Alright everyone, I finally had some time to get back on this project and DWL Pro Beta 1 is ready. I am going to be charging $25 for this in the future, but need beta testers, so the first five people to let me know they want to help out will get it for free in exchange for helping me find any bugs that might be remaining.

Update:  The beta is now closed.  The full release will be available for purchase shortly.

To recap, the DWL Pro does the following over the standard DWL that I posted last year…

- Service Tag lookup on remote machines via WMI query.
- Lookup warranties on remote machines (one at a time) from the GUI.
- Alternate Credentials available in GUI.
- Command Line options:

o Lookup warranty on single service tag.
o Lookup warranty on single hostname.
o Bulk lookups of tags and machine names from import file.
o CSV output with customizable output fields.
o Direct output to SQL 2000, 2005, and 2008 databases (or SQL Express). This requires the sqlcmd.exe from MS, which is included in the “SQL Command Line Utilities” found about 1/3rd of the way down the page here.
o User-defined export/import fields for use with SQL.
o Support for Asset Tag retrieval if using hostnames.
o Support for Alternate credentials for use with hostnames.

After the initial release of DWL Pro I will be working on adding a network scanner to the feature set which will allow you to get warranties for an entire subnet at a time.

This is the first theme I have created for Android. It was created in Sweeter Home which is a kick ass new home replacement for the Android mobile OS. This theme takes inspiration from the HTC Sense UI, hence the name Senspired. I have also included what I believe to be a first in the Sweeter Home community – a screen dedicated to the car dock with enhanced functionality over the default Droid “car dock mode”. There are a few quirks to this theme that you need to know about if you are going to use it, so hit the jump for more…

First of all, this was created on a Motorola Droid, so it may not work on devices with lower resolution. Now that that is out of the way, on to some of the more tricky bits…

When creating the car home screens I ran into LOTS of trouble with errors from Sweeter Home saying that there was not enough memory to load my images. The only way I got around this was by splitting my main images up into 3 horizontal sections for the vertical orientation (one section for each column), and 5 vertical sections for the horizontal orientation (one section for each vertical pair of icons). In addition to this, I also saved the PNG’s in grayscale format since I was not using color anyway. Between these two changes things SIGNIFICANTLY sped up and actually made this theme usable on my Droid. I was afraid for a while there that I was just trying to do too much with this theme.

The second thing that needs to be pointed out is that those white icons you are pressing don’t really do anything at all. They are just pictures. I have created a custom tray on top of the images and dropped shortcuts for everything into that tray. I configured the icons to be 128×128 and set the tray to the free form icon layout so that I could place them where I needed to without issue. Once I had all the application icons as I wanted them (basically laying them right on top of their respective icon on the background image) I then went into the Icon properties for the custom tray and setup the icon blending so that the Alpha slider was all the way to the left. R=This basically equates to 100% transparency of the icons, or 0% opacity for you Photoshop people out there. So, the icons are there, you just can’t see them! If you want to change the apps I have selected then you’ll need to turn up alpha channel back up so that you can see what you’re doing.

I used Better Cut to create the Bluetooth shortcut – hopefully it is included with the distribution of this theme…not sure that it will be though.

Well, that’s all I can think of at this time of night. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Anyway, go here for more screenshots of Senspired.

1. With a third party utility shrink the windows partiton to the desired size.
2. Shut down the virtual machine
3. Next step is the use of the "lvreduce" command to get back the extra space. Make sure you leave a little room for overhead just in case. I usually go 1GB bigger than the partition size then resize again to fill the extra gig:

· in the shell of the host console type "lvm"

· then "lvdisplay" to display all the informations of your logical volumes. Find your logical volume, select and copy the LV Name associated

· then "lvreduce <LVName> –size 16G " (replace LV Name by the one you copied, just right click and paste. replace 16G with desired size)

4. Power on your VM and make sure windows starts correctly, verify disk partitions and disk sizes in disk management.
5. Run the command “xe-toolstack-restart”. I had to wait a few hours for the space to get freed up after running this command. If you reboot the host server it will be immediate and negates the need to run this command.

