zip code and hit the locate button for a fast way to retrieve your latitude and longitude.

Click OK and we are all set up. I was expecting to include screenshots of the 12.00pm desktop and the 12.00am desktop but in the screenshots they were identical. This is truly an application you need to experience for yourself to see how it works. But in essence it reduces the brightness of your monitor by changing your color schemes.

Let’s take a look at what options F.lux offers us:

We’ve already covered the change location option, preview will take you through what your screen will look like at each hour, disable for an hour will put your screen back to full brightness for one hour – this is great if you do need to work with proper colors.  The change lighting button is really not necessary unless you want your screen dark during the day and bright at night!

I also tried to do a screen cast and then as a last alternative went to see if there was a YouTube video of F.lux in action and sadly it appears that it is just not possible to capture the application’s effect using any type of screen capture software. If someone does have a link to a video of F.lux in action let me know in the comments!

Congratulations! You have decided to start designing a home and you are looking for somewhere to start. There are many free services that will help you build your dream home but one of them REALLY stands out as being an excellent tool in building, designing and displaying your floor plans.

FloorPlanner is free for personal use and they have paid accounts for professional designers or someone looking to create a lot of floor plans. Let’s see how it works and get you started building the home of your dreams!

We will start off by visiting their website and signing up for the free personal FloorPlanner account. When you arrive at their homepage you will see this:

We will get started and create a free FloorPlanner account, This lets us create one home. If you need more plans feel free to upgrade to a Plus account but it will cost you a annual fee.

They ask for your email address and a password. Go ahead and fill in the information and then we can get started.

After we are all signed up and logged in we will see a grid like you see below:

Now if you have ever played The Sims you will feel right at home!

The designing will be drag and drop. You will see this box on your right hand side of the screen that allows you to choose what you want to place and then we can drag it to where we want it to go. Before we start placing objects we should build our rooms and structures using the construction tool.

I chose the draw room tool on the top left of the tool bar and then used my mouse to “draw” the room. Simply click and drag to size your room like this:

Next we should add a door to our room, after all we do need to get in and out of the room right? So choose the door tool – which is the fourth tool on the construction panel and drag it to where you want it to go.

Now you are starting to get the hang of it! Create more rooms, add a staircase, create another floor or just work on a single floor of your home. Whatever you want to do, you can do! I went ahead and created a few more rooms like so:

Let’s add a staircase and work on the second floor. Choose the staircase from the structural category as you see below and drag the one you like to where you want it to go. Remember the staircase severely cuts into your space so choose wisely where you want it to go so you can maximize your living area. I am in no way an architect but this is common sense!

I added my spiral staircase (I love these!) and a few windows by simply dragging them where I want them to go as you can see below:

Alright now to switch to our second floor, hit the button and choose new design to create the second floor. For this session we will not be building the second floor.

We will now add some styling to our design and distinguish what rooms are what. I added a kitchen, a living room, a bedroom and a foyer as you can see below:

Make sure you save your file by hitting the save now link towards the top of the screen. You can now also view it in 3D like so:

We would love to see what our creative readers can come up with so share your links or images with us in the comments!

So as you probably know I have been supporting more and more Mac’s in my previously Windows Shop. Now I had to allow Windows home users to connect to their Macs in the office and lock their screens or monitors as they worked in case they were doing confidential or stupid stuff…

This should have been easy. Macs are supposed to be easier to use than Windows machines right? Well no dice. You could not do it with out modifying they system. I tried over and over using VNC, Logmein, PcAnywhere and more…  Everyone of them would open my screen right on up, so anyone walking by could not only watch me work but also move the mouse or type on the keyboard! It was the end of the road when someone type hello into a spread sheet of a Production manager… Sonofabitch!

I found a hack courtesy of ArtOfGeek and added my Vine VNC server and a new port for the win!  My favorite quote from the article has to be:

I know, enough with the chatter, get on with the tutorial! Just follow these steps and you’ll be locking your Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard like it’s running Windows XP! Wait, did I just write that? Shudder. Sorry, I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Here is the nitty gritty for ya:

1. Open Automator (in your Applications folder) and choose Service from the list of templates provided and click the Choose button.
2. In the left hand column under Library, select Utilities.
3. In the second column, drag “Run Shell Script” to the right hand pane.
4. At the top of the right hand pane where you dragged the Run Shell Script action, click on the menu next to “Service receives” and choose “no input”.
5. Copy and paste the following Terminal command into the empty text area of the Run Shell Script action:
   

   /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

   The entire command should be entered on a single line and note there is a space after “/Menu\”.

