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I used to work in a Secondary School and whilst I was there I developed an application using VB.net for students to run checks on and upload e-portfolios to a shared resource before submission to the examination board. The application worked fine so I packaged it into an MSI and deployed it. Everything was ok [...]

Way back in 2002 Microsoft released a security bulletin regarding what they called a 'vulnerability in HTML Help that Could Allow Remote Code Execution'. The issue is related to help files that many software vendors use in the form of compiled HTML help files that use the .chm file extension.

I have a server located in a data centre miles away from where I work. It currently runs Windows 2000 Server. Every now and then when I try to connect to the server I get the following message about the number of Remote Desktop connections being exceeded:

I was recently asked to investigate a problem with a server and the lack of space on a partition. After a quick look using Treesize I noticed a suspicious folder being used by an application for logging purposes.

I use VMware ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5 since implementing it at my current workplace. Like many sysadmins I regularly keep on top of patching. I manually patch my ESX hosts when I see fit after pulling updates through Virtual Center. Subsequently, I recently applied the latest update (3.5 u2 or update 2) to [...]

Pre Microsoft office 2003 SP3, when creating a new MAPI email account in outlook 2003 the default setting was to "Use Cached Exchange Mode". I have noticed that after installing SP3 the default seems to now be disabled when creating an email account.

I have installed Microsoft Exchange quite a few times as a syadmin and since the release of Vista one thing I seem to forget is to address the issue of Vista clients using Internet Explorer 7 that send email through Outlook Web Access.

Here's a quick script written using KiXtart to retrieve information for a user (object) in Active Directory. Once enumerated, object information is stored in variables to be used later.

Here is another quick KiXtart script I wrote to backup a Microsoft SQL database on a server. I personally run it locally on the server that contains the database I want to backup using a scheduled task. It connects to the MSSQL database using the OSQL command line utility which it runs through a shell.

Here is a registry key I run from a startup script to disable the option that allows users to invoke a "Log on using dial-up connection". Having had experience of working in a school I know how kids will use any excuse to distract them from logging onto a computer and starting the lesson!

I have 6 Adtran Netvanta 1524st switches on which I wanted to disable STP (spanning tree protocol). After checking the switches through their web interface and using SSH to check the Adtran Operating System (AOS) command line help I was unable to spot any obvious method of disabling it.

I just had an issue where I was trying to install PowerDVD 5.1 onto a Dell laptop with a fresh Windows XP install. The PowerDVD software was on Dell branded media and I had reinstalled the laptop using a non OEM Dell branded version of Windows XP Professional. It seems that there is a check [...]

Every now and then I find myself needing to create a file of a certain size for one reason or another. This is usually for testing in situations where people are experiencing email attachment issues or disk quota problems, things like that. The quickest way to do this is to use a Windows command line [...]

I recently had a problem when I rebooted an Exchange 2003 server after some updates and it refused to display the winlogon screen. Instead it sat at "applying computer settings". I left it for around 10 minutes before realising something was seriously wrong.