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…

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 

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_

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]

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_

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_

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.

Well, there is at least one case where a lot of RAM can cause problems.

My current desktop had 1 Gig of RAM and I recently bought an additional 2 Gigs since the price was so low. (And of course I used The AdmiN’s link to give a little back to AtA)

Wow, 3 Gigs of RAM what could possibly be bad about that? Well one night, I went to put the system into hibernate and it beeped and a balloon popped up from the system tray that said “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.” After that, the system would only go into standby, not into hibernate. In fact the hibernate tab of the Power Options settings was completely gone.

It turns out this is a known issue and Microsoft has a patch for it. The KB article describes the exact problem I was having and states “This problem typically occurs when the computer uses 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM.“

My favorite part of the article is

“This problem occurs because the Windows kernel power manager cannot obtain the memory resources that are required to prepare the computer to hibernate.“

So basically, you have so much memory that we cannot obtain enough memory! The system had no problem obtaining enough memory resources when there was only 1 Gig of RAM, but with 3 Gigs there isn’t enough.

I applied the patch offered in the article and haven’t had any problem putting the system into hibernate since.

Who knew, it IS possible to have too much RAM!

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]

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_

One item that Windows XP users will have to understand is the location of the Startup folder in Windows 7. For you Vista veterans, you can go about your day, because it is in the same place in Vista as Windows 7. For you XP folks, who haven’t played with Vista or Windows 7 Beta, I’ll give you the low down.

In Windows 7 the location of your personal startup folder is:

%systemdrive%\users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

For all users, you will find the startup folder in:

%systemdrive%\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

I hope this little tid-bit of info helps in your transition!

Know of any other good Windows 7 tips/tricks? Hit us up in the comments!

Written by El Di Pablo of Bauer-Power.

Thanks El Di Pablo!

_TheNeedSleepAdmin_

—————————————
ME

Here’s the scenario….

Backed up info off old laptop to external HD.

During XP install I saw two identical drives…nuked the first partition and tried to install. XP said no. Nuked the 2nd one…XP allowed the install. JOY!!!

You know where this is going don’t you…..

Anywho…it turns out XP is able to see external USB HD’s and I nuked the MBR on the drive. Do you know of any freebie tools to recover the data on that drive? I have my bosses personal stuff on it and a lot of my own personal stuff too….and the drive states that it needs to be formatted….

HELP ME Obie-ADMIN, You’re my only hope! :-D
——————————————–
Karl

Sorry it took so long ive been in windows mobile hell today.

Do not let it format! Knoppix live cd wll fix you right up.

You will be able to see and copy everything even without the mbr.

Let me know how it goes and if it doesnt work i might have some other apps
———————————————
Me

I bought a tool to recover the drive….but…..I have a BKF file on
there that is corrupted now….any idea of any tools that are freebies
to be able to recover those files? I suppose I can get the bosses CC to
buy a tool to do it…but I’d rather not…..
———————————————-
Karl

What OS is the BKF file from? What os are you restoring to? What is the error message?

———————————————-
Me

Win2k Pro. It is saying that the BKF(windows Backup file) is not valid or something to that effect….

I am running a scandisk on it….we’ll see if it goes. I downloaded a demo of a $ product and I could see the data in the file, but I cannot get at it without paying…..
———————————————-
Karl

Are you restoring to w2k as well? Did you use msbackup or ntbackup to compress it?
———————————————-
Me

NTBACKUP to create it. Tried restoring on Win2k server and XP.
———————————————-
Karl for the win

I’d try to restore on 2k pro but if that doesn’t work check this out:

Backup Exec has the ability to read .bkf files. You can download the trial
version and use it for 60 days for free.

If you go to the “Tools -> Options -> Catalog” menus, there is a check box
labeled “Use storage media – based catalogs”. If you remove the check from
this checkbox and run a catalog job on the bkf file, you should be able to
recover any files that are not corrupted. The catalog operation will take
longer to complete, but you should be able to restore any valid file within
the .bkf, before and after the corruption. Its hard to know how much
corruption there is in the .bkf file, so I wish you the best of luck.

