RobPlatt.com

I had a client that accidentally installed Incredimail. After awhile of using it, he decided he didn’t like it. Who can blame him right?

I looked around online for various ways to export his mail out of Incredimail, so he could use it in Outlook, Outlook Express, or now, Windows Live Mail. No such luck. He didn’t think it was right to have the shell out money for products that may or may not work, the free options didn’t work on the newer version of Incredimail, and of course – Incredimail won’t give you that option. So he stuck with it in hopes that some way would surface… He didn’t want to lose the email that had built up in the client.

This has been an on going problem for almost a year. Every few months we’ve checked to see if someone came up with a solution. Finally, someone did.

Thank you ReynardWare for making incredimail-converter!

Running the converter couldn’t be easier. It took about 20 minutes to export all of his email and attachments from Incredimail, into the Microsoft .eml format. Which we simply drug into Windows Live Mail.

Visit his blog and show him support!

Had this happen at a clients today…

Multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user, using more than one user name, are not allowed.

I tried “net use * /d”… I checked DNS settings… that didn’t help.

In my case, my client had the same administrator:password login, both on the local machine, and as the domain account. So, even while the computer was disjoined from the domain, the local admin account had rights to the server. This defeated using the server credentials when trying to add the computer to the domain. Changing the local administrator password to something else solved the problem.

Having trouble logging into a new account, from XP, over wireless? Did you make sure the wireless zero config was controlling the wireless connection? Can you ping the computer from a remote desktop while it’s at the login screen?

Try this…

Log on with an already trusted account. Lock the computer. Try to unlock the computer with the new account. It should cache the login credentials and let you log in. Read on for more help with this problem.

I used to encode my videos with Flix Pro, using the VP6 codec. While this worked, it wasn’t easy to batch process

I hunted all over the web for a perfect solution for what I wanted to do. What many people wanted to do. Now I can easily convert my videos to h.264 in a flv or mp4 container using only ffmpeg. If I use flv, I can inject the metadata to produce seekable media files, and stream with xmoov/jwplayer. All from the command line. My batch file is easily enough to understand. It creates a high quality flv file, injects metadata, and produces a single frame thumbnail. Adjust the dimensions, framerate, audio/video bitrates for your needs.

… and I’m going to share it with you. Here you go.

From Sempai.inFo – http://411.sempai.info/?p=63

My buddy was going to check out a website on his phone (url wont be disclosed) when he opened up the default “Internet” app and cleared out the address bar and typed “http://www.re” with no quotes, the auto complete came up as http://www.redtube.com this is not a site he has ever been too on his phone.. To confirm this wasn’t just by chance I grabbed my phone and attempted to recreate the issue.. it did the same thing on mine..

For the record, it doesn’t appear on my default browser, nor xScope, using the BuglessBeast rom on my Droid… Still…. be cautious out there.

Trying to install SQL Management Tools on my machine threw an error related to Visual Studio 2008 not having SP1.

I installed Sp1… Same error.

I tried uninstalling Visual Studio. It threw up on registry errors, office errors, etc. I removed office, fixed the registry errors – still no luck.

I forcefully removed Visual Studio using Perfect Uninstaller. Still no luck installeding SQL Management Studio.

Then I stumbled across this page: http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2008/08/11/sql-server-2008-visual-studio-2008-sp1-and-net-framework-3-5-sp1-explained.aspx

This page may help too: http://www.galcho.com/Blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=4afabe28-002a-409b-9076-f7f6ee6bd55e

Removing the registry keys described in the article did the trick. Now lets hope I can get Visual Studio and Office back on here 🙂

As much as I love Diskeeper, it’s expensive. The windows defragmenter in Vista/7/Server 2008 is better than earlier versions. The problem, however, is that we still have some Server 2003 OS’s in our environment.

Two products that I tested were “Free Disk Defrag” from The Flexomizer, and UltraDefrag. While the first worked OK, there was no 64 bit support. UltraDefrag does.

UltraDefrag has a simple GUI and a command-line interface. It also has another option besides defrag called optimize. Optimize piles your defragmented data towards the front of your drive, leaving your white-space at the end.

Need to run a piece of software with another user account without having to supply that information each time?

Steel RunAs has you covered.

Steel RunAs helps you in executing commands or applications which run properly when run only with administrator privileges without having to give the user full rights to his machine.

Steel RunAs outputs a single executable (“.exe”) and does not need any installation in the target machine. Steel RunAs also doesn’t need any extension through command line. The end user can simply double click to execute the destined program with alternate credentials.

Strong encryption standards keep the embeded credentials safe and secure.

http://www.steelsonic.com/steelrunas.htm

Lets start out with our problem.

We have many desktops here at the office, and we want the user data replicated to the server so it’s included in the backups (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Favorites, etc).

We used to use roaming profiles. Though the users were not normally allowed to roam from machine to machine. The upside was, it was easy to deploy a new machine to a user, and of course, we had a copy of their files on the server if their computer failed at any time. The downside, roaming profiles can cause logon/logoff events to take longer. Permissions can get screwed up, which will prevent the profile from synchronizing. Ever have a user complain that they deleted icons on their desktop just to have them magically reappear when they rebooted? Yea… So have we.

We ditched roaming profiles in favor of folder redirection in Vista/7. The upside, files are on the server and included in backup. The downside, you are now working only off the server. There are obvious delays when working with large files/projects.

That being said… Folder redirection with offline files works well for mobile users. As they are disconnected from the network the majority of the time. Therefore, they are working locally. When they connect, files sync, and are backed up. This was not a viable solution for desktop users on our LAN.

The solution? RoboCopy. It’s fast, free, simple to script, and can work with Volume Snapshots (vshadow). I tried a few others, but wanted a simple script that would mirror changed files, periodically, throughout the day.

This following document, I found to be a great starting point.

http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/f6972828-1e81-4cd4-ae0c-36196a82ed25/workstation-open-file-bac.aspx

I downloaded RoboCopy, familiarized myself with the command line parameters,  and wrote a simple script to copy some folders to my server.

Then I worked on implementing vshadow. It was a pain at first. Namely due to the fact that no single exe will work on all platforms. Theres one for 2003/xp, theres two for vista/7/2008 (x86/x64).

I downloaded the Volume Shadow Copy Service SDK 7.2, and started digging into it.

You’ll find the files you need in \Program Files\Microsoft\VSSSDK72\TestApps\vshadow\bin\… I referenced this article, which helped.

I wrote a script to mount a new snapshot, call my robocopy script, then delete the mount point. It errored on “‘dosdev’ is not recognized as an internal or external command“. Seems I’m missing another file. A quick google, and I picked dosdev up here.

Now I can take a snapshot, and mirror user directories to their folders on the server. =)

Here are the files I used.

Hope this helps someone.

p.s. the image, top-right, is a mozy.com t-shirt. i used to use mozyhome. however a good program, it doesn’t apply to this article 😉

WebEx and GoToMeeting cost $$. Teamviewer is free, but only for personal use….

How would you like a dynamically compiled single-click VNC, with no GUI, using a repeater, for free?

First off, let’s answer some questions… What is single-click? What is a repeater?

UltraVNC Single-Click is a mini UltraVNC Server that can be customized and preconfigured for download by a Customer. UltraVNC SC does not require installation and does not make use of the registry. The customer only have to download the little executable and Click to make a connection. The connection is initiated by the server, to allow easy access thru customers firewall.

Hmm, ok, and the repeater?

http://www.uvnc.com/addons/repeater.html
Basically allows you to bypass firewalls using a preconfigured server.

continue reading…