Printers: are in my opinion and in the words of Owen Wilson in the movie ‘Armageddon’, “.. basically the worst parts of the bible…”. We all wish for the days that offices become truly ‘paperless’ – that fun buzzword of the 1990′s DotCom era. Sadly however this has never really materialized - and from what I see on a daily basis – it’s going to be quite some time before the vision is realized.

Until that day however people are going to want to print things. From the mundane TPS reports to the cheques and remittance advice notes all the way down to the latest fun joke that’s going to end up posted on a break-room wall only to offend at least someone in the office and remain there until the paper starts to become one with the corkboard to which it has been pinned. Printers are a mess of mechanical parts, liquids and fine powders, plastic and metal, software and firmware. If you’ve ever had to perform any surgery on a printer other than installing a maintenance kit, changing rollers or the holy grail of printer maintenance – change a fuser – you know how fussy and delicate they really are. What’s more – because they’re usually the last thing in the office to get replaced, they’re usually the biggest pain in the neck for IT staff.

But hardware issues aside, the real bugbears of printer maintenance is the software interaction with the magic box of wonder. Enter; the driver. It’s almost as if the printer driver is your enemy. It’s usually buried in a mire of tacky add on software, is likely to be platform specific and comes in a myriad of flavours who barely mix between species. Drivers are the cause of more problems in the printing world than I can care to recall. However one good thing about drivers is they can be removed. And once you remove them, you can put them back again (of course this doesn’t apply to situations where you plug in a USB printer into Windows XP and it can’t find a driver on its own and throws the dreaded ‘Unknown Device’ hardware hissy fit!).

So if the mechanics of printers can be overcome, and the drivers can theoretically be challenged to a duel at dawn by the engineer – what’s the whole diggity about printers? Enter; the spooler. Most people haven’t heard of the spooler. It’s this integrated operating-system specific piece of software that acts as the nanny to between the printer driver and the printer itself. It sits there eating up your CPU while you print the funniest cat picture you’ve ever seen. But there will come a day when the latest funny cat picture is too much for your ageing printer to handle. It’ll get muddled in its jumble of binary juggling. It’ll tell the spooler “Oh I didn’t get that last part, can you repeat it?” and the spooler will just respond by saying “you never listen to me!” and much like the anthropomorphising analogy would play out, the spooler crashes and sits in the corner sullen and refuses to co-operate. This is where you start to see the following errors:

Spooler SubSystem App has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Printers: Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running.

So what do you do? Well you could go back into the services control panel and restart the spooler (cleverly hidden under ‘Print Spooler’ just to throw you on your first foray into service restarting). But that’ll just make the spooler more angry. So you take a visit to the ‘Printers and Faxes’ folder – but wait – where did all the printers go? Yes you guessed it, the spooler is what gives you access to your printers. If it goes, your printers go. So now you have the all-too-familiar chicken-and-egg scnerario: you need to get at the printers to fix the spooler but you can’t get at the spooler because you need to fix the printers. Try if you want by having your DOS prompt on one side of the screen and frantically typing in “sc start spooler” while trying to refresh the printers folder to no avail. You (like me) might get lucky occassionally.

However, there is a quicker way. I’m sure someone else has figured this out before me, but I’m proud to say I got this all on my own. Basically what’s happening is a document has gotten stuck in the queue and the spooler just flat out refuses to repeat itself to the printer and crashes all over the place. Traditionally you’d try the “Cancel All Documents” approach or try to delete the job from the queue – but if your spooler keep crashing, you’ll never get that far. So the best approach is the direct one – pull the job from the queue ‘manually’. What’s happnening is that the jobs are just files in a folder being monitored by the spooler – delete the file and hey presto!

Get over to the following directory and delete all the ‘.spl’ files – then restart you spooler and hot diggity it’s all over!

That’s literally all there is to it. Now as ever, there’s a caveat – if your printer is installed directly on your computer, this will work – however – if you’re using a print server and sharing the printer from there, you’ll need to do this on the server and not your computer (because your computer sent the ‘.spl’ file to the server when you submitted your job).

This is kind of an angry post – apologies beforehand!

For some stupid reason, Windows Server 2008 (not the R2 version by the way) and Windows Server 2008 for Small Business has the ‘hibernate’ feature turned on by default. Hibernation is when a machine commits all running memory to disk and powers down only to pull this data back off the disk upon powering on and thus giving you the impression everything is as it was before you ‘hibernated’ the machine – I say ‘impression’ as very often it doesn’t work properly.

