NPS Setting for SafeWord 2008 with Cisco Router

When using Aladdin SafeWord 2008 with RADIUS authentication installed on Windows Server 2008, Network Policy Server (NPS) needs to be configured for RADIUS authentication with the router as RADIUS client. For Cisco routers the following authentication settings will work.

Unfortunately the documentation for Aladdin SafeWord 2008 does not provide the following steps, so I decided to put it here for anyone who can benefit from it.

After you have installed SafeWord 2008 successfully, made sure all SafeWord services have the startup type – Automatic and have activated it. Now its time to work on RADIUS Authentication, following steps describe the complete process:

1. Open Start --> All Programs --> Aladdin --> SafeWord --> Configuration --> IAS Agent Configuration
   Under Authentication Policy click on Groups and make sure the following options are selected.
2. Steps below are for NPS settings
   * Open NPS Console, Right Click RADIUS Clients and select New RADIUS Client option
   * Provide following details based on your environment.
   
   
3. Go to Policies --> Network Policies (Right click and choose New) and Follow the snapshots below
   
   
   
   
   
    
   Authentication methods are very important
    
   Click next in all the windows after this and finish at the end.
   
4. Make sure that this newly created Network Policy is on the top and if you want disable all the other listed network policies by default.
5. No need to touch the connection request policy already there.

That's it!! NPS authentication with SafeWord 2008 should work fine now.

So-called GodMode in Window 7 !!! I call it AdminMode.

I don't like the idea of calling a cool shortcut or trick “GodMode”. However as you might have guessed, I like the trick itself. I would call it “AdminMode” because that's what it is.

In Windows 7 you can create a new folder anywhere with the following name

AdminMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You can change “AdminMode” to whatever you want to name the folder. After the folder creation is complete you will see it listed as following.

When you double click it, you will see a list of commands which are either well hidden or require a few clicks to get to. With the help of AdminMode you get easily access all of these cool features at one place. What's even more great is that you can create a shortcut by right clicking any option and choosing create a shortcut, it will place a shortcut on your desktop.

Enjoy Windows 7 !!!!

Users cannot logon to the Terminal Server

When users try to logon to the terminal server they get the following error

Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service

or their sessions just drops during the login process without any errors.

In this case one of the reason could be that your terminal server is handling the memory usage correctly.
check the event log to see if you can find event 1500 and event 1508 for each unsuccessful logon attempt.

if yes then use the following method:

To resolve this problem, modify the registry to increase the PoolUsageMaximum value and the PagedPoolSize value. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management

3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. In the New Value #1 box, type PoolUsageMaximum, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click PoolUsageMaximum, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 60, click Decimal, and then click OK.
7. If the PagedPoolSize registry entry exists, go to step 8. If the PagedPoolSize registry entry does not exist, create it. To do this, follow these steps:
   1. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
   2. In the New Value #1 box, type PagedPoolSize, and then press ENTER.
8. Right-click PagedPoolSize, and then click Modify.
9. In the Value data box, type ffffffff, and then click OK.
10. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

source: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/935649

Roaming Quick Access Toolbar

Office 2007 is packed with useful new features. Quick Access Toolbar is one of them, although the concept is not new but the ease with which you can add the buttons to quick access toolbar is what I would call a new feature. With Quick Access Toolbar you can have a collection of frequently used commands on the top of the ribbon, in the title bar. To add an option to the quick access toolbar just right click on any command on the Ribbon in any Microsoft office program and select the option “Add to Quick Access Toolbar”

Of course we all know that, we also know that this toolbar is actually saved as a file in your profile at the following location

"%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat

all the files with .qat extension are quick access toolbars for the related application.

When using roaming profile it becomes an issue because as you have noticed that the qat files are in Local Settings folder, which doesn’t get saved with the roaming profile. So to have all users’ Quick Access Toolbar in the roaming profile we need to do two things. First following registry DWORD needs to be created for each user.

