Did you know that Microsoft have a page that lists out the end user license agreements for almost all of their products? Check this out here –http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/UseTerms/Default.aspx
Category Archives: Online Tools
Configuring the iPhone for Microsoft Online Services (BPOS)
With a bigger push towards Cloud based services, I have decided to put down a quick reference on how to configure the iPhone to work with Microsoft’s Onlince Services (BPOS).
The starting place is to read Microsoft’s Help and How to section – http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/914df3cf-0135-46a7-a975-fd767b6d9a96.htm
- On the iPhone, go to Settings> Mail Contacts, Calendar> Add Account…> Microsoft Exchange
- Fill in the relevant details
- Email: Your email address
- Domain: Leave blank
- Username: Your email address (the login to your BPOS account)
- Password: Your Password
- Description: Put in the email address or give it a friendly name
- The iPhone will Verify the information and will bring up a new field. Type in the relevant field depending on the location of your region in the Mobile Device URLs section here – http://www.microsoft.com/online/help/en-us/helphowto/c0a1a4b9-111f-4bd4-8fab-8147344cd278.htm. Remove the “https://” ie. For Australia, use “red003.mail.apac.microsoftonline.com”
- Select the information you want to synchronise. That’s it.
Creating a multiboot USB drive from ISOs
A good friend Robert Pearman (SBS MVP) from the UK recently published this useful resource – http://titlerequired.com/2011/05/01/usb-multiboot-toolkit/
In a nutshell, the utility will allow you to create a bootable USB with a number of ISOs on the stick. Excellent for having a portable AntiMalware/AntiVirus utility or for running various other tools.
PowerShell – Check Permissions on files and folders
While looking up some PowerShell scripts, I came across a neat command to recursively look through a folder and report on security and permissions for objects in the folder and subfolders.
Get-ChildItem C:\Scripts -recurse | ForEach-Object {Get-Acl $_.FullName} | Export-CSV C:\filename.csv
In Windows Server 2003, PowerShell is not automatically installed. You can also use a simple command – CACLS – to perform the same function.
cacls [TopFolder] /t > C:\filename.txt
This will dump the security information for TopFolder and all subfolders into the filename.txt file.
Some great resources for PowerShell scripting can be found from these links.
- Microsoft PowerShell Technet reference – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692944.aspx
- 10 Cool things you can do with PowerShell – http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=302
- Hey, Scripting Guy blog – http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/
- The Official Scripting Guys Forum – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ITCG/threads
DNS checking tool
Here’s a great tool for checking DNS server records.
Squishywishywoo – http://www.squish.net/dnscheck/
Daylight Savings Time Zone Editor for older versions of Windows
There are still occasions where old Line of Business applications are still in use that cannot/will not/absolutely will never work on newer operating systems. On these PCs, time zone updates for daylight savings are also not updated, and can cause some grief.
To manually create new timezones on these older operating systems, you can use Microsoft’s Time Zone Editor. The Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 can be downloaded here – http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/8/a/58a208b7-7dc7-4bc7-8357-28e29cdac52f/TZEDIT.exe
If you are living in a time warp called Windows 95, 98, or ME, you can download the program from the old Microsoft FTP server – ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/services/technet/samples/ps/Win98/Reskit/CONFIG/
Once downloaded, run tzedit.exe and it will install itself to C:\Program Files\TZEdit. Browse to that location and run the tzedit.exe program.
Creating a new timezone is as simple as clicking on the New button and putting in the details.
IT Security revisited
I was just reminded of the 10 Immutable Laws of Security (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722487.aspx)
Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore Continue reading IT Security revisited
Word 2010 Blog Publishing
You can now type your blog post in Word 2010 and publish it directly to your blog site.
Your document will be formatted in a blog-style format. You need to give the title of the post as requested.
The first time you click on this button, you will be prompted for the details of your blog site and the login details.
Click on Register now to continue.
Choose your Blog site.
For Windows Live Spaces, you need to enter your space name – ie. if your blog website is http://powerbiz.spaces.live.com, then enter powerbiz as your space name, and the Secret Word is the word that was chosen when e-mail publishing was turned on in Windows Live Spaces.
For more help on this, refer to – http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/word-help/help-with-blogging-in-word-HA010164021.aspx?ver=14&app=winword.exe#BM4
Click OK to continue and the account registration will give you the thumbs up, if all is OK.
To set up your Windows Live Spaces account to enable e-mail publishing, log in to your windows live blog account, then select Options, E-Mail Publishing.
Follow the instructions to set up E-Mail publishing.
One problem with this feature is that pictures are not saved. You need to save pictures as files, and upload them to the blog site and insert them manually into the blog.
Remove Administrator Deny Permissions in Exchange 2003
In Exchange 2003, Administrator accounts are denied access to mailboxes. As such, the EXMERGE utility will fail to export mailboxes when run using the Administrator account. To enable the Administrator account to use EXMERGE for exporting user mailboxes in archival situations, the following fix must be applied.
Open Server Management, browse to Advanced Management, First Organization (Exhcange), Servers, [servername]
Right Click on the server name, and select properties.
Select the Security Tab, and click the Advanced Button.
Untick the Check Box, Select Copy. Then select all Deny Permission Types, and click Remove.
EXMERGE should now run properly.
Using Vyatta Router device in HyperV (Part 5)
OK, so that wasn’t the last entry on Vyatta.
In the upcoming versions of SBS, a new product was annouced. (http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2010/07/12/announcing-previews-of-our-simple-and-affordable-servers-for-small-businesses.aspx)
This version of SBS (codenamed Aurora), is quite similar to Windows Home Server. As such, it does not appear to run a DHCP Server service by default. Therefore, the DHCP Server service needs to be configured on the Vyatta router. Three command lines will do the trick.
set service dhcp-server shared-network-name ETH1_POOL subnet 192.168.100.0/24 start 192.168.100.100 stop 192.168.100.199
<<Name the Range, set the subnet, then put the starting address and ending adddress for the leases
set service dhcp-server shared-network-name ETH1_POOL subnet 192.168.100.0/24 default-router 192.168.100.15 <<set the default router
set service dhcp-server shared-network-name ETH1_POOL subnet 192.168.100.0/24 dns-server 12.34.56.100 <<set the default DNS server