This link will give you instructions on how to import a bkf file into the
program for restore. Before performing step 6. (The catalog operation),
follow the steps above. http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/241600.htm

———————————————-
Grateful Me

Dude……you rock.

We use BE and I never thought of trying it. Thanks to you I was able to restore….get this…..ALL OF IT.

Rock on Detroit….Rock on Chicago…NAPA, it’s the auto parts store. (If you don’t know what this is…do a Youtube/Google search on Wesley Willis)
———————————————–

So what have we learned today?

• 1. NEVER, EVER leave a USB HD attached to XP on install and NEVER, EVER nuke a drive unless you are 10000000% certain you have the right drive.
• 2. Karl rocks and has great ideas.
• 3. NAPA, It’s the Auto Parts Store

–A Grateful Slothman

Well in Windows Vista, you can! And it is as easy as this:

Click the Start menu >> Click Control Panel >> Click Speech Recognition. >> Click Start Speech Recognition >> Now you can tell your computer what to do!

Be sure to take the Speech Tutorial first to get your computer to get the feel for your voice.

All versions of Windows Vista, even the Home Basic version already have one of the most powerful speech recognition systems available for consumer consumption. Microsoft has invested lots of dough in research and development regarding speech recognition over the years. Lets just say these boys have just about done it right this time! I have been trying to talk to my computer since my Commodore 64 and lets just say it has always been a kind of 1 sided conversation. But I had some big surprises on my hand when my computer actually responded by doing the tasks I requested. SWEET!

Just to give you a heads up we have composed the majority of this post using the features and it did not slow us down one bit! What are you looking to do? Surf the web no handed? Open applications? “type” word documents or emails? Well it is all possible my friends and it is pretty simple to get it going. All you need is Vista, A Microphone and Some time to put into training the beast. We all know you AtA readers will not sit sit still for a tutorial until you had problems doing it on your own… And you have probably already launched the wizard (Yes we know you that well!). You are going to have to put in 10-15 minutes but its well worth it. Trust us would we steer you wrong?

Once your finished you should have your Recognition Panel @ the top of your screen. Wake her up by saying “Start Listening” and your on…

The program will interpret EVERYTHING you say until you speak the magic phrase “Stop Listening” Wow. When has Microsoft made things easy?

Just say “Start” and the start menu opens on up. The cursor sits there in the search box, as it always does with the start menu is opened – Except now you can speak what you want to search for. AMAZING!

If you want to launch a program , you can skip the start menu entirely by saying “Start [app name].”

MS takes into account that different people speak in different ways so say “Start calculator,” “launch calculator,” or “open calculator” interchangeably. This works for 3rd party programs as well; “launch Firefox” works just as well as “launch Internet Explorer.”

Scrolling up and down in your browser is as easy as saying “scroll up” or “scroll down.” You can get more elaborate, like “scroll down three” to move further down, or “move to the end of the document” to go all the way to the bottom of the email, web page, word doc, or whatever you have open.

Want to click on something? Say “click [item]“. This works for commands like “double click” and “right click” as well. At the desktop, for instance, you simply say “right click recycle bin” to get a context sensitive menu, and then “empty recycle bin” to perform that action.

Last but not least, you can emulate a keyboard keypress by simply saying “press [key].” If the speech recognition just can’t understand your command to refresh, say “press F5.” Some keys can be virtually pressed without saying the word “press,” like Enter, Home, End, PageUp, and PageDown. Vista recognizes fancier commands like “press right arrow three times” and “press control and Up arrow.”

[Via ExtremeTech]

For more commands and an in depth review follow that link to ExtremeTech – awesome article guys.

Now all I need to do is figure out a registry hack to turn “VISTA” into “HAL” :)

_The2001AdmiN_

Check out my MakeUseOf.com posts – I broke my 80th post this weekend.

I am duty bound to tell you that if you are doing much of anything involving code, you need to be using some sort of Version Control, however I am not going to ram Subversion or Tortoise SVN down your throat. I understand why programmers use them, and I have used them myself in the past. Since I try to live the whole “Least Amount Of Administrative Effort” thing, I just really don’t like them. Let me explain.