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars

New DWORD –> QuickAccessToolbarRoaming
Value –> 00000001

Above can be achieved in many ways, easiest of them could be to use Group Policy Preferences.

Now we  the second step is optional because it is completely for user satisfaction. For the users who have already added their favorite commands to the QAT, once the roaming is activated they will lose their settings. To prevent it you can add the following line to a logon script or just create a new batch file and have it applied as logon script for all users.

move /Y "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat" "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\"

Disable Send Out of Office auto-replies to External Senders in Exchange 2007

You don’t want users in your organization to send Out of Office Auto-replies to external recipients and also you don’t want the option to appear in Outlook 2007 like shown below

To disable/hide the option Outside My Organization in Out of Office Assistant in Outlook and in OWA use the following in Exchange Management Shell.

Set-Mailbox <mailboxid> -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

This can be changed per mailbox, if you want to be applied to all mailboxes there are many ways of approaching it. You can get mailboxes on a server and pipe it with Set-Mailbox with above settings Or the following will apply it on all mailboxes in an exchange organization.

Get-Mailbox –ResultSize Unlimited | Set-Mailbox -ExternalOofOptions InternalOnly

-ResultSize Unlimited is important otherwise it will change the setting for the first 1000 mailboxes.

For more details on Out of Office Assistant refer to the link below.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/10/06/429115.aspx

Send as permissions disappear – Exchange 2007

You granted send as permissions to an account from Exchange Management Console in exchange 2007 environment and realize that after an hour later the permissions have disappeared, in fact any other explicit permissions that you granted through Active Directory have gone as well. This will also becomes an issue for organizations using BlackBerry.

Above is by design, read this for more details.

To fix the issue:

Remove the account from any of the following group

• Administrators
• Account Operators
• Server Operators
• Print Operators
• Backup Operators
• Domain Admins
• Schema Admins
• Enterprise Admins
• Cert Publishers

If that's not an option then see the work around in the following KB Article.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=907434 

This applies to any version of Microsoft Exchange.

Freeware to Backup and Restore Device Drivers

Double Driver is a great freeware to backup and restore device drivers. It is a stand alone application that you can run from a USB drive or any storage location without needing an install.

it works fine with windows 7. Its a great tool!! no need to worry about keeping track of recovery CDs for old laptops and desktops.

Freeware to Backup and Restore Device Drivers

Double Driver is a great freeware to backup and restore device drivers. It is a stand alone application that you can run from a USB drive or any storage location without needing an install.

it works fine with windows 7. Its a great tool!! no need to worry about keeping track of recovery CDs for old laptops and desktops.

Reset Mailbox Permissions

if a mailbox is being shared between multiple users and for some reason not all folders are visible to all the users. First thing you might want to do is to consider resetting the permissions of the mailbox.

The tool you would use for this purpose is PFDAVAdmin.

• Instead of connecting to public folder on a given exchange server, connect to all mailboxes of the server where the concerned mailbox is.
• Right click the mailbox name and select Propagate folder ACEs
• Check “NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON” and click on OK

even though the level of permission is none “Anonymous Logon” has to be listed in the ACL in order for the folder to be visible to everyone who has permission to the mailbox.

If Active Directory System Discovery does not work

If you are using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and Active Directory System Discovery does not show new computers added to your Active Directory then following will resolve the issue.

There is a bug in SCCM SP2 that does not resolve the LDAP query for newly added computer objects. To make it work:

• Go to Site Management > Site Name > Site Settings > Discovery Methods
• Go to the properties of Active Directory System Discovery
• In the General Tab, Click on the new button to and chose Custom LDAP or GC query query should be based on the following. (remember to check Recursive and Include Groups if needed)
  
  LDAP://SERVERNAME:PORT/DC=CONTOSO,DC=COM
  
  
• To put the above in context: Lets say your domain name is contoso.com and the name of the LDAP server is dc01.contoso.com then the query will look like the following.  (389 is the default LDAP port)
  
  LDAP://DC01:389/DC=CONTOSO,DC=COM
  
  
• If the same was to be done for an OU named Workstations in the above domain, following query can be used.
  