Anyway, as it commits all running memory to the disk, the hibernation system has to create a file which is usually equal in size to the installed physical memory (RAM) of the machine. Now in a PC, that might not be much, but in a server, that could be a phenomenal amount of storage. So let’s say you’re running a server with a 140GB partition and 16GB of RAM and over time your server consumes 100GB of data from users. As an administrator you look at the server and see only 8GB of free space and start to wonder what happened the other 32GB? Well remember the 16GB of RAM you have installed? 16GB of hard disk space has been consumed by this stupid hibernation system – a feature I cannot see any server ever needing or using. OK, so now you’ve accounted for 16GB of your 32GB missing storage – the rest is probably your pagefile if you set it to be huge or system managed (that’s your call to fix!)

So you need your 16GB back right? OK, well then you need to disable hibernation. Before Windows Vista you’d go into the power options and turn it off there. But thanks to the foresight of Microsoft in introducing Windows Vista, all is not as it was. The way you do it now is via a command. Here’s how:

1. Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
3. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate off, and then press ENTER.
5. Type exit, and then press ENTER.

So go forth an take back your server’s storage. It might get you out of that tight spot!

(Thanks goes to VMPros.nl for the instructions)

Imagine the scene; it’s the late 1990s and all over the world people are preparing to embrace the Internet and all the possibilities that entails. Optimism for the new medium is at a fever pitch. By the time the new millenium is ushered in, thousands of Internet-only start up companies are being valued at ridiculous prices. Everyone is getting on email and heralding the paperless office and the death of fax machines. Newspaper companies are tripping over one another to bring the news to the Internet first – worries abound over their prospective futures as blogs take over and the dawn of social media is breaking.

Fast forward to today – 2011. It’s been about 10 years since the dotcom bubble burst and now we’re in the second or third iteration of that bubble. But today, the talk isn’t about whether or not you’ve got a website for your plumbing business, it’s about whether your business is “in the Cloud” or your social media strategy isn’t focused on the right niche market. A lot has changed, but little has really changed. The changes we see on a company’s website – the new branding, the new colorscheme, the sparkly taglines and the happy customer testimonials – these change our perception of the business on first contact. The reality is however that for most companies, this is surface window dressing. Today, at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first-century, small businesses across the globe are struggling to find new business with little more in their toolbox than some facepaint and some Red Bull.

Business and the very nature of how it is conducted has changed dramatically. The world we live in today is a far cry from the world of 2002 when an optimistic Microsoft released its update to the fledgling Small Business Server product built on the back of the failed BackOffice Server system. The world has grown more mature and the era of mobile computing and ubiquitous internet access has well and truly dawned on the global business sector. But while all of this change happens at the surface, behind the scenes, businesses are being choked by their poor investment decisions in their information infrastructure.

These weren’t bad investments, rather they were investments which have now, sadly, investments which have gone bad. Rather like a putrid carton of milk laying at the back of your refridgerator, the small business server of today is a tired, worn out and unfit piece of equipment – a potential disaster waiting to happen. Companies, especially small businesses, are quick to buy into a new marketing campaign involving social media and search engine optimisation based on the potential of gaining new business, but they fail to put in place the infrastructure to serve those potential customers – if they ever get the return on that marketing investment! Back in the day, companies wanted email – so they went out and got email. But like most things back then, it was a massive investment; it involved purchasing very expensive software and hardware, internet access, computers, screens, printers, faxes (they didn’t die sadly) and expensive maintenance costs. Many years later, these computers and servers are beyond obsolete. Companies remember the hurt and pain the initial investment cost them and are reluctant to go through it again. In Ireland, as in most countries, there is a high propensity to ‘sweat the asset’ a lot longer than is generally done elsewhere in the modern world. It’s not uncommon to see servers in small businesses dating from 2002 or 2004 with 1GB of RAM and a 72GB hard disk configuration running Windows Server 2003 SBS or worse, Windows 2000. When you sit down and do the math on that fact, they’re running products over 10 years old to conduct business on that has wholeheartedly changed in that period. No amount of facebook marketing can fix that.