   

   Completed Automator action, ready to save (click to enlarge)

6. Choose File–>Save, and give the new service a meaningful name like “Lock Computer” that will appear in the Services menu. Once you’ve done that, you can go to the Services menu (located in the current application menu, next to the Apple menu) and your newly created service should appear there.
7. Next open System Preferences –> Keyboard –> Keyboard Shortcuts and select Services in the left column.

   

   Setting the keyboard shortcut (click to enlarge)

8. Scroll down to the bottom and under the General category, you should see your newly created service listed there. Select it, then Double-click close to the right side of the selected line to reveal a field where you can enter a custom keyboard shortcut. Enter an easy to remember but unique keyboard shortcut (I decided to go with ctrl+option+command+L), and then quit System Preferences.

That’s it! Go ahead and test your keyboard shortcut!  That locked your screen right? Now you can install Vine VNC Server on your machine change the port that it is listening on to 1111 or something other than 5900. Connect to your Vine server using UltraVNC using the IP address and the port like this 192.168.1.1:1111. That will keep your Mac locked and allow you to log into your machine keeping the screen locked. If you try to lock the screen and log in on port 5900 (built in screen sharing) you will arrive at the login screen and defeat the purpose of this hack!

You can read the full post at ArtOfGeek here

_TheMacinAdmiN_

  This is a Windows 7 only feature don’t be jealous…

Do you want to lock down what applications the kids can run on your shinny new Windows 7 computer? Well they have a little known feature built into the latest and greatest version of Windows. It takes a little know how to get it going but that is what we are here for – right?

First set up the machine in question with the applications you want on it. Install the versions you want to run. Then we will need to open up the Group Policy editor or Local Security Policy Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in.

1. Click Start, type secpol.msc in the Search programs and files box, and then press ENTER.
2. In the console tree, double-click Application Control Policies, and then double-click AppLocker.
3. Right-click Executable Rules, and then click Create Default Rules.
4. AppLocker rules are automatically created .

To get into AppLocker and more advanced setups check out this page from Microsoft entitled AppLocker step by step scenarios http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee791835%28WS.10%29.aspx.

_TheLockedDownAdmiN_

You ever have a conversation with someone, or perhaps stood in front of a group of people and in the middle of whatever you are talking about, someone gets up and walks out. It hurts a little, and is rather rude. Well, unfollowing people is sort of like that.

Granted, sometimes it is warranted. I mean, I have posted about tools to do mass unfollows to keeps your Twitter stream nice and fresh, but you don’t want people unfollowing you right? I mean, you are not a spam bot, so people should stick around to hear what you have to say right? Double standard much? That is besides the point.

Well, here are two tools that will snitch when someone unfollows you so you know who the jerks are:

• Goodbyebuddy: Goodbyebuddy will DM you when someone unfollows you. So far they claim to have busted over 2759413 unfollowers. To use this service, all you have to do is follow @GoodByeBuddy.
• Twitterless.com: Twitterless tells you who stops following you and graphs your follower history over time, making this info available in a variety of useful views. Once again, all you have to do is follow them to get started. @tless.

Know of any other Twitter tools to give you the goods on those walking out on you? Let us know in the comments!

[Via  Bauer-Power.net]

So Johnny command line needs to be cool and open his computer management console or maybe just his services how can he do it?

Here you go little Johnny Command Line:

• Computer Management – compmgmt.msc
• Component Services – comexp.msc
• Disk Managment – diskmgmt.msc
• Device Manager – devmgmt.msc
• Disk Defrag – dfrg.msc
• Event Viewer – eventvwr.msc
• Group Policies – gpedit.msc
• Local Security Settings – secpol.msc
• Local Users and Groups – lusrmgr.msc
• Performance Monitor – perfmon.msc
• Resultant Set of Policies – rsop.msc
• Shared Folders – fsmgmt.msc
• Services – services.msc

And for the n00bs hit Start—Run—type anyone of these commands (include the .msc extension) and viola… Console Magic

_TheConsoleLovinAdmiN_

Do you ever need command line access to see how long a Windows Server has been up for? This morning I did. I needed to prove that a machine (Windows Server 2003) was up last night at 3 am when a critical process was going down. Someone flucked up and it sure wasn’t me! So…

Using one of my favorite command line commands NET I will show you quickly how to display your Windows up-time:

net statistics workstation

This will show you a similar screen to this:

The first line across the top shows when the machine was last rebooted along with some other geeky goodness. Do you have an easier/quicker/more obscure way of doing this?