All of us have been tasked with this at one point or another and if you are using Dell equipment then there has never been an easy way to do this outside of going to the Dell website and performing the lookup one machine at a time.

Until now.

DWL is free to use and distribute, and will allow you to perform warranty lookups on your Dell systems without visiting the Dell support site. 

When you first launch DWL, it will automatically retrieve the Service Tag from the local machine.  Just press the Search button to lookup the warranty details, or replace the Service Tag with another one to lookup the details for another machine.

In the next few days I will be releasing DWL Pro for $25.00 USD, which contains the same GUI-based funcitonality seen here, plus the features below…

• Command-line interface, enabling a fully-scriptable solution
• Input File support
• Service Tag lookup for remote machines
• CSV output (with user defined options)
• Export results to MSSQL 2000+

In the mean time, you can download DWL here.

Update:  DWL Pro is in beta!  More info here.

Outlook was unable to recover some or all of the items in this folder. Make sure you have the required permissions to recover items in this folder and try again. If the problem persists contact your administrator.

It turns out that you can get around this error by recovering the folder via webmail.  Just use the following URL to show items in deleted item retention and restore from there…

http://<servername>/public/<path to parent folder>/?cmd=showdeleted&btnClose=1

Enter MSI Manager…

MSI Manager is a tool I have created with AutoIt that will allow you to connect to any machine, get a quick list of the software that has been assigned, and select what you want to have reinstalled. On the next reboot the machine will re-install the chosen apps automatically. Problem solved.

By the way, the keys that are being modified are located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Group Policy\AppMgmt.  There will be a key for each piece of software that has been assigned.  To force a reinstall, simply delete the associated key and then run gpupdate/force on the target computer.

Download: MSI Manager

Why would I need this?  Well, for one, if you plan to use SCP to access your SPLAT box you must have this enabled.  Other than that, typically you only enter the SPLAT box command line interface if you need to do something, not just for fun.  Any changes or commands you need to run outside of the ‘sysconfig’ or ‘cpconfig’ menu systems, requires you to be in Expert Mode.  You used to have to edit a file using ‘vi’ which isn’t the most user friendly editing program, but there is now a new method.  I recently found this and wanted to share it since it SO much easier than before.  Enjoy!

 To enter Expert mode automatically on each login, perform the following steps:

1. Enter Expert mode.
2. Run the ‘chsh -s /bin/tcsh admin’ command (to work in tsch).
   Run the ‘chsh -s /bin/bash admin’ command (to work in bash).

To revert back to the default login shell:

Run the ‘chsh -s /bin/cpshell admin’ command

Note: ‘admin’ is the user name in the above commands and can be substituted for any user name you have on the box.

I recently came across this error and it had us stumped for quite a while.  I found several articles online that didn’t quite identify it correctly or didn’t apply to my situation.  After digging around on the knowledge base of the firewall manufacture, Check Point in this case, I came across a real solution that worked.  It wasn’t easy to find, even on their site because the situation wasn’t the same, but I figured “what the heck, I’ll try it”, and it worked. 

The problem had to do with the default windowing size allowed through the firewall.  If you aren’t familiar, “windowing” is how TCP negotiates the transfer of data.  It is variable and starts out slow until it can negotiate an acceptable packet-to-acknowledgement rate for both parties.  For example, first we exchange packets by me giving  you one packet and you responding (acknowledging) that you received it.  Then we try say 10 packets to one, if that worked without corruption, we increase it.  So on and so forth until we get to a maximum agreeable rate that both of us are comfortable with and we get data transfered at a much higher speed.  All that to say this…

Check Point firewalls have a max windowing size of 10K by default.  This sometimes gives you the “Path is too deep” error, espescially when on a LAN going to a DMZ or some other interface on the firewall.  To fix it you will want to do the following:

To increase the window size, run the fw ctl set int fwtcpstr_max_window 65536 command.