The struggle as I see it today is that companies are not in a position to adapt to changes. The economic woes of the past few years have bred the arrogance out of small business who for one reason or another failed to see the impending alterations to society that a fiscal crisis brings – and they suffered the consequences. All over the world, businesses are failing or have failed. In most cases this was because demand for their supply chain dried up. Those companies founded before the world financial disaster born of sub-prime lending failure in the US who still survive today do so on a very unsure footing and are one or two diverse changes away from being another statistic.

As the iPhone, iPad and formerly the Blackberry came to revolutionize the workforce of the connected globe, companies struggled to ensure compliance and data security and invested heavily in pre-iPhone technology like the Blackberry Enterprise Server and other such devices as ActiveSync-powered PDAs. The rapid adoption of anywhere email access heralded by the Blackberry and ignited in the consumer market by the iPhone and iPad has led to a sea change in the way people work today. In the past there was overtime – today there’s just one time – the 24/7 business. In a globalized economy, business owners know that the customer isn’t likely to wait until Monday morning if they need service on a Saturday evening. This has become the customer-orientated world we now occupy today – where the customer is no longer just King, they’re the Kingmaker. Competition is fiercer than ever today and every thing that holds you back in terms of conducting your business is something that’s potentially costing you money.

Networks built on Exchange 2003 are slowly starting to face their impending doom as the businesses who embrace newer technologies in that sexy colourless cloud are competing at levels that are unprecedented to companies who lumbered through the 1990s and 2000s. Lawyers, accountants, veterinarians are all now competing with worldwide companies who spread their tentacles beyond the local village store memo board and onto the social media universe that promises so much for market share today.

There is a risk these companies cannot survive, but there are some things they can do about that. One is to change how they do things. In my next article I’ll outline how they can change one thing that will change their business, and it has a relatively low cost compared with what they shelled out for their servers way back when. The question I pose is; are some businesses unable to change just that little and adapt to the modern world where there is no future but what we make of it tomorrow?

So much is written online about the brilliance of Office 365 and why we should move there. I agree with most who say it’s a fantastic way of getting an organization up into the Cloud and to harness the benefits of better connected mobility in an agile business world such as the one now present in the second decade of the twenty first century.

However, while it may be easy to sign up to Office 365, migrating there isn’t exactly straightforward. First, it depends, as many things in the world of technology do, on how many users you’re taking about. I have doubts over the ROI for larger enterprises in using Office 365, but few about small and medium sized businesses utilizing the cloud platform primarily sold for email use.

So the scenario unfolds like this – the business has already got a typical installation using Windows Small Business Server 2003 or 2008 with Exchange 2003 and 2007 respectively. They have approximately 10 real users of this and want to move to Office 365 because – let’s be honest – Outlook Web Access on 2003 and 2007 is pretty dire. The company also wants to benefit from not having to worry about a backup strategy for their burgeoning Exchange environment and want to get rid of the product off their old creaky servers. Fabulous.

Enter the IT guy. He (or she!) is most likely a Microsoft Cloud Partner – this makes sense as it take all of 10 minutes to do so. He sells you the benefits and says he’ll do it over a weekend when things are quiet. He assures you with his devilish charm that you won’t “lose” any emails and that by Monday morning you’ll be back in action, with only a brief outage over the previous weekend. Pretty standard stuff for the tight-budgeted small business of today.

So the IT guy heads off to www.office365.com and signs the company up to the 30-day trial for the P1 plan which serves up to 25 users. Except the trial is limited to 10 users – quite a nasty little surprise to get, but nevertheless, he’s only concerned with 10 users anyway, so off he goes to finish the setup. After a few tricky stages of verifying the domain and updating the DNS records (not pointing them to Office365 because I fail to see why anyone would do that!), he’s ready to go with the weekend migration. Of course, being a devilishly charming IT guy, he already knows that the minimum supported versions of Microsoft Office are 2007 SP2 and upwards, and has cleverly sold the customer brand new Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business packs (who said the cloud was cheap?!).

So there he is, in the middle of a Friday evening at home logged in remotely (and securely!) into the customer’s PCs and the devilishly charming IT guy is exporting the mailboxes one by one (the quick and dirty method!). Once he finishes, he thinks “I may as well get one guy fully set up with this before I turn in for the night…”, and heads to the Office365 portal. He diligently (after many blank glances at the screen) downloads the Setup tool and proceeds to set up.

