We had a request to add several employees to a large Public Folder database, and using ECP we got the error below: The issue is that the public folder list is too large for the ECP web interface to enumerate, and had to use a script that comes with Exc...

A weird one, because it had been working for a long time, then stopped after a (Microsoft Update) patch and reboot cycle. PROBLEM: Financial users unable to access Quickbooks.  QB data files hosted on the Domain Controller, using the Quickbooks databas...

pfBlocker is an addon for pfSense that allows us to define IP addresses and DNS hostnames to be blocked at the perimeter. In and of itself, this is not a full IDS security solution but these addresses are known-bad and setting this package up is an import...

To configure an account to back up a Digium, follow these steps: * SSH into ftp.rbtechvt.com (in-house or VPN only) * Create user with following command, substituting user for their username. The naming convention for accounts is name-pbx, so the rb...

When you provision a shared resource calendar in Exchange or Office 365, the default permissions only allows users to see basic free/busy information and will not show any details as to who is using the shared resource or what they are using it for. To fi...

To program a pfSense to receive signalling from an APC battery backup over USB, follow these steps: * Connect UPS to pfSense via USB cable * Install Apcupsd in System - Package Manager - Available Packages * Configure Apcupsd * Go to Services ...

Symptoms Windows OpenVPN Gui (not the OpenVPN Connect client) cannot install or uninstall, the process gets stuck on the step relating to adding, modifying or removing the PATH variable and has to be killed with task manager. Uninstall The uninstaller i...

To disable the num and caps lock icons from displaying on your screen over top of everything (extremely annoying).... FOR WINDOWS 7 1. Right click on your desktop and select Personalize at the bottom of the menu. 2. From there click on Display on th...

Follow these steps to rebuild a Dell system into better than new condition: * Check the hard drive and replace if necessary. Dell tended to use Seagate HDDs on their Optiplex desktops which have a dismal failure rate and a nasty habit of reporting the...

We've been doing a LOT with Exchange online, and running powershell is a very handy way to avoid the point-and-click hell that Microsoft products are famous for. However, getting an Exchange Management shell started from a workstation is a non-obvious pro...

We're doing an O365 migration, and this particular site has a large list of domains that they have configured in their on-prem exchange but don't want to migrate. I have the list of domains we don't want, and a list of domains we *do* want to move, and ...

There are a number of different ways to disable the Windows 10 update, some of which are provided and/or documented by Microsoft and other provided by third parties. These methods the ones that we have found to be simplest and most consistent to implement...

I often find applications opening off screen after I disconnect from my docking/multiple monitor set up. And I always forget to move them over to my main monitor before I disconnect from my docking station. Here's how to fix those application that open up...

I HAD AN ISSUE WITH UPGRADING IE TO VERSION 11 FROM 9/10. I DID A LOT OF RESEARCH ON THIS AND CAME UP THE SOLUTION BELOW. FOR ISSUES INSTALLING IE (9, 10, 11). Look under error logs under C:Windows Look in IE9_main.log, IE10_main.log or IE11_main.lo...

When I upgraded to Win10 64 bit from Win7 64 bit, I noticed my search functions were not working correctly. Below are three links to articles I found to improve search functions for Win10. Credit goes to all of the people who wrote these articles. If th...

Turn on Rights management/setup O365 encryption via Power Shell (Main tutorial) http://office365support.ca/setup-and-enable-office-365-message-encryption/ [http://office365support.ca/setup-and-enable-office-365-message-encryption/] OFFICE 365 MESSAGE E...

THE EXCHANGE 2013 FUN DU JOUR... Exchange Server 2013, Windows Server 2012r2, VMware hypervisor.  Office (Outlook) 2013 on the workstations. Customer's Exchange server crashed after repeated power failures/ hard power cycles corrupted the Exchange d...

