Make your own Engrish

We’ve all seen Engrish.com where Japanese or other countries have some Epic Fails when it comes to English translations. Like the Computer Gaming system “Game in Home Computer. Lets Play Game. Everybody gets off.” or the plastic bag that says “Keep the reach out of children. Do not put the plastic bag in your head to prevent from suffocating.” Now I know that Engrish.com has a Create your own Engrish. But all it does is tell you to go to babblefish and do it all manually. Who wants to do things manually these days? Not me that’s for sure. So I came across Translation Party. At Translation Party you just type in any English Phrase and click the button and watch it go. For example it took the phrase You’re about to leave? and turned it into...

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Firebug in IE or on the Go

Yes folks. One of the best Add-Ons for Firefox has an On The Go version. That is Firebug Lite!!! So I’ve actually known about this for quite some time but I’m just finally now getting around to talking about it. The nice thing about Firebug Lite is that you can just set a bookmarklet in any browser and bam, you got Firebug. They have tested this in IE, Opera and Safari. Now of course it’s not as good as the original Firefox Add-On so by no means is this meant to be a replacement, but does help especially for any of you that are forced to be stuck on IE6 or to making sure that websites still look good in IE6 this is a must. With some of the latest updates to Firebug Lite it can now support all of the basic commands of Firebug. So all those...

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Outlook 2007 Search Stopped Working. Now What?

I love when you make a change on the network, then immediately afterward every little problem comes up and people want to know if it was because of the change you did. Sometimes it most definitely is, but other times it is completely unrelated. I just finished a project with Exchange 2007, and right afterward , amazingly, one of our executives lost his ability to search using Outlook 2007. Most often, this is caused when an Office 2003 product, like Front page for instance, gets installed after Office 2007. The 2003 Office install breaks the Windows desktop search component that Outlook 2007 uses. So how do you fix it when you need both Office 2007, and the one 2003 Office product? Actually, it is pretty easy, just time consuming. First, close out of all Office Applications Do a repair...

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Free/Busy Not Working Exchange 2007

Here we go again with another Microsoft Exchange 2007 piece. Luckily I am finished with my Exchange 2007 project, so I can get back to wrting a little. Since Exchange 2007 took some getting used to, I thought I would share with you some of the stuff I discovered along the way. One problem we had was that after doing our setup, users could not access Free/Busy information from Outlook 2007. If they logged into OWA (Outlook Web Access) they could see it fine. For this type of issue there are two things you can check. I will start with the easiest. If your Outlook 2007 users cannot view Free/Busy information, try the following on your Microsoft Exchange 2007 server: Go to Start > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services...

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Where is the Startup Folder in Windows 7?

Now that Windows 7 is out on the market, and the Microsoft marketing machine is in full gear, people are starting to go out and purchase their Windows 7 upgrades to finally release them from the oppression that is Windows Vista, or they finally want to upgrade now that their is a decent replacement for Windows XP. With the upgrade will come a few changes, so getting used to your new operating system will require a little bit of a learning curve. One item that Windows XP users will have to understand is the location of the Startup folder in Windows 7. For you Vista veterans, you can go about your day, because it is in the same place in Vista as Windows 7. For you XP folks, who haven’t played with Vista or Windows 7 Beta, I’ll give you the low...

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The Exchange 2007 Autodiscover Song

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have been doing a lot of work and research with Exchange 2007 recently. I managed to get all of our outstanding issues resolved, which is a huge load off my shoulders. I hope to share with you some of the stuff I figured out in future posts when i have some time to write them up.In the mean time, lets talk about Autodiscover. Autodiscover is a new feature to Exchange 2007 that allows clients to automatically figure out their settings. It also helps clients to figure out how to get information like Offline Address Books, where to go for out of office information etc. It is so important that one Exchange developer decided to write a song about it. Here it is, the Autodiscover Song!Chorus: >>Autodiscover>>There...