But wait, what’s this? Outlook requires some ‘manual steps’ to be set up? Okay, which steps would those be? Damn. Nothing but a whole mess of TechNet notes and some backchatter on the blogosphere. This doesn’t bode well for the devilishly charming IT guy who’s now becoming rather irate and cursing the Redmond WA company who came up with this POS. Okay, calm down – there has to be a way. As with so many things in life today, it’s all about how you search for stuff online. Google is great, but it can’t read minds (yet!) so he tries some different search terms and phrases. Much discussion around manipulating registry keys is discussed, but the problem as he see it is that Outlook cannot be configured because the stupid Exchange 2003 server is trying to be the mack daddy of the organization. The now frustrated and tired IT guy wishes the old BPOS sign-in tool was there to rescue him, but alas, he’s on his own.

Until he remembers what he did before to set up the last customer that went into BPOS who had a tricky configuration. Manually setting up Outlook then becomes the mission. In the absence of steps, the IT guy whacks some details into Outlook only to get nothing back but a rude set of errors about Exchange not being online. Damn. What now? So he checks again for the settings, does some more Google-ing and then finds the answer Microsoft so miserably failed to tell him – make changes to what Microsoft tells you!

Here’s how. First, log into the Office365 portal, then hit on Outlook and wait for the Outlook Web App to load. Then press the help circle on the far right and select the ‘About’ option as here:

Now you’ll see the ‘About’ section which has a whole mess of detail few people really want to see. Your concerned with the ‘hostname’ bit of the setup, and that’s because you need to know what server your Office365 installation (in the cloud) is running on.

Once you have your hostname, you need to make a minor adjustment – adding the word ‘mailbox’ to the equation. So if like above you’re sitting on ‘amsprd0302.outlook.com‘, your Exchange server address is really ‘amsprd0302.mailbox.outlook.com‘. Now, you have pretty much all the detail you need. (Please note: Don’t use these settings as you may not be on this server and any attempt to authenticate will fail.)

Now you need to launch Outlook (2007 SP2 or later) and setup the new profile and account. The devilishly charming IT guy in his wisdom and ridiculous self confidence has of course deleted all the other profiles from the Mail control panel option and of course backed up his NK2 files before doing so – that’s what makes him that little bit special!

So in the Exchange Account Setup for Outlook, your server becomes the one with ‘mailbox’ in it. The username is self explanatory, and it entered in the format of ‘user@domain.com’. Don’t go anywhere just yet though, because you need to head into the ‘More Settings’ options, where you’ll find the secret sauce to this Outlook Anywhere business you so well touted to your business clients when you sold them on the whole ‘cloud’ thing. Head for ‘Connection’ and mark the option box for ‘Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP’ and then select the ‘Exchange Proxy Settings’ box. Now you’ll enter the Exchange server name without the ‘mailbox’ addition and check all the boxes, add in the term ‘msstd:outlook.com’ into the principal name section and change authentication to basic. Now press OK twice, then you can do the ‘Check Name’ thing to see if you hit the jackpot. Of course, you will be prompted for credentials, but hopefully the sign-in tool for Office365 you installed earlier (remember the thing that told you there were ‘manual steps’ to complete – yeah, that!) will keep suppressing future authentication challenges and Outlook will work “just like it normally does” – yeah, the devilishly charming IT guy did promise his customer that assurance, the cocky SOB that he is, and it looks like he’s gonna get away with it too!

All in all, by now you should be connected to the sexy lovable cloud. Now he must do some more dirty tricks like cleaning up NK2 files, importing PSTs and making new signatures – these little tidbits really do go down well with the customer.

Enjoy!

So you’ve taken the plunge and bought yourself a Mac. Welcome to the future my child, where computers rarely break, viruses are for the other guy and everything is beautiful. But wait, you work for a company who’s head is stuck in the digital sand? They still use Windows for their accounting software or legacy applications? You’ve tried to get the IT manager to help you setup your mail on your Mac but he’s totally dumb? Well, if you want, recommend me to your boss. Alternatively, you can do without the hassle of getting all worked up about your inept IT manager and your company’s unwillingness to embrace change, by installing Windows on your Mac.

What’s that you say? Windows on a Mac? Well as blasphemous as it sounds, it’s very do-able and there’s loads of ways to do it. Right out of the box, your new Mac comes with Apple-produced software to help you do this, called ‘BootCamp’. This will walk you through how to install a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows XP, Vista or 7 side-by-side with your OS X installation. This is great as it de-marks your OS X life and your hideous Windows life.