_TheObscureAdmiN_

I know the feeling of your secure network being compromised by an end user… Passwords do fall into the wrong hands and then what do you do? Scenarios start running through my head and I make a mental list of all the passwords and system configs that need to be changed. These aren’t fun times in Admin land but they usually breed scripts and easier ways to do the necessary!

El Di Pablo tell us of his experiences… And is culminated by using a Great tool that AtA LOVES! Check it out…

I had a bit of a scare the other day. I get a call from a user in the field.

She is traveling with her laptop and she was calling from her hotel. she was complaining that she couldn’t log into her laptop using her normal log in credentials, and that the only way she could log in was using the local administrators account.

“Local Admin what?!?!”

I exclaimed then started hyperventilating. I asked her how she came across the local administrator password, and she told me that one of the techs at the company that is no longer with us gave it to her a long time ago.

I asked her to spell out the password for me, and low and behold it was the corporate standard.

I ran to my bosses office and reported the compromise, and recommended changing the local passwords. He agreed and called a meeting with me, our head desktop technician and one of the senior systems administrators to come up with a plan of attack. I told them that I can easily change these passwords using a script and pspasswd.exe that comes with Sysinternals PSTools.

I told them that I can export a list of all of the workstations on the network from Active directory, and put them in a text file. pspasswd will read directly from the list in the text file and change the password of the specified account on each computer in the list. I showed each of the guys in the meeting how it works, and they agreed that my script would be the best way to go with this.

Here is an example of the syntax used in my script. Keep in mind that this script must be ran from within the directory containing the pspasswd.exe program or else you have to modify the script to change into it’s directory. Of course, if you know batch scripting well, you can add all sorts of stuff to the script, but the basic run command looks like this:

>set /p filename=”Please enter name of computer list (ie: computers): “

>pspasswd @%filename%.txt -u administrator@domain.com -p password

administrator newpassword >> %filename%-results.txt

You’ll notice that I added an output to a text file so I could create a log of which workstations the password was changed on, and which ones it wasn’t. That is a good idea so you can keep whittling away at it until the change has been completed on all workstations. Also, you’ll notice that I added the -u and -p switches. You don’t need that if you are already running the script from an account that has permissions to change local passwords.

There are many other little changes you can do as well. I used the set command because I had different lists for different offices. You could just put the computer names in one list and not use the set command.

Let me know if you have used this or a similar product, and perhaps some other scripting ideas for this.

This article was written by El Di Pablo a guest contributor on AskTheAdmin.com. You can keep up with his high tech antics at his blog http://www.Bauer-Power.net!

This is one of those articles where you HAVE to read the comments. You guys have some great insights and ideas! Keep on Commenting, that is what makes this site great. Go ahead pat your self on the back!

See that picture? When it happens to you, it may not look quite that bad (or be quite that obvious), but data loss sucks. And it does happen. I’ve been working with computers for 10+ years, and I’ve had it happen a couple times myself. Did I mention how much it sucks?

I’m not going to spend a couple pages telling you why you should backup, I’m just going to be straight about it, unless you really couldn’t care less if that happened to your computer, you are flat out stupid if you are not backing up your data on a regular basis.

Instead of telling you why to backup, I’m going to tell you how to ensure that you are not going to get your data back, even if you think you are backing it up.

Method 1: I’ll just back the data up to CD/DVD.

Well sure, this will work for a bit, but:

1. Ever try to save 20GB to CD? Or 250GB to DVD? Ugh.
2. How long do you think that optical desk is going to be readable?

Going this route, you can quickly end up trapped behind a small mountain of plastic. Or lets say you manage to somehow keep the optical disks to a manageable quantity, will the marker you labeled it with make the disk unreadable in a year, or is the dye layer unstable, rendering your disk unreadable in six months, or will the glue on the label you made for the disk make it worthless in a year or two? These are just a couple of examples of why optical media should not be considered an archive grade solution.

