If you are a user of Big Brother, you may know that by default, your reporting dates cut off on the year 2010. To extend this capability to the current year, you just need to edit bb-rep.html, found at /usr/local/bb/www/help/bb-rep.html. Simply add the following options to your start-yr and end-yr:
So my updates broke, because I “accidentally deleted” a computer group in the WSUS console (http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/09/26/67958.aspx). When I went into the SBS 2008 console and went to Updates, and tried clicking the “change the software update settings” in order to make any changes to my computers and exclusions, I was greeted with the error “windows sbs 2008 console has stopped working”.
The EASY way. One website I keep an eye on is www.calendarofupdates.com. It keeps me up to date on new software releases on a daily basis. I just have a bookmark and check it, daily!
From here we can see that they provide more information about the update. In this case, Adobe Flash 11.1 (as of current). Clicking on the link takes us to this page, where we find a link for “Offline Installers”. Clicking here takes us to Adobe Flash distribution page. From here we can download the MSI files we need. I’m only deploying the 32 bit version, on my 64 bit machines as well. I download to a network share that all computers can see, for instance on my file server.
So you have a planned outage, and you don’t want the damn thing setting off alarms while it’s down? Easy enough. If you prefer to hold on to the entry in your bb-hosts file for later testing then this is for you. Simply enable this feature by editing /usr/local/bb/etc/bbdef-server.sh. Search the file for RUNOPTS. Around this line you will see other options we can add to RUNOPTS for different features:
RUNOPTS=”DATAMSG EMBEDHTML ENABLE_DISABLE”
export RUNOPTS
You can see that I already have test disabling, enabled here, by including ENABLE_DISABLE to the RUNOPTS line. Save and close and restart BB. Now that it's done, perform the following to disable a single test:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10(your BB server IP) “disable server.mycompany.com.conn 2h”
This will disable the connection ping test for 2 hours. The following will disable all tests on the same server for 24 days:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “disable server.mycompany.com* 24d”
To re-enable the server after repairs or maintenance are done:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “enable server.mycompany.com*”
So I was working on a client machine here at home, backing up and rebuilding the machine with a fresh software load. After doing so, I informed them that I would need to do more work at the office to get it joined to the domain, create the profile, set up outlook, etc, etc. Problem was, they had morning appointments, as did I. I needed to get this done with no physical access, other than remote desktop services to the server to do it. And here is the answer!
I have been using Frontmotion’s Community Edition Firefox on my local network, and it works great for locking down configuration settings in FF, such as required proxies, etc. It comes along with a set of templates that you can plug into Group Policy Management, firefox.adm (version 1.3, user config only) and mozilla.adm (version 1.7, computer config only). Right click, save link as on the previous links!
For those of you that are system administrators and have to keep up on 3rd party software updates, check out www.calendarofupdates.com. I don’t know what I would do without it. I check it daily, of course.
So there are a number of group policies around Remote Desktop, we know this, under:
Computer/Admin Templates/Windows Components/Terminal Services
But I want to make sure all my Windows 7 machines have the “Remote Desktop Services” and “Remote Desktop Configuration” SERVICES set to automatic and start when the system starts! Try Googling that. You get a lot of results about the former, not the actual system services. These services USED to be called “Terminal Services” and “Terminal Services Configuration”, respectively. Set these services to automatic in the GPO and you’re good to go, they map to the new names in Windows 7. Why, why did they rename these services? Or at least update the .adm files to include the proper service name? It’s beyond me. Here’s where to change:
Computer/Policies/Windows Settings/Security Settings/System Services/Terminal Services
Computer/Policies/Windows Settings/Security Settings/System Services/Terminal Services Configuration
WebEx sure makes it hard to find the right msi files for GPO deployment. Here’s the trick: go to http://webexhelp.webex.com. Click on Meeting Center tab, then Support/Downloads and grab the Meeting Center Application for both IE and Firefox in msi format. Could they make it any harder?
For GotoMeeting, see http://support.citrixonline.com/GoToMeeting/search?search=msi
Say goodbye to replmon, say hello to repadmin. Gone are the days of good old replmon, so to force AD replication across site boundaries and all just do the following at the command line:
repadmin/syncall /APed