The problem with BootCamp though is that while it’s probably the fastest way to run Windows on your Mac, it’s completely separate from your Mac, for all intents and purposes. A better way is to use a virtualization product to achieve a good balance. There are a few notable variants out there offering this type of technology – which basically installs Windows on top of OS X. If you think about it this way, it’s the same almost as opening another application from your dock – except it’s Windows. Parallels and VMWare are among the most popular software distributors for Mac-based virtualization. They’re lovely products, but they cost money. Instead, Sun Microsystems which is now owned by Oracle have a product called ‘VirtualBox‘. Like almost all open-source software, VirtualBox has a hideous website, but a brilliant product behind it all. You will of course need to bring to the party a genuine copy of Microsoft Windows in whatever variety you choose. Don’t be tempted to get any other source. If you’re lucky enough to be in the US, buy your copy from BestBuy or even the lauded Windows Store. Outside the US, see if your local IT house can supply you with a DVD version – most have them but prices are hideously fluid.

Once you’ve got the legitimate stuff out of the way, it’s time to download VirtualBox. Installation is fairly simple too. Once complete, fire up the software and start the wizard that helps you install your copy of Windows on your Mac. Once installed, do all the updates and be sure to install a reputable anti-virus software client – I recommend Avast or AVG. Remember, just because you have a Mac running underneath doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable to attack – anything that runs Windows is fair game for viruses and malware.

If you’re having trouble installing, hit up YouTube for some helpful videos here (no point in re-inventing the wheel on this one folks – some guys have already nailed that puppy).

My advice after this is to use the Windows platform as little as possible. For the simple reason that you’ve taken the time and money to buy a Mac, it doesn’t make sense to use anything other than Mac. It’s really only for some legacy applications that don’t yet run on Mac – and probably never will as most people head down the route of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based web apps.

Also, it’s worth noting that this will not work on PowerPC-based Macs. So if your Mac has a G4, G5 or G3 chip – you’re outta luck buddy!

One of the things that bugged me for years with TextEdit on the Mac was that it used Rich Text Formatting (RTF) instead of plain-old plain text. At work I’m forced to use Windows PCs because Irish people in business are sticklers for tradition. So every day, I use Notepad.exe. I love it. I use it for taking notes, washing text (i.e. removing the formatting before I format it), coding, configuration changes, HTML editing and all sorts of techy-uses. But Mac has a more powerful version in TextEdit.app. Trouble is, I hate the default RTF format. But a while back I found you can turn TextEdit into Notepad with a few simple clicks. Here’s how!:

• Open TextEdit (I keep it in my Dock, but it’s in your Applications folder too)
• Hit TextEdit > Preferences
• Change the Format from ‘Rich Text’ to ‘Plain Text’
• Press OK

That’s it! Enjoy.

– This post was originally written for my Posterous here

So you’ve deployed Microsoft Office 365, and are retaining the admin account for your own use so you can better manage the deployment into the future. You’ve gotten over the fact that you have a more complicated username than your staff, and the fact that it can be tricky setting up a mobile device to sync with Office 365 because of the combination of your different username and the email address you have.

Now you want to change your admin password. If like me, you set all the users (in a fresh deployment) to have the same password, you want yours to be different, yeah? Of course you do. But unlike the other users, you cannot ‘reset’ your password (because you’re the administrator of the domain). So what do you do?

Well, that link at the top right hand corner of your personal portal is the key. Visit the website and log in with your hideous login details. Hit the ‘My Profile’ link at the top right hand corner of the screen and beside your name on the next screen you’ll see the ‘Change my password’ link. That’s the ticket!

Viruses and their modern-day menacing equivalents called ‘malware’ are the among the top 5 reasons for the loss of productivity to businesses and enterprises around the world today. These troublesome bots wreak havoc with computers, notebooks, mobile devices and servers by encouraging users by any and all means to part with their precious valuable data – more often today, by getting the user to actively hand over their credit card details.

Today, viruses and malware have reached into the more popular areas of the internet. It used to be the case that viruses and malware would infect machines who were pirating software or illegally downloading music. Today, these parasites of the modern age, infect machines by ‘hooking’ users into doing something that causes them to install on the user’s computer and then carry out their programmed tasks. Most variants of these that I see come from unwitting users clicking on malicious links sent through social networking sites; predominately Facebook.