Method 2: ok then, I’ll just copy the data to a USB hard drive.

Sure it’s better than nothing, but single HDD solutions are not going to keep your data safe. Hard drives fail. In fact it will happen to every single hard disk you will ever come across. The only question is; when? It’s not a matter of if, or of MTBF (mean time between failure), it is more a matter of “you never know, it could fail in ten years, or in ten seconds”.

Don’t get me wrong, if this is the only way you can back the data up, then it is your only choice, and it’s better than nothing. Just be aware, as soon as you copy the data to that USB HDD, the “Clock of Death” is ticking.

Much better would be to copy the data over to a machine with a RAID storage system (preferably RAID5).

Method 3: I bought actual Backup Software (or use a vetted Open Source solution), and run Incremental Backups (to tape!) every single day!

Ok, so you spent some money on a tape backup solution, spent hours reading the manual and configuring your backup. Congratulations, I bet you think your data is safe! Until you find out how Incremental Backups really work (this usually happens after a disaster, and the tapes is all you have left of your pr0n, illegal mp3’s downloaded movies warez mission critical data).

Let’s pretend for a minute that your backup tapes look something like this:

Full_backup_tape (tape 1 – doesn’t matter what you tell it to be, the first backup is always and without exception, a full backup)

Incremental_backup_1 (tape 2)

Incremental_backup_2 (tape 3)

Incremental_backup_3 (tape 4)

Incremental_backup_4 (tape 5)

Incremental_backup_5 (tape 6)

And then you have a catastrophic failure. So you’re sitting there at 2am merrily running the restore, and you hit a snag: tape 2 won’t read. Doesn’t matter why, the tape could be bad, maybe you left it out of the tape safe overnight, and the radio station next door managed to erase it with the magnetic waves they transmit (this actually happened), the data is gone. So is all data after it. See Incremental backups require that all tapes since the last full backup be present and working. So tapes 3-6 may as well be empty, because you are never getting the data off of them. Ever.

If you can’t run full backups every day, use Differential backups instead of Incrementals. Let’s say that in the scenario the user had been running differentials rather than incrementals. They could then restore to current using just the original full backup, and the last differential.

Method 4: Now I’m running differential backups to tape every single day!

But you fail to check the backup logs every day, and the backup job you though had been running for the last year actually failed 273 days ago, and has been requesting the “correct” tape since then. I’ve seen this one a lot (in fact, I think this would be the most popular reason for data loss if you have backup software running).

You’ve got to check your backup logs. It sucks, and it’s boring, but it’s one of those things you just have to do.

Method 5: Alright, I’m running differentials to tape, and have been checking my logs for the last 2 years every single day!

But you’ve never run a test restore. If you haven’t restored data from the tape successfully, there is no data on the tape. The tape was bad, the backup software failed (silently of course), the gremlins ate it.

Method 6: Ok, now I spend two hours reading the log and then randomly restoring files from my backups (before putting the tapes in the tape safe) every single day!

And then your server room catches fire. All machines, and the safe holding the backup tapes are destroyed. You never took any offsite, because you have a tape safe. It happens. It’s unfortunate.

Method 7: Enough, I give up on tape! Now I run a full backup to a RAID5 NAS every single day!

But you ordered your NAS with the drives form the manufacturer, and they used 4 HDD’s from the same batch, and two failed. This is the one that always gets them! The strength of RAID5 is that more than one drive has to fail before the RAID is unrecoverable. The weakness is that hard drives from the same batch tend to fail at the same time (or thereabouts).

To strengthen your RAID system, always make sure that you have drives from different batches, if not from different manufacturers (this is not always the best idea, but that is an argument for another time). For instance: to take care of my backup needs at home, I bought a Buffalo Terastation. Unfortunately, Buffalo sent me a Terastation with 4 drives from the same batch (you can usually tell if they all have the same date on them, sometimes there will be a batch code on the drive). I bought 3 more of the same model drive from 3 different manufacturers, and now have the most healthy RAID I can.

These are not the only ways to lose data, but they are by far the most common. How would I know? I was the Worldwide Manager of Technical Support for a backup software company for several years. And I always got to be the one to explain to the customers why their data is gone.

