Andy Kemp

Some time ago I wrote a post on the Mimecast Active Stationary and creating a custom email disclaimer with a business card pulling the information from AD. This is a great solution, however there is one draw back, it applies the business card to the very bottom of the emails on replies and threads. IT works well when the email has been generated on the sending end as it applies it directly below. I had a look some time ago at creating a script that would create an Outlook signature but didn’t get very far. Last week a colleague/friend...

For this you will need: Windows 7 DVD or install files 1 x 4GB USB Flash Disk a pc that supports booting from a usb device. Follow these steps to the word and you should have an up and running USB Flash Drive that you can installing Windows 7 (or Vista) from. 1. Plug in the USB flash drive and backup the data on it (if you want to keep it). Make a note of the drive letter in this example I am going to use F:\...

Ok so you are probably wondering why am I posting something like this up on a subtext blog? Well I have recently set up a Ubuntu server running apche2 and MySQL so I thought I would start using it for Wordpress as I cannot install Subtext on Ubuntu. Any way my new blog www.blogwhenbored.com is now up and running and I wanted to be able to email posts into it. As I use Google mail I set up the pop3 Server as pop.gmail.com and the port as 995, I then added the username and credentials in and emailed in...

So I have had about 5 V+ boxes in the last year to 18 months, Box kept re-booting itself and various other issues. Well today I had an engineer out (again) and instead of replacing the box he just gave me instructions on how to factory re-set my V+ box (format it) like most computer related issues a reset is usually a last resort but the most affective, but you loose all your existing data (if you have not backed it up). Backing up your PC/Laptop data is one thing (relatively easy) However backing up your V+ box isn’t...

So now I have managed to change the Server IP address the next thing was to change the host name. The hostname is defined in the two following locations: /etc/hostname /etc/hosts To change it you need to edit both files: sudo nano /etc/hostname and sudo nano /etc/hosts As with the interfaces file after each edit press Ctrl+X to save and exit. I restarted the server after changing it but I guess there is a restart of a service you can do.

One of the most simple things that only really took me a google search to do was to change the IP Address of my Ubuntu server from a DHCP assigned address to a Static IP address. This is done through editing two files: /etc/network/interfaces /etc/resolv.conf This is done through using the following commands: sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces then making the following changes to the file: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static         address 192.168.1.100         netmask 255.255.255.0 ...

If you try and install Search Server Express on Windows Server 2008 R2 you will get the following compatibility error: It wasn’t till I tweeted about the error that I managed to solve the problem. With thanks to ToddKlindt pointing me in the right direction mentioning that Office SharePoint SP2 needed to be slipstreamed I managed to fix the problem. I had guessed that was the case but I was looking in the wrong direction, I was looking for a Service Pack for Search Server not for Share Point. So the answer was to Slipstream...

With Windows Vista I had to install the Admin Pack for Windows Server and then run a cmd file to register a load of DLL’s I tried this fix with Windows 7 but it didn’t work. I then found out that there was a tool created for Windows 7 Beta called Remote Server Admin Tools (RSAT) for Windows 7 Beta, so I downloaded this and installed x86: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/4/AD4D3903-E06D-456D-AED4-D53895D2C1A9/Windows6.1-KB958830-x86.msu x64: http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/D/4/AD4D3903-E06D-456D-AED4-D53895D2C1A9/Windows6.1-KB958830-x64.msu After the install I went into my Administrative Tools menu but I could not see anything. It turned out what I needed to do was to add...

Some times it is quite handy to have the My Computer Icon renamed to the current logged on user and the computer name, it makes life a lot easier for when the user calls the helpdesk. You can ask them to minimise all windows and give you the information that is on the Icon, believe it or not some users have a hard time remembering their own username let alone their password. so a simple registry tweak will sort this one out for you: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D} And change the LocalizedString to %Username% on %computername% ...

I have seen this on more than a handful of pc’s on the network where you have a users home drive (H: for example) is pointing to \\server\share\%username% but or some reason H:\ is pointing to \\server\share. Well the good news is that there is a simple fix to this one! there is a setting in the local policy of the computer, which can be set through GPO. All you need to do is enable the Wait for the network at computer startup and logon setting in: Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Logon\ If you are doing this for an individual computer you can...

For the last couple of days I have been looking at the options that Windows Server 2008 Enterprise offers in terms of Clustering. I have never really looked at clustering before (apart from playing around with Hyper-V and clustering last week). As we do not use any live Virtual systems here in the office I thought that testing and playing around with that would not be good business development so I looked at the option for File Share clustering and also printer clustering. Up until now Clustering had been rocket science, you needed the same hardware and some would even say you...

I have been playing around with my registry on my pc (I know a dangerous thing to do some times). Now what I had done was similar to that in the post on how to edit VBS files in VBSEditor, I created a folder in C:\Program Files\ called Notepad2 and copied the files for Notepad2 into there. To set up Notepad to to edit documents from a right click you need to do the following: Open up Registry Editor Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\name of the file type in this case it is...