Ok, setting up full on Version Control makes sense if any of the following are true:

• You spend a large portion of your day writing code (like your job title is “programmer” or something similar)
• You spend more time fixing things you break while writing code, than writing code
• Anyone else is going to suffer consequences if you totally wreck some code
• Someone else is going to maintain and administer the Version Control System
• You work on files that multiple other people also edit

However it does not make sense if any of the following is true:

• You write code for your own use only
• You could care less if it gets broken or accidentally deleted
• You don’t have time to administer or maintain a Version Control System

Even if all of the last bit are true for you, it is still a good idea to use Version Control. Wait, what?

Version Control is a process, and if done correctly it works very well. If done poorly it gives you a false sense of security. Version Control is not necessarily a software package or commercial system.

If working with end users for all these years has taught me anything it is this; if a system is easy to use (especially if you don’t have to actually do anything) it will get used, if it is complicated (or time consuming) it will not get used. This also holds true (even more so in most cases) for the IT professionals I know.

Since don’t write enough code to make Visual Studio a wise investment, I use Notepad++, and unlike Visual Studio, I can take my IDE with me on a USB drive (Notepad++ Portable!). In the same vein, I don’t really write enough code to really justify setting up and maintaining a Version Control System, so I do it with Notepad++. Least Amount Of Administrative Effort.

So here is my solution:

I use the Backup settings built into Notepad++ to take care of my Version Control. To set this up:

1. Install notepad++
2. Open Notepad++
3. Select Settings > Preferences
4. On the Backup/Auto-completion tab, change the backup setting from None to Verbose

If you change nothing else there, now when you save your file, Notepad++ will automatically create a copy of the file without the changes since the last time you saved it. The copy will also be saved in a subfolder (named nppBackup) in the same folder where the document is saved. The copy will be named FileName.Extension.Date_Timestamp.bak by default. So a file named “test.vbs”, saved today would have a name similar to “test.vbs.2009-06-29_151927.bak”.

Cumbersome to be sure, but I am guaranteed to use it every time I work with a document.

Please don’t mistake this for something it is not. This is not a Version Control System. You do not check files in or out, and it doesn’t differentiate who made what changes, all it does is save every iteration of your document. It is Version Control in the truest sense of the term.

Hit F7 and you will get a complete list of commands that you executed. Use the arrow keys to highlight the command you want to run again or just hit the number key corresponding to the command that you want to execute.

History keys

Use F1 to paste the previous command one character at a time, F2 (followed by a number) to paste the previous command up to the said number and F3 to paste the previous command.

Run multiple commands

You can run multiple command by separating them with &&. Note that this doesn’t run the commands simultaneously. Instead, the command towards the left is run first and if it completes successfully then the second command will run. If the first command fails, then the second command will not run

Check out these and other great Command Line Tips from Varun over at MakeUseOf.com here:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-windows-command-line-tips-tricks-you-should-definitely-check-out/

_TheRunningOutOfTimeAdmiN_

I hit Window-R and typed CMD. I pasted the first line of my batch file into the command prompt like so:

xcopy e:\users\* x:\server32\\users /D /E /C /F /H /Y

I got back Insufficient Memory and 0 files copied. This box has 4gb of memory and less than 1gb in use. I hit up Google who had be try disabling my Antivirus to no avail.

I then found a XCOPY replacement called XXCopy (found here). It says that it should help me with this exact error. It also says XXcopy is faster than Xcopy and can deal with file names longer than 256 character. So instead of counting the paths and filenames characters I downloaded and installed it. I replaced the XCOPY with XXCopy in my scripts and they took off like a bullet. I haven’t gotten into it yet but it does all of XCOPY’s switches and then some as you can see below.

_TheXXAdmiN_

I found out I could view the log file by going to Help – About Windows Live Writer – and View Log.