Microsoft Office documents that reside on a shared drive and are opened by multiple users have a feature whereby a user will be notified if the Office document that they are trying to open is in use by another user. The Office application (usually Word or...

http://kb.digium.com/articles/FAQ/MAIN-FEATURES-CONVERGED-PHONES [http://kb.digium.com/articles/FAQ/MAIN-FEATURES-CONVERGED-PHONES] CONVERGED PHONES Many things happen when you converge a phone with your main phone: * Your Switchvox voicemail messa...

Like most MSPs we've been doing a lot of virtualization in the past couple years. We kept bumping up against a simple problem that resulted in frustration and wasted time, where the new Windows Domain controller (usually a Windows 2012 server), running...

ZIMBRA CONNECTOR FOR OUTLOOK ON WINDOWS 8 THROWS \"ONE OR MORE CHANGES YOU MADE CANNOT BE SAVED\" \"THIS ACTION COULD NOT BE COMPLETED\" The title pretty much describes the issue: Windows 8, or 8.1, Office 2010 or 2013, x86 or x86_64. Zimbra Net...

Because sometimes I have the hardest time remembering the simplest things... [[email protected] ~]# tar cvzf - /path/to/sourcefiles | ssh {user}@{some.host.tld} "cat >/path/to/tarfile.tgz" or to pull from another host: [[email protected] ~] ssh -l {remoteuser...

Ran into a genuinely strange one today, and after lots of Google-fu, head banging and frustration, we figured it out. PPTP clients were not able to connect to the VPN, even locally. The server had been recently converted from a physical server to a VMW...

Recently we needed to add anonymous posting to public folders to a client's Exchange server. It's not possible to do this through the ECP, it must be done via the Exchange Management Shell instead. We found the Microsoft TechNet article about it her...

Troubleshooting a very strange error on a client site in which a user runing Windows 8.1 and Outlook 2013 reported that her email would decided to stop sending outbound messages after several hours of use. Inbound traffic was uneffected. The user would...

October 19th, 2014 I've been looking at home media/ audio systems for a little while now. The Sonos http://sonos.com systems look ok, but are expensive at $199-299 per room. They also come with mixed reviews and you don't get any choice about speake...

We recently built a website with excellent help and guidance from our friend Carter at figrig (http://www.figrig.com [1]). After we did all of our behind the scenes tweaks and modifications, and lots of testing, we were ready to move the site to it's p...

Setting up anonymous relaying is fairly simple to do in Exchange 2013, but it's unbelievably poorly documented. After far too much Googling around, I found most of the information I needed, but there was one glaring ommission from every page and post I...

On the host behind the firewall you want to pierce, run: ssh -NL 7071:localhost:7071 -p222 [email protected] where ^^local port ^^remote port. This can be done at any Linux command line, as well as from Cygwin.

ENABLE WOL IN BIOS Because of all the various motherboards out there, I'm not going to go into how to enable WOL in your BIOS, only know that you need to. However, if your BIOS, like mine, is severely limited in settings and no option is available to enab...

It's rare, but it does happen occasionally... the config on an OpenWRT flashed devices gets well and hosed, and the easiest thing to do is simply nuke the thing and start all over again. How? Here's how: TRIGGERING VIA HARDWARE BUTTON (STANDARD OPENW...

Thanks to nixcraft for his how-to here: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-move-migrate-user-accounts-old-to-new-server/ [1]. I had written a very overcomplicated script to accomplish all this (never underestimate the power of AWK!!!), and this simpli...

After following the steps on the Samba Wiki [1] to prepare a Windows 7 workstation to join the Samba3x domain, I was running in to a persistent and well documented issue. Upon entering the domain Administrator credentials, I would get the error "specif...

This one took me a good long while to figure out, so I thought I'd put a quick post up so the next poor sod who is beating their head on a wall about it can do so for perhaps slightly shorter than I did. The issue: And older LAMP application, presen...