I was reading a copy of the Web User Magazine today Issue 193 and in their Downloaded Software Section there were some good looking downloads. One of which was Notepad2. This can be downloaded from: http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html. It truely is a good notepad editor! it works much like the VBSEditor in my previous post (this is what prompted me to put this post up) but it works for more than VBS files! It will choose the syntax schema depending on the file extension of the script so a batch file will be assigned the Batch File syntax schema, a...

I recently wrote a post about moving my MX records from pointing to Google Mail to point to Hotmail using Windows Live Community. Since then I have switched back as I liked the function of being able to check my email on my iPod Touch.  I did try izzy mail which basically creates an IMAP route to your Hotmail. Well last week I switched back, I did not close my account I just pointed my MX records elsewhere. Anyway there was about a 6 week gap in my email and I was wondering if there was a way to...

Like my previous post, there was another nice utility that I used frequently in XP that enabled you to open a command prompt from what ever folder you were browsing in Windows Explorer. To my astonishment, this utility had actually been included in Windows Vista. if you press the shift key and right click on the folder that you want to open up and command prompt from you have the option to Open Command Prompt Here: It also works on mapped network drives too.

Smartphones are becoming more and more popular in businesses today along with the blackberries. If you have an Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Environment then you can take advantage of the Exchange Mobility feature, which enables your users with smartphones to sync their email, contacts and calendars. If you have an Exchange 2003 Enterprise Server Environment with Exchange Service Pack 2 then you can take advantage of not just syncing Email, Contacts and Calendars but SP2 Enables the following: Direct push is a new Exchange technology that maintains an open connection between the mobile device and the...

I started to play around with Exchange 2007 on my windows 2003/2008 domain. As my Windows Server 2003 DC had Exchange 2003 installed I thought I would try installing Exchange 2007 on the Windows Server 2008 DC. I Managed to get the install under way with little problem. I started to write a How To guide for the migration process but I found a very good guide on the web on www.msexchange.org. This guide I found very useful although I can fumble my way round the exchange system it was handy to have some sort of guide line to follow. IT...

This is a brief How To guide (the first of many) on how to migrate your existing Active Directory to Windows Server 2008. Please note that I cannot be held responsible for any issues that you encounter when following this guide, my upgrade was done in a lab environment on a single Domain Controller running Exchange 2003. If you do follow this and do it on a live system please, please, please run a full back up of your domain controllers and verify that the backup was successful. Even though this is a straight forward...

So you have installed and got PHP running on Vista/IIS 7, the next thing to do is to install MySQL. I had some issues with MySQL 5.0.51a so I stuck with MySQL 5.0.45. Download a copy of MySQL from: http://downloads.mysql.com/archives/mysql-5.0/mysql-5.0.45-win32.zip Before you run the setup you will need to disable the User Account Control (UAC) Open Control Panel in classic view Select User Accounts Click on Turn User Account Control on or off uncheck Use User Account Control and then click on OK ...

I have been able to get subtext to work locally pretty easily as it uses the .net framework, but what if you wanted to play around with blog engines like wordpress or drupal on your local PC? Answer install PHP on your IIS installation. After searching a bit on the net I came across a blog on blogs.iis.net then went through the install of PHP on IIS 7. I was suprised at how easy it was, here is what I did to get PHP working on Vista/IIS 7: If you have not done so already install IIS, include ISAPI Extension component (for PHP-ISAPI)...

OK so I have had a few issues at work where for some reason or other users are prompted for their AD credentials when accessing the Internet through our proxy server (ISA 2000 with Surfcontrol 5.0). For the life of me I could not get to the bottom of the issue. I tried cleaning out her profile, deleting her profile, move her out of Group Policy and it still happened. The same problem had happened before so the only other thing was to delete the user and recreate the account and re-attach the mailbox. The problem with this is that if...

OK so I have got XBMC running on my Softmoded xbox and every time I start it up it goes into the evox dash. To save time and to make my life easier I wanted to make my xbox load directly into XBMCto do this you need to replace the default.xbe file with a shortcut to your xbmc default.xbe file. To do this you will need to download the XBE Shortcut Maker. Locate your XBMC default.xbe file, make a note of where it is located on your xbox. mine was stored in: e:\Apps\XBMC\default.xbe Launch the XBE Shortcut Maker and set the Target Path...

Do you have an old xbox that you bought years ago and played games on it for all of about 6 weeks? wondering what to do with it? well you could turn it in to a Media Center. that is what I did with mine, not only that you can put a bigger Hard Disk in too. I have my xbox running with a 250GB HDD, have an F: for Music, Movies, Pictures etc.... and then a G: that I can copy my games on to! saves me having to find the Games when I do decide to play on...

**Disclaimer** This is for your information only follow at your own risk I cannot beheld responsible if for any reason it goes wrong. This Tutorial will guide you on how to replace your HDD in your xbox with out affecting the original one, so if anything does go wrong you will still have a functioning xbox. OK so you have a softmodded xbox and you want to replace the original 8gb HDD with a bigger one, after all bigger is better. Assumption that you are using the evox or unleashedx dashboard's Equipment you need: Softmodded xbox (goes without saying) ...