Once there I found this log:

WindowsLiveWriter,2944,None,00021,01-Jun-2009 12:48:15.973,"Exception parsing XML-RPC response:

WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcClientInvalidResponseException: Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server —> System.Xml.XmlException: There are multiple root elements. Line 2, position 2.
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Exception e)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(String res, String arg)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Throw(Int32 pos, String res)
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.ParseDocumentContent()
   at System.Xml.XmlTextReaderImpl.Read()
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadNode(Boolean skipOverWhitespace)
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.LoadDocSequence(XmlDocument parentDoc)
   at System.Xml.XmlLoader.Load(XmlDocument doc, XmlReader reader, Boolean preserveWhitespace)
   at System.Xml.XmlDocument.Load(XmlReader reader)
   at System.Xml.XmlDocument.LoadXml(String xml)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcMethodResponse..ctor(String responseText)
   — End of inner exception stack trace —
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcMethodResponse..ctor(String responseText)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.XmlRpcClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)

<br />
<b>Fatal error</b>:  Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 886081 bytes) in <b>/usr/www/users/esengul/makeuseof.com/wp-includes/class-IXR.php</b> on line <b>207</b><br />
",""
WindowsLiveWriter,2944,Fail,00022,01-Jun-2009 12:48:16.004,"WindowsLive.Writer.Extensibility.BlogClient.BlogClientInvalidServerResponseException: Invalid Server Response – The response to the metaWeblog.newMediaObject method received from the blog server was invalid:

Invalid response document returned from XmlRpc server
   at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.XmlRpcBlogClient.CallMethod(String methodName, XmlRpcValue[] parameters)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.BlogClient.Clients.MetaweblogClient.DoBeforePublishUploadWork(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)","   at System.Environment.GetStackTrace(Exception e, Boolean needFileInfo)
   at System.Environment.get_StackTrace()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.Diagnostics.LogFileTraceListener.Fail(String message)
   at System.Diagnostics.TraceInternal.Fail(String message)
   at System.Diagnostics.Trace.Fail(String message)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.WeblogBlogFileUploader.DoUploadWorkBeforePublish(IFileUploadContext uploadContext)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.FileUploadWorker.DoUploadWork(String fileReference, BlogFileUploader fileUploader, Boolean isWindowsLiveLightboxCloneEnabled)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.BlogPostReferenceFixer.LocalFileTransformer.Transform(BeginTag tag, String reference)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.LocalFileReferenceFixupFilter.FixReferences(BeginTag tag, String reference)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.OnBeginTag(BeginTag tag)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.LightWeightHTMLDocumentIterator.Parse()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.HTML.HtmlReferenceFixer.FixLocalFileReferences(String html, ReferenceFixer fixer)
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.LocalSupportingFileUploader.UploadFilesBeforePublish()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.PostEditor.UpdateWeblogAsyncOperation.DoWork()
   at WindowsLive.Writer.CoreServices.AsyncOperation.InternalStart()
   at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state)
   at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state)
   at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart()"

Out of Memory? Fatal error? What’s going on here why would my post need 33554432 bytes + another 886081  bytes? That is for you non-cis or math majors 32.8450 megabytes!

I checked it out and Jing was saving my screenshots as HUGE files! Each of my images were several Megabytes! I corrected my images – re-uploaded and BAM! We were straight.

_TheReUploadingAdmiN_

If you’re like me, you use your Windows-based computer almost every day.  The startup and shutdown sounds have just gotten a little boring to be honest.  Here are some simple steps to use your favorite voice, music excerpt, or sound for your computer’s start-up and shutdown sequence.  You’ll need two soundbites.

Step 1. Choose the soundbites: Choose the track which you want to play at start-up and shutdown jingles.  Key to note:

1. It must be in the .WAV format.
2. The soundbite shouldn’t be too long otherwise you could be waiting for the bite to end before you begin computing.

Your preferred file is likely an mp3, but regardless, if its not in .WAV format, you can easily convert it using  any converter.  My preference is audacity, which is an open source music editor <– it allows you to actually select a “soundbite” from any song.

Step 2.   Rename the new files. Rename these files as “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV” respectively.

Step 3. Rename the old files.

1. Goto “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”
2. Find the files “Windows XP Startup.WAV” and “Windows XP Shutdown.WAV”, and rename them to Windows XP Startup_old.WAV and  Windows XP Shutdown_old.WAV respectively. This step is required for the case if you need to revert back to these sounds, otherwise you can ignore this step and just delete them (not recommended).

Step 4. Save your new files. Just copy your files from step 2 into the directory “C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA”

You now have new startup and shutdown tunes.