Here at rbTech, we have a Samba 3.x (at the time of this writing Samba 3.6.9) domain on CentOS6.x and with tdbsam backend. The domain has been set up and working for well north of a decade. We regularly update and upgrade, and the Samba config file get...

ALL REQUESTS WITH /BIN IN THE URL ARE REJECTED AND RETURN A 404 ERROR (IIS 6.0) This occurs when IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET are both installed. In order to take a more proactive stance against malicious users and attackers, the ASP.NET ISAPI filter, aspnet_f...

Log in to the target server as root. root# /etc/init.d/scalix-tomcat stop root# ps -ef | grep java root 5024 1 1 Jun13 ? 03:45:01 /usr/java/jre1.5.0_21/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/var/opt/scalix/zs/tomcat/conf/logging.properties ...

Internet based phone service, also known as SIP trunking or Cloud based PBX service, is very popular right now. At rbTech, we have a wealth of experience with both cloud based PBX products and SIP 'trunking' services. Customers call us daily asking abo...

Zimbra is very picky about certificates, and sometimes if a certificate expires it will stop working correctly and refuse to restart with a fairly unhelpful and generic error: Unable to determine enabled services: Cache is out of date or doesn't ex...

We've done this somewhere around 100 times, and I'm just now getting around to writing the steps down! Better late than never I suppose. First off, Why upgrade Samba-3.22 to the RPMforge Samba3x version? Windows 7 (or Windows 8). The 'stock' version...

There are a couple of requirements that need to be met before attempting to join a Windows 7 machine to a Samba-based domain. First, the Samba package on the server must be updated to samba3x (this is now in the CentOS repository). The other requiremen...

Rubin Bennett 05/20/2009 02:09 pm Ok, so I've clearly been using *nix operating systems for too long because little annoyances like this make me have nasty Tourette's episodes. Seriously, how fscking hard should it be to open up the CD image...

To set up Outlook 2007 and Scalix, here are the steps that need to be followed: Download the scalix connector from your server, save it to your desktop. You cannot run the connector installer from a network drive, it will silently fail the install. ...

This issue is almost not worth documenting, but it took me a while to figure this out: http://www.scalix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11741&highlight= [1] The short trick is to properly configure /etc/mail/local-host-names with the actual hostnames o...

Table of contents Extract Sourcefiles: Rename the directory: Patch your sourcetree: Run configure: Run Make: Set up your account: Done! EXTRACT SOURCEFILES: Using tarball from Scalix distribution evolution-scalix-11.4.2.105.tar.gz All operation...

T. Andrew Hooper 12/11/2008 10:46 pm After no error messages, and many attempts to initialize the SmartCache, a solution is found. This should only affect non-initial-installation Scalix Connector installations. The symptoms are as fo...

This is really too silly of a topic to even put up a post about except for one thing: This information literally doesn't exist anywhere else on the Internet. So, if you're the proud owner of a new Okidata B430dn (which, by all accounts, is quite a nic...

Some models of Lenovo laptops seem to struggle with updates that appear to install, then fail and come back. The current count is 47 updates that keep coming back. Some googling turned up this article [1] on the Lenovo forums, and in that was a link...

After repeatedly fighting with IDE tape drives (read: Cheap but effective) and their reticence to work under the various versions of Mandrake that I've implemented over the years, I got it together to whip up a How-to on the subject. The prodecure i...

We get a large numebr of requests to have a user's extension forwarded to their cellular phone or other external number.  Here's how: Log in to your Switchvox as your extension. Navigate to Settings -> Call Rules Under "Unanswered Call Rule Set...

Below is a script for backing up a Linux server to a local folder. This script will back up the folders specified in the $src variable along with all MySQL databases on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and automatically purges each after a set time perio...

This is a quick and dirty script that logs the current download speed and latency to a text file. To use it, copy the script in to your home folder, adjust the log variable to suit your environment and add it to cron on some reasonable interval such as ev...