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Exchange 2007: Offline Address Book Not Moving from ExchangeOAB to OAB

Hi all, once again sorry for not updating as regularly as I should. This new job of mine keeps me really, really busy. One of the things I am working on now is migrating users from one Exchange 2007 server to another. During this process I have had to troubleshoot many different things. Hopefully I can find time to write about all of the things I discovered in later posts, but in this post I will talk about something I noticed with the offline address book. My problem was that when I generated a new address book on the new server the folder with the GUID name wasn’t being created in my \Exchange Server\Client Access\OAB directory. If your users use Outlook 2007, then they download the updated address book from the web, from that directory. If that directory isn’t getting populated by Exchange,...

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Exchange 2003 Error Event ID 8063 From MSExchangeAL

I recently completed a project where I had to upgrade all of the domain controllers on one of the Active Directory domains I manage to Windows Server 2008 and raise the functional level to Windows 2008 as well. In order to do that you can either do in place upgrades on all of the domain controllers, or build new ones and transfer all the FSMO roles to them. We went with the later. We decided to build all new from scratch because it is always better to go with a clean install than do an in place upgrade, and it also gave us the opportunity to clean up the naming conventions of the old domain controllers. (By that I mean, there wasn’t a naming convention in place.) The upgrade went pretty smooth, with a couple of exceptions. One, a few Sharepoint...

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How To Setup A SSTP VPN in Windows 2008

I was given the task at my company to come up with a reliable, and most importantly secure VPN solution that didn’t require the use of third party agents. Currently they have a couple of VPN solutions in place. One is the somewhat secure PPTP VPN, and the more secure Cisco VPN with IPSEC. We needed something with the same ease of use as PPTP, but with the reliable security of IPSEC. Enter SSTP, or Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol. It is one of the “new Hotness” VPN technologies from Microsoft. Actually, the newest hotness is DirectAccess, but unless you are willing to start setting up for IPv6, you might want to go with the next best thing…SSTP. SSTP has all the ease of setup that PPTP does, but with the warm blanket of security that SSL provides. According...

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Installing IE6, IE7 or IE8 on any OS (Windows 7, OS X or Ubuntu)

Ok, so this isn’t exactly installing IE6 natively on Windows 7, OS X or Linux but it’s probably a better solution than actually trying to run IE6 natively on Windows 7, OS X or Linux. First things first. Go to: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en Download your preferred package IE6-XPSP3.EXE, IE7-XPSP3.EXE or IE8-XPSP3.EXE. So you’re prob thinking, “umm… dude, OS X and Linux don’t run EXE files dumbass!!” Well you’re pretty much right. Luckily these are really just Zip files so swap out the .exe for .zip or just extract the exe file itself. Extraction Windows: Just run the exe file and install it wherever. Ubuntu: unrar it using unrar e IE6-XPSP3.EXE XP_SP3_IE6/ in the console OS X: load the file using Zipeg...

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Goodbye Bauer-Puntu. Hello Open Bauer-Power!

A few months ago, not long after the release of Ubuntu 9.04, I released my 3rd installment of the mildly popular Bauer-Puntu 9.04. In my announcement for that, I noted that 9.04 may be the last version. I am here to tell you that 9.04 will indeed be the last version. It is simply too much of a pain to create an maintain. That doesn’t mean the end of Bauer-Power slightly customized Linux goodness is going away though. No, it will just be different. The next version of Bauer-Power Linux will be called Open Bauer-Power, and will be based on OpenSUSE 11.1! I wanted to call it Bauer-Puse, but a friend of mine pointed out how that may actually sound vulgar and offend some people. After thinking about it, I think my friend may be correct. Why is...

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Error Backing Up Shadow Copy and System State in Backup Exec 12.5

I have been working hard on setting up a new Backup Exec 12.5 server. On of the tedious parts is adding new servers to backup selection lists. Want to know what is more tedious though? When you go to select System State and Shadow Copy Components backups and you get an error!Man that is frustrating because to fix it requires a registry hack, and a reboot of the server. Do you know what that means? After hours or maintenance window work. Both of which means late nights. Not so bad if you get paid overtime, but it sucks if you are strictly salary.Anyhoo, enough whining about after hours work. I mean, it goes with the territory right? So what is the error you see? I’m sure there are others, but the ones I’ve been seeing lately say:ErrorAn error...

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