There is no real cure for this in terms of anti-virus software or anti-malware devices. The real cure, is education. But how do you educate people against something that is constantly evolving? That’s what I have yet to find an answer for. Companies around the world spend billions of dollars each year into the marketing and development of products sold to customers who will inevitably infect their computers because of their apparent ignorance. These anti-virus software programs can only prevent against passive threats. If a user deliberately tries to do something that the software doesn’t pay heed to, the machine becomes infected.

So you’ve got an infected machine – what do you do? Well at this stage, it’s too late to go and buy anti-virus software or even to download tools to solve this problem; the viruses will simply hide themselves and evade detection. The only course of action, is to use another machine or operating system to clear down where the viruses most likely infect. PC repair shops use sterile machines for this – a computer with nothing on it except anti-virus tools. The strategy is simple; remove the infected hard disk from the affected machine, attach it to the sterile computer and begin an series of exhaustive scans to remove the infection.

But this is slow and laborious work. Most new notebooks today are designed to make it difficult to remove the hard disk – as these devices are now being seen as one-use devices designed to be ‘thrown away’ after a year or so. An example of this is the latest HP ProBook series of notebooks. Sure, you can remove the hard disk, but not without some pretty intensive take-apart procedures. Enter Linux.

Linux has been around almost as long as Microsoft has had an operating system. It comes in a bewildering array of ‘flavours’ which are all fundamentally the same at their core. Among the more popular of these flavours today is Ubuntu. Any of these Linux varieties however will do for the purposes of removing most of the infection in a quick and dirty way.

For this you’ll need an empty USB flash drive with more than 1GB of capacity. These things are pretty cheap and are a heck of a lot cheaper than getting your PC repaired professionally. You’ll also need another computer, just to do the initial setup. You could do this in advance with you existing computer and then keep the flash drive somewhere safe for the day you’ll need it. It goes without saying at this stage that this article is geared towards people who insist on using Microsoft Windows as their operating system. While Macs have seen an increase in malware attacks, Windows remains the most easily infected operating system today (short of Android).

So, first you need to set up your USB flash drive. You could use a CD also, but that wouldn’t be much use to repair a netbook with! Head on over to www.pendrivelinux.com and download their UNetInBoot software. They have all the clear instructions you should need to get that part done.

Now you have your “Linux on a Stick” drive, here’s where the fun begins. Boot your USB drive on the infected machine. Most modern PCs and notebooks have USB boot options today. For most Dell PCs, press the F12 button when you see the DELL screen after turning on your PC. For HPs, press F9. Your own computer manufacturer has a similar way of doing this – Google will tell you.

Boot into your Linux system from the USB key. What you’re effectively doing is running Linux from the USB key instead of booting Windows from your hard drive. Once you’ve booted into Linux (in this case I’m assuming you went with Ubuntu) head on up to ‘Places’ at the top and select your hard disk (usually the largest partitioned disk indicated in this menu). It should be worth noting at this stage that if you have an encrypted notebook or PC, you may as well stop now – you will NOT be able to do this with an encrypted disk!

What you’re basically looking for is the normal places bugs go. For most malware bugs, you’re going to want to dump out the temporary folders where they like to hide.

That out of the way, let’s get on with the show.

The first place you want to dump data out of is the Windows Temp folder. You’ll want to go into your

C:WindowsTemp 

directory, select all the files and press the ‘Delete’ key (or “Move to Trash” on the right-click or Edit menu).

Next, you’ll need to dump out your Internet Explorer Temporary Internet Files folders. Depending on the number of users you have, there could be many of these.

For Windows XP, you’ll want to head into the:

C:Documents and SettingsusernameLocal SettingsTemporary Internet FilesContent.IE5 

directory. Again, same procedure, select and delete all these files. Repeat this procedure for all the users you have set up on your PC.

For Windows Vista and Windows 7, that directory is at:

C:UsersusernameAppDataLocal

Lastly, you’re going to want to remove the contents of each individual user’s temporary folder.