Note: This command does not survive a reboot.

To make the command survive a reboot:

1. On Linux or SecurePlatform, edit the $FWDIR/boot/modules/fwkern.conf file using vi.
2. Set a parameter name to a value, e.g.,
   fwtcpstr_max_window=65536
3. Run the fw ctl get int fwtcpstr_max_window command to verify whether the new value is applied on the OS properly.

After the procedure completes, users should be able to successfully copy the files.

This is great for deleting spyware and viruses from your system if you know the name of the offending EXE.

HERE is a good summary of the PendingFileRenameOperations registry value,

and HERE is a freeware utility that adds an option to delete files on the next reboot to the right-click context menu.

Now go delete that bastard!

Big credit goes out to joshiieeii over at the AutoIt Script forums. I could have easily coded this myself, but his post HERE saved me most of the effort. Why reinvent the wheel anyway? Josh’s original script used some XML files and ExCmd to create your custom signatures and even pushed your signature out to OWA. The OWA support is more than I wanted though, and the XML approach was a bit tedious IMO, so I modified his script so that you basically create your html, rtf, and plain-text sigs as individual files and it modifies them for each user using the data stored in AD. This makes it much easier to go back and make changes to your signatures on the fly instead of having to dig back down into the script and XML documents to make a simple change. Once you have your signature templates setup, just configure a GPO to run the script at logon and it will silently create HTML, RTF, and plain-text signatures for each user.

I’d just like to interject here that AutoIt is a VERY powerful and little known scripting language which I have used to write all kinds of utilities in the past. I strongly recommend that you check it out if you have any interest in writing your own scripts and don’t want to mess with vbs or, god forbid, batch files.

So, THAT solves the problem of how to create the sigs, but how in the world do you push that change out to all your desktops? We’re talking about an Active Directory enabled environment here, so it makes most sense to leverage GPO’s for stuff like this. Unfortunately, the Outlook 2003 administrative template (OUTLK11.ADM) that Microsoft provides only gives you the option to disable signatures — what’s the point in THAT? So, MS didn’t provide us with a way to administratively set a default signature for Outlook, but as usual the lovely Sue Mosher has the answer for all things Outlook. Seriously, I cannot count the number of times I have been researching a problem only to have Sue come up with the answer. In this newsgroup post, Sue links to a small ADM file (contents below) that will allow us to set a default signature via GPO. I merged this into my existing OUTLK11.ADM file (just open it in notepad) so that the resulting “Signature” category looks like this:

CATEGORY “Signature”
POLICY “Disable signatures for new messages”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Disable signatures for new messages” CHECKBOX
                VALUENAME NewSignature
                VALUEON “”
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Disable signatures for replies and forwards”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Disable signatures for replies and forwards” CHECKBOX
                VALUENAME ReplySignature
                VALUEON “”
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Signature for new messages”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Signature for new messages” EDITTEXT
                VALUENAME NewSignature
                
    END PART
    END POLICY
POLICY “Signature for replies and forwards”
KEYNAME Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\MailSettings
    PART “Signature for replies and forwards” EDITTEXT
                VALUENAME ReplySignature     END PART
    END POLICY
END CATEGORY
END CATEGORY

Then I just added the ADM file to my policy and configured it to point to the name of the signature files I created using the script. For example, if the files generated by your script are mycompany.txt, mycompany.rtf, and mycompany.htm, then you would just use “mycompany” as your signature name when configuring the GPO. You can even use command-line variables here (%username% for example).  Note that you MUST have Office 2003 SP2 installed for this policy to work.

And that’s it! You now have a fully automated signature for all of your Outlook users based on the information in Active Directory and enforced by Group Policy! It doesn’t get any easier than that!

You can grab my version of the script here, and my modified OUTLK11.ADM file here.