We often set up one of our colocated servers as a backup mx for our clients and our own network.  Yesterday, we received a number of complaints from clients who were receiving bounceback messages from our secondary mail host that their message w...

Our affiliate and recommended vendor for web hosting is Crucial Web hosting. They currently charge $10 per month for a single domain with limited resources and $25 per month for an account that can host multiple domains, plus an optional $8 per month for ...

One of my favorite features of my droid is Pandora, so I was super excited when I added my Google account to my Xoom and Pandora was suddenly there.  My excitement dimmed quickly however whenI tried to launch Pandora, and was met with an immediate fo...

HOW DO I SET MY RAPID DIAL KEYS TO PERFORM A BLIND TRANSFER IN 5.X? * Click server -> Manage * Find the extension you are working with and click the Brown door Icon to login to the user extension suite. * Click Features -> Phonebooks * Click Modi...

This one was discovered by one of our more clever clients - they figured it out before we were able to! History: Client makes heavy use of shared/ receptionist managed calendars in their organization. The receptionist was experiencing fairly persistent ...

So, Symantec's documentation is notoriously sparse - there is very little information out there about handling the licensing and that ilk. From what I've found, it comes down to the versions. We will see two versions on our day-to-day jobs, 11 and 1...

We recently had a client who was experiencing the issue as described above: He'd open a composer window in Outlook, or reply to a message, and as he typed the cursor would advance very slowly behind the text as he typed. It was distracting and frustrati...

How to build an Internet kiosk using Mandriva Linux and Firefox This is a quick document to remind me how to set up an Internet kiosk for public usage. Many thanks to James D. B. for his invaluable insights that he has posted at http://jadoba.net/PLUG...

When you ask the Google about this, you'll get lots of hits suggesting that you un-join the machine in question from the domain, and re-join it. But what happens if that doesn't work? Turns out that when I narrowed my Googling to only postings in the la...

(Originally published on 10/30/2008, updates 2/5/2009) This page is a documentation of how I set up OpenVPN on Linux servers with Windows (non-admin) road warriors. I've documented both the Server and Client side of the installation here because it...

HOW TO INSTALL AND CONFIGURE SPAMASSASSIN WITH SENDMAIL ON LINUX Copyright© 2003 by Rubin Bennett, All Rights Reserved. Written by Rubin Bennett ([email protected]). Comments to me, flames to /dev/null! FIRST, THE USUAL DISCLAIMER... I hereby a...

LINUX MANDRAKE 9.0 AND XFREE86 4.2.1 ON MY TOSHIBA SATELLITE 1905-S303 Copyright© 2002 by Rubin Bennett, All Rights Reserved. Written by Rubin Bennett ([email protected]). Comments to me, flames to /dev/null! FIRST, THE DISCLAIMER... I hereby a...

\N\NHOW-TO LOAD LINUX ON THE COMPAQ PRESARIO 1600 LAPTOP\N\N Copyright© 2000 by Rubin Bennett Written by Rubin Bennett ([email protected]) LINUX (AND XFREE86 4.0.X) ON MY PRESARIO 1600 Compaq Presario 1600XL (Compaq Built for you, Celery 500 ...

Copyright© 2000 by Rubin Bennett Written by Rubin Bennett (rbennettthatITguy.com) v0.5 30 Aug, 2000 Originally posted to http://www.thatITguy.com/howto/ This document is subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the GPL, or Gnu Public License, ...

T. Andrew Hooper 11/11/2008 12:12 pm While looking for guidance on creating the schema to authenticate Samba (Windows) users against OpenLDAP I found this article which was no longer available at the publishing server, but was still available...

We tripped over a good one this week, and the resolution was simple, even though the troubleshooting steps were long and arduous. Background: SBS 2008 site migrating email to Exchange Online (O365). Endpoints have Office 2010 installed, fully service pa...