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses phone number privacy issues.

Guess who is going to save the day? It’s AskTheAdmin! Well actually it’s Google but the answer is brought to you by AskTheAdmin!

Google now has Activesync support on m.google.com meaning they can create a new gmail account and both sync to it! Let

s check out how it works:

To set up Google Sync on your Windows Mobile device, please follow the steps below.
Important Note: Make sure that you have backed up any Contacts and Calendars from your phone to your computer before proceeding.

Getting Started

1. Open the Active Sync application on your device’s home screen.
2. Click the link Set up your device to sync with it.
3. Enter m.google.com as the server address.
4. Ensure that the SSL option is checked.

Sign In to Google Account

5. Click Next.
6. Enter your full Google Account email address as the User name.
7. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
8. Leave the Domain field empty. If your device requires you to enter a domain name, enter google.
9. Click Next.
10. Check only Contacts and Calendar.
11. Click Finish.

12. Press the Sync softkey on the left to synchronize.

You’ve now set up Google Sync for your Windows Mobile device.
Tip: If your business, school, or organization uses Google Apps, your administrator will first need to enable ActiveSync before you can take advantage of this feature.

Let’s check it out:

Grab your super secret .rar file, copy it to the same directory as your not so super secret jpg image. Let’s use c:\test for our example.

Open up a command prompt by clicking Start/Run and typing “cmd” and click ok.
In the DOS window, type “cd c:\test” to navigate to our folder
Type “copy /b input.jpg + input.rar ouput.jpg
(input jpg is the picture that will show when it is opened, input.rar is the secret file you want to hide and output.jpg will be the name of the new combined file)

It is as simple as that!

You can double click the new file and it will show it as a picture, BUT… if you open it with winrar, you will see the files contained.

Unless there is an need for it, being an administrator I’d rather block it! they bring all  kind of viruses to my children (the servers). Besides, it would make information leeks more easier (in my workplace only the managers get an external E-mail accounts+ internet access, while slaves get a foot print on their butts).

Now, How we can block memory sticks without stopping other USB devices (Keyboard, mouse, printer…etc.)

FOR FREE?

Plain and Simple:

Windows Registry, All you have to do is run (regedit) then browse to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor

Disable usb storge: set the key (Start) to 4

Enable usb storge: set the key (Start) to 3

Too geeky for you? there are some free cool tool with GUI interface that can share your burden called

USB Drive Disabler :
http://www.intelliadmin.com/Downloads.htm

Also to enable/disable remotely USB Remote Drive Disabler (You need Admin privilage of course)

There are also similar ones to enable/disable CD and floppy.

Ohhh and one more thing: if you want to enable USB storage but only for reading (said to be working on WinXP SP2 only) then browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies

then Right click > new > DWORD Value name it WriteProtect and give it a value of 1 for read only, 0 for Read/Write.

Thanks Mohamed Alreafi for the awesome email! What do you guys do to block or lock down USB devices?

This has been a rough month for me at my day job. We are in the midst of rolling our existing company over to an ESOP (basically employee owned, buying out the current owners over a period of years), which has basically doubled my workload in getting the back end ready for the change over.

In addition to this we had a senior accounting executive fired, which led me to discover that our entire AR system is being handled by a series of highly customized Excel spreadsheets. When I say highly customized I mean that not only will they only work on one computer, but they will only work under one single user’s profile (which happens to be the previously mentioned, and recently departed, senior accounting executive).

This in turn led me (with the help of the accounting department) to the inevitable conclusion that our entire ERP product needs to be completely replaced. Why? Because it  is not capable of handling the volume of of a specific AR transaction we have on a daily basis without quickly locking up the server (which is how the current “Franken-Excel” system came to be in the first place).

Ok great! I’ve never liked the ERP solution we use, and have already done the research on what I would like to replace it with. After getting the current owner to sign off on it, I’ve now effectively quadrupled my workload. Oh did I mention the go live date for the new ERP system can be no later than October 1st?