So what do I do?

There are as many answers to that question as there are IT shops with backup systems. Here is how I protect data at my office:

I backup all data every day (full backup) to a NAS configured in RAID5, with a hot spare. I check the health of the RAID every day (it takes about two minutes). Once a week I backup the entire RAID to LTO3 tape, and take the tapes offsite (currently I am taking them home, where they go into a DATA rated fire safe (there is a difference, do your homework), and then into my large safe where I keep all my other valuables. My ideal would be to have them delivered to a bank safety deposit box, but that costs money.

At home, I back up all my data to the aforementioned Terastation. Once per month, I copy all the data off to a USB HDD (actually two of them), and take one to work where it goes into the tape safe.

Is it perfect? No. Does it stand a much better chance of keeping that data alive through a catastrophic event? Absolutely. You don’t have to go to these lengths to protect your data, but you should be aware of the risks.

I often find myself in situations where I wished I could share out my internet with other users. I have tried programs that turn my Touch Pro into a hot spot but it not only kills my phone’s battery but it also slows it down to a crawl. I could tether my laptop to my phone and share that out but why should I when I found a nifty little device called a travel router. When I paired this up with a mobile internet card I had a match made in heave!

The Cradlepoint CTR350 Cellular Travel Router has found a new home in my laptop bag. Using this router with a Verizon Sierra Mobile Broadband Card (EVDO) I can have an instant network setup… Um anywhere I can rig up power.

Simply insert the card into the router. Log into the router and configure firewall, routing and even dynamic name resolution.

This means at your next outdoor event you can not only provide internet to your geeky pals but you could be running a web server that is resolving to a domain name.

I was not only impressed by it’s simplicity but also by how cheap it is. I found the mobile router online for under $150. Cradlepoint CTR-350 Mobile Router The Verizon card I already had but they are also practically free if you are willing to sign up for a 2 year contract. AT&T USBConnect Mercury Broadband USB Modem (AT&T) I have used this little guy to set up a  DVR in an office without internet. Share out internet in my truck/car to all the others on-board. The sky’s the limit!

Do any of you use mobile internet for something interesting? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

_TheMobileAdmiN_

Ok, so it really doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.  Yeah, drat, your mouse has broken after you used it by accident on top of that peanut butter smudge on your desk.  Here’s an obscure yet real windows tool you can use to make your keyboard act as a mouse until you get that replacement.   To do this, you push at the same time, Alt+Left shift key + NumLock . You’ll get a pop-up window saying to

1) Use Mouse Keys, click OK

2) Cancel MouseKeys, click CANCEL

3) Deactivate, click settings….blah, blah blah.

When you get the popup you can click the settings button and customize the feature as well.

How many of you knew about this? We all knew about the OSK I wrote about here but not this one!

Kerry is a wanna-be geek who periodically writes on the the AskTheAdmin website.  Her favorite website is callcatalog.com which is a reverse phone lookup website that allows you to do a reverse phone number lookup.

I love when other sites incorporate what we do here at AskTheAdmin.com and we also love sharing them with our readers. So here is Paul Bauer from Bauer-Power.net using our Make Outlook your biatch with rules and batch files for those of you that have not seen that post check it out here.  Without further ado here is the post:

My buddy Karl over at AskTheAdmin.com once wrote an article about running a script from Outlook when a particular email comes in. It got me to thinking if there was a way to remotely wipe a hard drive when an email comes in. I couldn’t find a program that could be scripted to remotely wipe a drivebut I once wrote about a program called HDD Wipe that can at least wipe a drive while Windows was running.

So all that was left was a way to automate HDD Wipe. Well, HDD Wipe is GUI only, so that got me thinking about another program I wrote about called Autoit that lets you automate GUI programs. I decided to write my own program that automates HDD Wipe to wipe out a hard drive remotely. Here is a teaser video of me wiping a drive using an email. I will get more into that in Episode 18, but in the meantime here is a teaser, and below is the link to my Autoit program RemoteWipe!

http://www.youtube.com/v/iiAn2FaqDZ4

Download RemoteWipe here: (RemoteWipe.exe)

To use it drop it in the HDDGURU FreeWipe Tool programs file directory, and run it via script, double click, PSExec or however you feel you need to run it!