T. Andrew Hooper 11/12/2008 10:08 am SAS controller causes Intel motherboard in Dell desktop to go through four sets of motherboard error messages before booting normally. While trying to flash some SAS drives that were causing trouble in...

The Base & Firmware only take a couple of minutes each, but the "Sys" stage is very large and will take about 10 minutes. To perform the upgrade, use the FROM URL option in the firmware upgrade section (in the SYSTEM->MAINTENANCE tab), and then copy and...

T. Andrew Hooper 11/12/2008 10:13 am One of the more annoying features of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 is something called Shrink-to-Fit. This will attempt to get the entire web page onto a single printed page, even if it requires that eve...

T. Andrew Hooper 11/20/2008 04:30 pm Strange connectivity problems at Barre Court House diagnosed, ultimate cause still unknown. One of our customers has an employee at the Barre Court House who could not connect to the internet at all t...

\N\NTHE SHARP ZAURUS® SL-5000D\N\N \n\nThe Hottest PDA Available (in 2000, That Is)!\n\n _This article was published in early 2000, before there was such a thing as a 'SmartPhone'. PDAs and phones were separate devices, not to converge for severa...

_PLEASE NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS STILL A DRAFT AND INCOMPLETE!_ We were contracted to install the as of yet unsupported CentOS 5.2 x86_64 as a virtual machine under Hyper-V on Windows 2008 server. We began with a base install of CentOS5.2, x86_64. Whi...

Occasionally, even us I.T. folks do silly things and forget configuration passwords. Such was the case when I needed to pull an old system out of retirement for a client. The client had Trend OfficeScan Client/ Server suite back when the PC was retire...

A client called recently with a new issue - Quickbooks Pro 2007, which had been working just fine for literally years, wouldn't start. When they double-clicked on the Quickbooks Icon, a Windows Installer screen would come up, and nothing they did would ma...

As part of our normal on site routine, I ran yum check-updates on a client's CentOS5.1 server today and got back a slew of updates that were needed. When I ran [[email protected] ~]# yum update I got a pile of errors about incomplete headers. After a bi...

The following will create a backup of the OpenVPN Access Server databases that can be used to restore a configuration: * Create the following script in /etc/cron.daily and make it executable: * #!/bin/bash DEST="/home/administrator/backup" TODAY=$(da...

We recently replaced a dot-matrix printer at a site with an Okidata MicroLine 590. The building is wired with cat-5 that is being used to carry serial signals to the terminals and printers. We needed to build an RJ45 to DB25 (male) adapter to attach to th...

Issues related to a domain controller being offline for long enough to get out of sync with the other domain controllers. These issues also commonly occur when a domain controller has to be restored from a backup, particularly with Veeam which restores th...

Have you ever needed to query your installed RPMs in a Linux system by architecture? In using CentOS, I keep running across 'mixed architecture' systems where yum has helpfully decided to install both 32 and 64 bit versions of many packages. I find this a...

Sometimes you need to add a range of IP addresses to an interface. A good example is configuring a firewall, where you need all of your public IP addresses to be bound to one interface. One way to do this is to create separate IFCFG-ETH0:X files for each ...

This occurs when you connect a vSphere client (the 'fat' client) to a server running ESXi 6.5.  Everything appears to work fine until you try to launch the console, and it gives the error below: unable to connect to the mks: Could not connect to pipe \....

Once in a while you need to find that device that's on your network that you don't have a record of. I know, never happens, right? Because you have DDNS and DHCP completely and properly configured on your entire network, and you never forget to add a m...

Hi folks This is a new product that we're trialing here, but I suspect we'll be doing much more with it over time. Here's how it works. * Log on to the Umbrella portal at https://dashboard.umbrella.com [https://dashboard.umbrella.com] using creds in K...

The following is directions on setting up a server to send a weekly status email with relevant information about system resource usage and activities. This summary isn't a substitute for a proper monitoring system but it can be a very useful tool for keep...