Which led me to the conversation with one of the executives in our company about the fact that I need more IT staff. Anyone who has experience with an IT degree education would be great. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind working the occasional 14-18 hour day, but when it becomes 10-12 hours every day (and at least a couple hours over the weekend) there comes a point where I would rather just not come in.

More to the point it’s a bad situation for the company. At this point my IT staff is worn kind of thin, and we are basically paralyzed. We can continue what we are doing, but doing anything more (like when the main printer goes down because you accidentally tried to print the entire Internet, or when the pr0n fiend on the third floor infests the network with spyware, and the servers start to lag because of it) is going to force one of us to stop doing something else.

In theory this is a undesirable situation, but in reality what happens is this; we have a bunch of unhappy users, and the IT staff is making decisions about what to get done based on what is least likely to get them fired if it doesn’t get done.

So keeping that in mind, the question I am asked by this executive is; what is the ideal ratio of IT Staff to Users?

Wait, what? It just doesn’t work like that (though I sincerely and truly do wish it were that easy).

Unfortunately IT is not a commodity like so many executives seem to think it is. IT work is not like filing, or data entry, unfortunately it is just not something that your average person can do (if it were I would not have a job).

And beyond that, it can’t be quantified as simple man hours either. An issue that may be a trivial five minute fix for me, may take another admin two hours to fix (or vice versa).

Which led me to the real question, how do I quantify the number of IT staff that is required for this company? Because when you cut right to the source of the issue, each and every company is going to have a different level of IT requirements based on a multitude of factors:

1. What does the company do? (a software company is going to require more IT involvement than say a restaurant)
2. How screwed up is the current IT system?
3. How screwed up are the company’s business processes?
4. What level of technical competence do the users have?

These are by no means the only factors, but they are the ones that have the biggest impact on what any given company’s ideal “IT staff to Users ratio” should be.

So what’s the answer? If I knew that I would be making Millions telling everyone how to get it right. All I can offer is this: the people making staffing decisions need to listen when their IT people tell them they need help, because the unfortunate fact of life is this; in the modern workplace (and perhaps more than any other business unit) when IT fails, the business fails.

I could list a plethora of statistics to back that up, but I just don’t have the time.

This would be a top level folder that shows up on your Windows desktop and in My Computer. Didn’t think you could do that? Well read on…

The folder we will be creating can not be removed – just like My Computer or My Documents. Easy accessibility for your most used folder.

You can assign the folder to be anywhere you have access to and use your own icon file for it. It will be the first view you see in any Open File box.

We found the step by step from PcTools talking about windows 2000. With a few slight mods we got it working on XP and it should work on Vista as well.

Now you can create your own custom system folder, like “My Documents”, that can not be deleted or renamed and place it on the desktop and My Computer. All you need to do is add a handful of registry entries. The last two steps add the shortcut to My Computer and The Desktop. You can do one or the other.

Editing the registry can be dangerous so be careful and make a backup before you begin!

1. Create the following series of keys and values in the registry at [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID] or [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID]. The GUID, globally unique identifier, can be a random number, in this example “FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345″ is used. See this article for more GUID examples.
2. Create a new key called [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}] and set (Default) to equal the name of the folder e.g. “My Folder”.
3. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “DefaultIcon” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\DefaultIcon]) and set (Default) to equal the filename for the icon you want to display e.g. “c:\windows\myicon.ico”.
4. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “InProcServer32″ (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\InProcServer32]) and set (Default) to equal “shell32.dll”, also create a new String value called “ThreadingModel” and set it to “Apartment”.
5. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “Shell\Open My Menu\Command” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\Shell\Open My Folder\Command]) and set (Default) to equal the command to execute when clicked, in this case explorer, e.g. “explorer /root,c:\MyFolder”.
6. Create a set of sub-keys starting at the main key “ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}”
   (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellEx\PropertySheetHandlers
   \{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}])
7. Create a new sub-key under the main key called “ShellFolder” (i.e. [HKEY_CLASSES...ABCD1DE12345}\ShellFolder]) and create a new Binary value called “Attributes” and set it to “00 00 00 00″.
8. (Optional) To place the folder on the desktop add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]
9. (Optional) To place the folder in My Computer add the following key:
   [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
   Explorer\MyComputer\NameSpace\{FD4DF9E0-E3DE-11CE-BFCF-ABCD1DE12345}]

Now the folder cannot be deleted from the desktop or My Computer, nor can it be renamed other than removing the CLSID and the entries under NAME SPACE.