Here are the locations for Windows XP:

C:Documents and SettingsusernameLocal SettingsTemp 

and Windows Vista/7:

C:UsersusernameAppDataLocalTempTemporary Internet Files

Once you have dumped out these folders (be sure to just delete the contents of these folders, not the actual ‘Temp’ or ‘Content.IE5′ folders!), you must empty the trash can. In Ubuntu, on the left hand side of the screen, you’ll see the ‘Trash’ can. Simply right-click it and select ‘Empty Trash’. This will take some time, so wait for it to complete.

After emptying the trash, you can now return to Windows. Shut down your Ubuntu Linux system (top right hand side of the screen) and remove your flash drive when you’re prompted to.

At this stage, your computer is more responsive. Now you can take the next steps of downloading some tools to finish the job. I recommend using MalwareBytes or SuperAntiSpyware for this last leg. Of course, this isn’t a one-stop solution and depending on the ferocity of the infection, what you just did may not get you to a position to download such tools. For these types of infections, you may be as well to just back up your data (again you could use the Linux system to safely do this) and just recover your PC with the factory discs or image stored on your computer (Google will point you in the right direction).

Hopefully that helped a little.

So you’ve been handed the task to set up a new phone system for your office or a client. You’ve battled through the fact that Cisco products come with no instructions, managed to get all the phones to ‘talk’ to each other, and are now ready to send them to their new homes where a mixture of bacteria-ridden hands and earwax will forever be their comfort. But you’d like to make an impression with these new-fangled phones. You want to put a wallpaper on these puppies so you can be sure people spot that this isn’t just another Panasonic Hybrid piece-o’-crap.

Wallpapers are the answer. But, like so many things Cisco, you get sweet f-all in the line of instructions, apart from complicated documents written by the world’s worst technical writers from the world’s most un-navigable website; Cisco.com.

Luckily, there is a way to do this without all the complicated waffle. You’ll need some kind of graphics package of course, and you need something to create PNG files, so I’d recommend Adobe Fireworks or something similar.. You’re gonna be making two PNGs per wallpaper (or more if you have differing models of phones!) – one is a thumbnail, the other is the actual wallpaper.

Here are some sizing guidelines. The problem is that almost every Cisco IP phone has a different requirement. It would literally be just too damn easy if they all read the same file. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on the 7970 and 7940 series of phones as they’re the more popular ones out there.

Here’s a handy table from here:

So once you’ve whipped up your images (you should have figured out which phones can display colour images and which can’t at this stage!), it’s time to send them into your IP PBX. There’s a free tool you can use called ‘TFTPD’ available here. But where should you put them? Well, some versions of CCME (Cisco CallManager Express) put these in different places. Of course, if you’re setting up a new system, the locations above will be where they go. But of course, you might be trying to do this to a creaky old version of CCME. I’ve found the best way to see where exactly to put these wallpapers for each phone is to open up a telnet, SSH or Console connection to your Cisco box and do the following:

# terminal monitor
# debug tftp events

Now try to select a wallpaper from the phone, and you’ll see from your debug where the phone is looking. That’s your location. So TFTP up your wallpapers as follows:

# copy tftp flash:/Desktops/320x216x16/

assuming that’s the wallpaper you want to upload. Match the directory according to what came out of the debug session earlier. Follow the on-screen instructions for the location of the TFTP server (see the TFTPD window if that’s what you’re using) and upload the files.

Now you’ll need to edit the file that controls these pesky wallpapers. This file is called ‘List.xml’ and it’s located in those /Desktops/ directory. If you run the following command you’ll see the entire contents of the flash disk:

# show flash:

You should copy this file down, by doing the reverse of the above command (assuming the List.xml file is in the same directory):

# copy flash:/Desktops/320x216x16/List.xml tftp

Edit this file in Notepad or something low-key. It should look similar to this:

<CiscoIPPhoneImageList>

<ImageItem Image="TFTP:Desktops/320x216x16/TN-velara.png"
URL="TFTP:Desktops/320x216x16/velara.png"/>
</CiscoIPPhoneImageList>

So this is fairly straightforward. The ‘TN-velara.png’ is your thumbnail file, and the ‘velara.png’ is your actual wallpaper. You could also remove all the default Cisco wallpaper entries from this file as they’re total crap anyway and it stops users changing the wallpaper from the delicious one you’re gonna make.

Once you’ve edited the file, upload it back to where it came from, and test to see if you can change that wallpaper.

Make sure that file however is being served up to the phones. Chances are if you managed to get this far without a hitch, it’s being served, but just in case make sure the following line is in your running config

tftp-server flash:/Desktops/320x216x16/velara.png
tftp-server flash:/Desktops/320x216x16/List.xml

again making sure the right directories are set for your images.