Zimbra fully supports calendar sharing with multiple users but has proven itself difficult to enable this function from within Outlook. The fix however, is quite easy: * Log in to your email account via the Zimbra web client * Click the "Calendar...

Last night, whilst rescusitating a recalcitrant mailserver, I was presented with a puzzler. I'd copied the entire /etc/mail directory from the donor (dead) machine, as well as the required /etc/sysconfig files. It seemed like no matter what I tried,...

If you get errors on a Drupal 6 site after upgrading to PHP 5.3+, find the following line in includes/file.php: elseif ($depth >= $min_depth && ereg($mask, $file)) { and modify it to read: elseif ($depth >= $min_depth && mb_ereg($mask, $file))...

This error caused me a monstrous headache recently when I did a CentOS load on a nice shiny new Intel 5650BC chassis. It happened after I had done an initial load of the Basic Server group, and realized that I needed a GUI on this particular server bec...

Sometimes you need to be able to embed an iframe using the TinyMCE editor in Silverstripe, for example if you are trying to insert a Google Map or a YouTube video. By default, the editor mangles the HTML if there are iframe tags in the HTML - everythin...

From the Zimbra wiki: http://wiki.zimbra.com/wiki/Zmtlsctl Basically, you need to run zmtlsctl , where is either "redirect" or "https" (no quotes), depending on whether or not you want to allow users to connect via http and then be redirected, o...

We've seen a few customers experience errors with Outlook trying to sync signatures over to the Zimbra server. It's very sporadic and doesn't seem to be limited to a particular version of Outlook or ZCS. The easiest way to fix this is to go into you...

Through this document, I'll use the terms target and production to describe the new clone and existing servers, respectively. To clone a physical instance of CentOS, the biggest trick is the fact that the filesystem layout will not be the same on th...

We bought a shiny new Oki 562dn MFP recently, and quickly realized that the device is great, but the documentation is atrocious. After breaking down and calling Okidata support (and since we're a tech company it took swallowing our pride a bit to do...

There are a number of reasons you may want to tunnel a connection to a remote server over SSH. You may be accessing an unencrypted resource and want to ensure that the information is transmitted in an encrypted form over untrusted networks, or you may ...

With thanks to the VMware documentation team for a complete but overcomplicated page on this [1]! vim-cmd hostsvc/firmware/backup_config Responds with a URL that you can (for a short time) go grab the firmware configs from on that host. Slick! So...

Running Parellel's (vs. 9) on a Mac with a MS Volume Licensing (MSVL) key. The issue I was running into was because MSVL OS's already have the license key included in the OS download, which was causing Parellel's to not recognize the DVD/HD when instal...

Untangle is a very powerful and versatile UTM firewall appliance. Fairpoint is the low cost 'broadband' DSL provider in Vermont and northern New England. Fairpoint DSL requires the use of PPPoE to authenticate your connection to their DSLAM (yuck...

We recently had a tricky one where a user with a large, redirected Documents folder was unable to access seemingly random files when disconnected from the home network. After some extensive Googling, we stumbled across a helpful error on the machine - ...

Particularly after a P2V conversion, you may find yourself needing to remove all traces of a NIC from a server. For example on a Domain Controller, if the NIC changes, you may find that it's unhappy about the domain profile - the server will show th...

A simple operation that had me banging my head in frustration for a couple hours before I stumbed across the magic button in the (absolutely, inexcusably terrible) WEBbios. Background: Existing server, running 4 drives in a RAID5 array. Wanted to ad...

We were diagnosing a particularly troublesome and inconsistent set of SMTP failures on an Exchange server recently, and I saw a very clever shortcut to the Exchange server SMTP logging folder. Go to start -> Run (or Windowskey-R) and type: %exchange...

If you are adding Windows 8 or 8.1 systems to a domain that uses WSUS, there is strong posibility that you will see a situation where the client generates an error 800B0001 and refuses to update itself from the WSUS server. The client may appear in in ...