Category: IT

Microsoft Outlook has stopped working

Chad

Here we are a day after Microsoft updates were released and I start getting phone calls of Outlook crashing for some users. I’ve seen it on both Outlook 2013 and 2016.

I don’t have full details yet, but for now the quick fix is to uninstall hotfix KB3097877 and reboot.

From what I’ve read, it seems to only affect those who have the reading pane enabled. Hopefully MS will issues an update for this update soon!

EDIT: This was a short lived issue. Microsoft has released an updated patch under the same number that does not have the issues.

 

Yes, the Ubiquiti TS-16-CARRIER can be separated into two units

Chad

I’m making this post simply because I had this question and could not find a conclusive answer. Here’s the back story.

I have a project where I needed 2 Toughswitches. And I needed the 8 port units as the 5 port switch was too small. However when I went to order the switches, every single seller of them had them listed as ‘back ordered’. I could get the 5 port models or the 16 port models, but those aren’t what I needed. That’s when I had the idea, since their ’16 port’ carrier model is nothing but two 8 port switches in a rack-mountable carrier, can they be taken out of the carrier and used separately? I didn’t want to take a $400 gamble to get one, and find out that they were difficult or impossible to take out of the carrier. Or that maybe that ran a special firmware that required them to work as a pair. The web provided no assistance on this question.

So I started calling some distributors to ask. What I found out right away was that the 8 port switches are back ordered because at this time there are labor issues and ships are not able to get in to port in Los Angeles. Secondly no one was able to specifically answer my question, but believed that what I wanted to do, could be done. So I went ahead and ordered a Ubiquiti TS-16-CARRIER.

I’m hear to say that it can done, and done easily. The face plate can be simply be popped off and the 2 8 port switches slide right on out. At that point, the are completely independent of each other. See photos below.

1-Ubiquiti_TS-16-CARRIER 2-Ubiquiti_TS-16-CARRIER 3-Ubiquiti_TS-16-CARRIER

edwalt’s: If I cannot remote, there is no hope…. right?

Chad

edwalt’s – Things I Wish I’d known about Small Business Server…… : If I cannot remote, there is no hope…. right?

Here’s the scenario; I am the Network Administrator and for whatever reason the remote desktop option has been disabled on the XP client I am trying to reach. It worked fine a couple of days ago, however I cannot connect to the client now. Is it possible to connect to a client machine remotely – even if the remote desktop option is disabled on the XP client?

The answer to this is yes…. as long as you have the rights to do so.

So how do you do it.

  1. Open Regedit on the server.
  2. Select File – Connect Network registry
  3. Enter the name of the client machine and select “Check Name”
  4. At the bottom of your servers registry tree you will know see 2 hives appear.
    • The Hkey_Local_Machine and the Hkey_Users under the clients computer name.
  5. Goto hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server\FdenyTSConnection=1
  6. Change the FdenyTSConnection to 0
  7. Attempt to logon on again

[via: In The Trenches]

XP and only one wireless access point

Chad

I’m looking help from the blogoshpere for a way to have XP only connect to my wireless access point.

I do not want the user to have the ability to see other available wireless networks and more importantly I don’t want them to have the ability to connect to wireless networks other than the one I configured XP with.

Scenerio: The computers are part of the management offices of apartment complexes. We will have 1 wireless router and 3-5 computers per location. Being that these are apartments, there are usually quite a few open access points within reach of the leasing office. And somehow my users are getting associated to these ‘other’ wireless networks. My biggest support issues right now are them calling up saying they cannot print anymore to a printer in the office and I find out they are connected to ‘linksys’ instead of the one they are suppose to be. I simply have them re-connect to the office WIFI and remove the rogue AP from the preferred list to get them back on their network.

For the record, the ‘Automatically connect to non-preferred networks’ is not checked.

What I’ve tried: If I stop the WZC service after the computer boots up, that prevents the ‘view available’ functionality, which is good and allows for continued use on their wireless network, but if I disable the service completely, wireless networking does not work at all upon reboot.

How can I make XP only work with just one access point?

Hopefully no more wiki spam

Chad

My wiki has been the target of spam recently. Yesterday when I went to it, the content of the main page was gone and was replaced by spam links. One of the nice things about wiki’s is was easy to revert to the original page.

I couldn’t figure out how this was happening. I disabled anonymous editing, yet pages were still being modified. I finally did a little research last night and found out that the spam bots were actually creating wiki accounts and then modifying pages under an account. Since my wiki is strictly for my own use(at least for editing), I don’t need users accounts at all. So after a little more research, I found a line that I could add to the configuration file that only allows admins to create user accounts. I’ve instituted that and it does remove the user creation form from everyones view. Now I just hope it works

Was my site down all day or not?

Chad

I was not able to get here or any of my sites at all today. I couldn’t even SSH in. I was thinking it may be a DNS issue, so I logged in remotely to another computer system at work and tried to communicate to the Linux server via the internal network and I got no responses.

So I assumed the computer had some kind of issue, maybe hard locked or maybe completely lost power. I had to wait until my wife got home from work so I could go to the office and find out what was going on.

On the way to work, I was only thinking about how I don’t have recent backups and what if the machine is hosed. I was getting nervous.

When I got there, not only was the machine running, it seemed to have no problems what so ever. It was communicating to the Internet just fine. Just for kicks, I rebooted the server and our Internet router.

After it came back up, I was able to get to this site, so I checked out the refer logs, and it states that the site has been getting hits all day long. So what really was the problem?? Maybe just something with roadrunner DNS?? Why couldn’t I ping it from a machine that was on the internal network?

I have no idea, I’m just glad it’s back available to me. Now it’s time formulate a better backup plan.

Quickbooks in a Terminal Server environment

Chad

Yesterday, I had the task of setting up an extremely limited access user to be able to run QuickBooks(and QuickBooks only) through a terminal server session.

I headed to the QuickBooks support site to see if there were any initial pointers before I embarked on this journey. Only to find that QuickBooks basic, pro, and premier are not supported in terminal services, but their enterprise version(starting at $3,500) is. The version I was working with was Premier, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any help from Intuit.

Starting with this KB Article, I created a special OU where these users are going to be placed and modified group policies to prevent access to just about everything. Then setup redirected desktop and start menu folders.

I logged in as a test user to verify my settings, and everything looked good, except there was a Microsoft Outlook icon on the desktop. So I found this KB Article and was able to remove it globally from the system. The article talks about renaming the registry key, I tried that first, but it didn’t work, so I just deleted it. Then wammo, no more icon. Everything was looking great.

So then for the finally, I obviously need to launch QuickBooks and verify that it works. And right away I’m hit with an error message, telling me that my limited user access is preventing QuickBooks from running.

Back the internet. I didn’t find much info searching the web so I searched the newsgroups where I found this site. After looking at the instructions on that site I knew I wasn’t going to reinstall QuickBooks, so I started following it at the registry changes. A quick test, and sure enough, everything was working perfectly.

Thank you Internet! I was able to have this completely working in about 2 hour�s time including all the different researching I did. Maybe these links will be of value to someone else down the road, which is why I made this entry.

Article links:
How to lock down a Windows 2000 Terminal Server session
How to remove the Outlook icon from your desktop
Changes nesescary to make Quickbooks work in a terminal session
Intuits official stance on their products running on a terminal server