Now, for some caveats; This isn’t a one-for-all solution. Most Cisco IP systems I’ve worked on have required a little more trickery to get things going, but I’m fairly confident that the above should get you going and headed in the right direction. Note that if you’re using Cisco CME version 8.1 on any of the SBCS products like the UC560, there is a bug in that software which will only allow you to change one type of phone at a time. This is because only one ‘List.xml’ file can be served at a time. This bug is annoying, but little has been written about it. Luckily for you, I’ve contributed to UC500.com on that issue, here.

Hopefully that all got working for you

So you’ve started to sink your teeth into Office 365 and you miss the administrative functions of Microsoft Exchange 2010 which is at the back end of your new ‘cloud’ based email service (and before I get slaughtered, yes I know Office 365 is more than just ‘email’ but that’s what it’ll inevitably be most popular for). One thing you’ve noticed is those shared mailboxes your company loves so much are now seemingly impossible to create. Well, fear not for others have found the methods, and I’m here to back up the evidence as it does indeed work.

You’ll need to flex those finger muscles a bit for the copy and pasting you’ll be doing and hopefully in 4-5 minutes you’ll be done. You will also need to get Windows Powershell. Now this is Microsoft’s attempt at making DOS more like a Linux terminal, and it’s pretty good so far. Not as simple as DOS though, so be careful. As far as I reckon, you’ll need Windows 7 for this or Windows Server 2008 R2 (which is basically Windows 7). Yes you can do this with Windows Vista, but are you seriously that much of a glutton for punishment that you’re still using that abomination of an operating system?!

First thing’s first. Make sure you’ve created your users, and of course, the group containing those users you want to actually access the shared mailboxes in the first place! Do this under your Outlook section within Office 365 by going to ‘Options’. Then on the left, navigate to ‘Groups’ and then add your group from there. Make sure you remember what you call the group – and it’s useful to just name the group ‘somethingDG’ so you can reference it below! Next, it’s Powershell!

Powershell is pre-installed with Windows 7. It’s in the Start > Programs > Accessories > Windows Powershell section. Fire her up and follow these instructions which I lifted from a number of sources to make it easier. The biggest help of all was Mike Pfeiffer’s Blog though.

NOTE: If like me the first time you used Powershell on your own computer was to do this task, you’ll need to allow your machine to run scripts locally. This is a potential security risk (yada yada) but you’ll need to first do this:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted

Once you’ve done this, you’re good to go.

Start by signing into Office 365. For this you’ll obviously need the administrator credentials for the new instance of Office 365. You’ll now be prompted for those all important logon credentials. Be sure you log in correctly! Once logged in, you will be redirected to where your instance of Office 365 is. For this, do the following:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Next you need to download those scripts from Office 365 that allow you to make all these nice things happen where the GUI doesn’t let you.

Import-PSSession $Session

This will take a few seconds to complete and you should see feedback like the here:

Now the rest is fairly simple. Open up Notepad, and copy the following scripts into the wonderful little application. You’ll need to do some configuring for your own needs.

New-Mailbox -Name "Your Mailbox Name" -Alias mailboxalias -Shared

Set-Mailbox mailboxalias -ProhibitSendReceiveQuota 5GB -ProhibitSendQuota 4.75GB -IssueWarningQuota 4.5GB

Add-MailboxPermission "Your Mailbox Name" -User yourdistributiongroupDG -AccessRights FullAccess

Add-RecipientPermission "Your Mailbox Name" -Trustee yourdistributiongroupDG -AccessRights SendAs

Replace the values for “Your Mailbox Name” as the name of the mailbox. The ‘mailboxalias’ is obviously the alias of the mailbox – so no spaces!! And you’ll see the references to that Distribution Group you made earlier (you did remember to do that, didn’t you!?). You can also change the limits if you want, but for a shared mailbox, 5GB of space should be fine!

Once this is done, that’s basically it.

To connect the users in the Distribution Group to the mailbox, simple right-click their name on the left hand side of the Outlook screen and select ‘Open Other Inbox’.

You might also want to edit this user in the GUI to add a mailbox license so that people can actually log into the box. But if your licenses are precious, just use them as mounted inboxes.

Phew! That was heavy, man.