If you flucked shit up Are Banging your head against you desk messed up on any typing a blank icon will appear on your desktop or in My Computer – go back and check for any erroneous characters!

_TheMyShortcutsBetterThanYoursAdmiN_

The interesting thing is that I never installed or use Outlook Express.

How did this happen??

Well, apparently this is caused by Windows XP SP3 and Windows Desktop Search (which I also installed)…ugh.  here’s quite a lively forum chat over at Microsoft on this subject also.

(One note of caution.  Be very careful when modifying your registry.  If you do not feel comfortable doing it, please don’t do it.  Any inadvertent changes or mistakes could cause disastrous effects..)

Here’s how to stop it from occurring:

1. Close all programs.

2. Create a Restore Point

3.  Find this key in the registry:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{GUID}\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express\5.0

4.  Double click the Compact Check Count

5.  Select the Base option for Decimal and change the value to 0

6.  Close the Registry

Kerry enjoys writing about a variety of topics.  Her favorite website is CallCatalog.com which is a reverse phone directory website.  You can also read her blog which discusses personal privacy issues.

I quickly found out that Microsoft provide a tool to back up and restore your printers. Score!

It said it will back up all your printers, settings, and drivers into a .cab archive, and then it allows you to restore the cab file on a different machine.

This small app grabbed ALL my printers including the local ones, copied all their drivers and crap to a single cab file. I was able to run the PrintMig on the new server and import the printers.

In 15 minutes or so all my printers were installed and working properly except one USB guy that needed to have its port switched. All in all it went very well. And I discovered another thing while testing:

So you can copy printers from one machine to another, create cab files for different off domain laptop configurations. Or this is great if you don’t do the Active Directory thing and want to semi-automate printer installation.

The latest version of Printmig is 3.1 and is available for downaload here.

more details available from:
http://www.microsoft.com/printserver

A special thanks goes out to the internet on this one. Thanks for always being there for me man!

Some people like this, most people don’t use it and a few people REALLY hate it. So here is a quick how-to on peacing it out:

To hide the Scheduled Tasks from the network share view, follow these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type REGEDIT
• Navigate to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \RemoteComputer \ NameSpace

• Backup the key by exporting it to a .REG file. (You need this to revert back!)
• To remove Scheduled Tasks, delete the following key:

{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}

• To remove the Printers folder, delete the following key:

{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}

• Close Registry Editor.

By deleting one key or the other you are removing the folders from the network view and not disabling printing/scheduling in any which way. To restore the shares after removing them import the .REG file you saved in the third step above.

_ThePeaceYouOutAdmiN_

I was copying a few thousand files to a San Disk Micro Cruzer Memory Stick with over 2gb of space on it. Windows kept throwing me an error that it was unable to copy my files due to error 0×80070052.

I tried via copy and paste and then drag and drop – and I went as far as to try it via command line.

No go.

On a hunch I decided to check the format of the drive – I was sure it was Fat32. But I was wrong and the drive was Fat and there are a bunch of limitations on Fat drives. I copied all my files off the drive, formatted it using Fat32 (Not NTFS because I use Mac’s occasionally and Fat32 is the cross platform friendly format)

Now my only issue is why the hell would they ship there drives as Fat over Fat32? Anyone got any guesses?

_TheStumpedAdmiN_

But AtA has been through this MANY MANY times and we know of an old school solution to blowing away almost any fussy hard drive.

Is Dos 6.22 old enough for you? Fdisk and format are your friends… You didn’t forget about them did you? 6.22 is before NTFS so it doesn’t worry about the security – isn’t that special?

Don’t worry loyal AtA fan we won’t make you go scurrying back to your domicile looking for your old dusty box of floppy disks because we have an image for you right over here…

You can use this with a blank floppy disk to boot into 6.22 and get down and dirty (You do know what a floppy disk is don’t you?).

How do you deal with formating issues? Hit us up in the comments.

_TheFlashBackAdmiN_