  LDAP://DC01:389/OU=WORKSTATIONS,DC=CONTOSO,DC=COM
  

Enable Check Boxes for Items in Windows 7

this can be very helpful as you wont need to hold the CTRL key for multiple selections.

Folder Options –> View –> Use check boxes to select items

For more details click here

Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.

When opening outlook following error occurs

“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.”

Resolution

there are two ways of fixing it.

1. Go to Start menu chose run and type the following and press enter
   
   outlook /resetnavpane
   
   This will open outlook, close Outlook and try to reopen it normally. If it still gives you the error then you an do it the hard way and that is following.
2. Go to %appdata%\microsoft\outlook\(type this in Run and press enter)
   and delete the profilename.xml, outcmd.dat and outlprnt files.
   
   If you are not sure which xml file to delete just delete all xml files and the two mentioned files at above location.

Move DHCP scope from Windows Sever 2000 to Windows Server 2003 or 2008

Move DHCP from Server 2000 to 2003 or 2008

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325473

Microsoft has detailed step by step KB article on it.. in brief.

• Reduce the lease duration on server 2000 so the clients will renew IP and you will discover issue quicker if there are any.
• Timing is important –> deactivate the scope on old server before you import it on the new one.

Here are the steps

1. Download and install the DHCPExim utility on server 2000, it will not create shortcuts so access it from C:\Program Files\Resource Kit\
2. Open command prompt and stop DHCP Service with the following command
   
   net stop dhcpserver
   
   
3. Open DHCPExim.exe and following the instructions to export any selected scope data to be exported to a txt file. You can chose to disable to the scope immediately.
   
4. Now on your server 2003 copy the txt file on the local drive and run the following command.
   
   netsh dhcp server import filepath\filename.txt all
   
   
   
5. Authorize the new DHCP server

Read the this article for moving DHCP from server 2003 to server 2008

Happy Upgrading!!

Great freeware for Windows Administrators – ManagePC

ManagePC is a freeware that can be used by administrators and/or helpdesk in an Active Directory domain to manage remote windows 2000/xp/2003 machines. Following is the features list.

ManagePC features

• Retrieves important WMI data from machine
• Remote control (via Remote Desktop, Remote Assistance or VNC)
• Remotely manage machine (via MMC)
• Reboot machine
• Remotely edit registry
• Stop/start services
• Monitor and terminate processes
• View local users and groups
• Remotely uninstall software
• Export data to Excel, HTML and RTF format
• All retrieved data stored in XML files for history purposes
• WMI Query Builder
• No extra software required on client machines

It does work with Vista and Windows7 machines but there are a few permission issues that need to be fixed, hopefully in next versions. This open source software provides a comprehensive suite of remote management tools with no client or agent installed on the target machine. But make sure that the PSTools are installed on the administrator’s machine for the uninstalls to work, specifically PsExec is required for that task.

Installation is very simple, once the software is installed read the help file its very brief. Happy Managing PCs!!!

http://managepc.net/

Map Windows Live SkyDrive (25GB Free Online space) As Local Drive and Much More

Having 10GB free space from 4shared is great but it has its own limitations. What if there was more space that you already have like 25GB from SkyDrive!! Hotmail users will know what I am talking about.

Gladinet is a tool that allows you to map SkyDrive, Google Docs and others as a Network/Local Drive to your computer. Which mean you can have a drive letter that allows you to automate backing up your data and/or you can just drag an drop files.

I have been using the free version and my experience with it has been great!! It works great with Windows7. Speed and performance is relative to what machine and connection you are using. I use a DSL line and have not seen any issue with the speed..

Gladinet has made life easy when it comes to storing data online!! Enjoy using it.

http://www.gladinet.com/