Just a quick heads up, but Spam Assassin (which we use for filtering here at Jephens) has a mis-formed filtering rule which considers 2010 to be a "grossly in the future" and therefore can't be a valid date.

This might have been true in Y2K, but in 2010, we're not so gross.

If you use ESVA like we do, there's a simple enough fix which is outlined in the ESVA Forums.

Otherwise, you'll need to fix your local.cf rules or edit the 72_active.cf file.

Further details can be found at Mike Cardwell's blog: SpamAssassin 2010 bug.

I keep coming up against this, and I keep forgetting it, so I figured I'd write it down here for all of our benefit.

Exchange 2003 allowed us to easily mail enable public folders, so something sent to info@domain.invalid would go to a public folder where any number of staff could monitor the mailbox.

However, by default, the mail is stored in the Public Folder as a NOTE and not an E-MAIL (for the geeks in the audience IPM.POST vs. IPM.NOTE)

To make the public folder store incoming mail as emails, we need to make a quick registry change. This is all outlined in MS KB 817809.

Go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeIS\<ServerName>\Public-<GUID>

And create (or edit) the key:

Value name: Incoming defaults to IPM.Note
Value type: DWORD
Value data: 1

Setting the value to 1 (true) stores things as IPM.NOTE (which is what we want). Setting the value to 0 sets it back to saving things as a post.

A client has an oldish Dell Dimension 8400 with an Intel RAID card that requires you to "Press F6 to add Storage Drivers" when trying to repair Windows. This also means that UBCD4Win (my preferred repair tool) also doesn't recognize the drives.

Happily, Dell has a set of the drivers available.

Sadly, they're part of a floppy image.

Grrr!

Enter Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1, a cool piece of shareware that can be glommed from http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

This operates along the same line as Microsoft's Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP, which mounts an ISO image and has it appear as a drive letter.

VFD does the same thing, it mounts an image file (or just creates a small chunk of RAM and treats it like a blank floppy) and you assign it a drive letter.

I loaded the application up -- it's pretty self-explanatory -- assigned to Drive B: and then launched Dell's Floppy making utility, told it to write to Drive B and bingo! I had my extracted files.

From there, it was trivial to copy them to the appropriate install media and we were off to the races.

(I finally searched for a virtual solution, when the one floppy disk I could find was throwing errors. How happy are we that those things have (mostly) gone the way of the dinosaur?)

There are times when Microsoft makes me wonder. You develop this cool technology, ClearType, which helps reduce eyestrain, you put checkboxes all over the Remote desktop client allowing me to choose to use or not use it, you have it active in the shell... but then you casually ignore it and withhold it from me. What gives?

Oh, a KB article sheds some light:

The option to enable theFont smoothing feature is not available in the version of RDC that was released with Windows Server 2003. By default, Windows Server 2003 disables theFont smoothing feature in all remote connections. These connections include the connections that are established through RDC 6.0.

Happily, MS's dictatorship is matched only by its benevolence, because there's a "hotfix" available for this problem:

KB946633:The "Font smoothing" feature has no effect in Windows Server 2003 terminal sessions

It kinda cracks me up...

"We'll put the feature in."

"But it doesn't work. We should disable the checkboxes"

"Why would we do that?"

I bring this up because we just migrated a client over to a terminal server environment, and the number one complaint was "My fonts aren't fuzzy!"

Since I actually prefer the crispness of an LCD display, I didn't really notice, or care, but since I wasn't signing the check, I did my best to comply. I used bing to google the issue, and found the hotfix.

Of course, since it's a hotfix, it requires a reboot... so here I am at 5:30 AM, having just rebooted the server.

This hotfix is available via draconian download -- you fill out a form, they send an email with the link - however, they put the link in parentheses, so Outlook botches the conversion and breaks the link, resulting in the need for you to copy and paste the URL into your browser. From there, it's a Start > Next > Finish install and a reboot seals the deal.

As a side note: ClearType increases the bandwidth requirements, and is only available if you're running in "High Bandwidth" mode in the RDP 6.0 (or better) client. It also needs to be turned on in the desktop session.

In the RDP client:

Click Options > Experience tab

The check off the "font smoothing" box.

On the Windows 2003 Desktop:

Right click on the desktop > Properties >Appearance tab > Effects button

That should do it!

A client came to us with an interesting problem -- his laptop was removed from his company's domain and his documents were no longer available to him. He could see the mapped drive, and the folders and files, but when he tried to launch any of the files, he got an "Access Denied" error.

So, offline files had his documents stored locally, but his lack of network credentials was keeping us from them.

While massively inconvenient, this is how it should be. No credentials, no files. Downside, of course, was I couldn't get the documents copied to the local drive.

Windows 2003 Resource Kit to the rescue!

There's a utility, csccmd.exe which, as the name imples, allows you to work with the "client side cache" (the pre-release name for Offline Files). The most recent version of the csccmd.exe has an option to EXTRACT files from the client side cache and put them on the local drive somewhere.

So, I grabbed the Windows 2003 Resource Kit, downloaded it, installed it,and ran csccmd.exe and it didn't work.

Wha?

Seems there is a NEWER version of csccmd.exe that is only available (officially) from MS Product Support Services (PSS). (Unofficially, use bing to google csccmd.exe 1.1) which does the job. I downloaded it and copied it into c:\windows (just to avoid path issues).

(I assume it's only available from PSS because it totally bypasses the security issue.)

So, logged in as an administrator, I created a temporary folderand opened a command prompt (do I show my age by insisting on calling it a DOS window?) and typed:

csccmd.exe /extract:\\server\share /target:c:\temp\user /recurse

Ta-da!

The files copied, rights of the folder they were copied into prevails (which is to say that the ACL information was not extracted as well) and he's happy because he has his documents back.