Do you know of a better way to remotely wipe a drive in windows? If so, let me know. Preferably a scriptable program please.

[Via Bauer-Power]

Our buddy over at Bauer-Power was able to install Windows 7 directly from his USB drive. Check out his method below:

I was having some performance issues on my Dell Mini 9 recently and decided to start doing some optimization. One of the things I was going to do was change the Page file settings from system managed, like they are by default, to a static size.

Well, I had filled up my drive, and didn’t have enough room to do that, so I decided to re-build my Dell Mini. Why not? It’s the weekend, and I didn’t have anything important save on it anyway. So like normal, I pull out my external DVD drive that I purchased with my netbook, and began trying to re-install. That is when I started having problems.

This actually happens every time I try to install anything via CD or DVD on the Dell Mini. The external drive that came with it is hit or miss. I looked online, and it appears to be a common issue with the Dell Mini. Let me tell you it is frustrating as hell!

The good news is that I can boot off of a USB stick no problem. In fact, that is how I install my Bauer-Puntu partition on the Dell Mini. What about the Windows half though? Well it turns out it is fairly easy to make a bootable USB Windows 7 install stick!

All you need is a Windows 7 install DVD, and a 4GB USB Flash drive. Don’t have one? You can get a Bauer-Power one here: Bauer-Power 4GB USB

Better yet, you get one for only $10.99 $5.65 from Amazon here: 4GB USB

Once you have your materials, just do the following:

• On another computer, open a command prompt as administrator
• Plug in your 4GB USB thumb drive
• Run DiskPart
• Type List Disk and hit enter (Note the number of your drive, e.g. Disk 1)
• Type Select Disk 1and hit enter (Where 1 is the number of your disk)
• Type Clean and hit enter
• Type Create Partition Primary and hit enter
• Type Select Partition 1 and hit enter
• Type Active and hit enter
• Type Format FS=NTFS and hit enter (This will take a while)
• Type Assign and hit enter
• Type Exit to quit DiskPart

Once that part is complete, keep your command prompt open and pop in your Windows 7 DVD, then do the following from command line:

• Type in F: and hit enter (Where F: is the drive letter of your DVD Drive)
• Type CD Boot and hit enter
• Type Bootsect /NT60 M: (Where M: is the drive letter of your USB Flash drive)

• Now copy the contents of your Windows 7 DVD to your thumb drive and you are ready to install from USB!

After performing the above steps, I recommend creating an image of your install thumb drive so you don’t have to remember all of the above later. To do that just download Roadkil’s Disk Image tool, and save an exact copy of your USB stick to your hard drive some place. If you ever need to use it again, you can re-image your USB stick with the same tool.

Are you a Dell Mini user? Are you having problems with your external DVD drive? Know of an easier tool to create a Windows 7 install USB thumb drive? Hit me up in the comments!

[via Bauer-power ]

Besides the fact that I am studying for another Microsoft test and staring at subnets all day long – I also get asked on a regular basis how many addresses can i get from a /24 subnet or what does 255.255.255.0 mean.

Let me break it down for you real quick like:

When you use 255.255.255.0 as your subnet you are limiting yourself to a network containing all the same ip’s except for the last number. Like 192.168.1.0 where the 0 changes. And using 255.255.0.0 Would limit you to the last two digits changing like 192.168.0.0 . Are you with me? It gets a little more complex with different subnets but here is a quick breakdown for you:

Check out this IP Subnet Tool Calculator – MINT! http://www.syrex.co.za/ipcalc/

_TheSubnettingAdmiN_

I recently made the switch from my private email server to Google for Applications. This made Gmail my primary mail client and I have dedicated some time to mastering all of it’s features – and there sure are a bunch. Today’s tip will show you how to simply and easily auto-label your incoming messages to your account. Before I get into how let me tell you why I want to do this…

I send emails from my HTC Tilt2 to my Gmail account from NewsBreak. This is a RSS reader and these stories are story ideas. So I created a label in Gmail called StoryIdeas.

Next all I have to do is send an email to Karl+StoryIdeas@MyDomain.com and the email will automatically be labeled for you without any other intervention! Awesome!

Do you have a Gmail tip – send it in to tips at AskTheAdmin dot com!

_TheGmailingAdmiN_