Frequently you need to uninstall some software which is causing your system grief, but you can’t uninstall it in safe mode. Follow these instructions to enable the windows installer.

You simply need to create a registry entry the type of safe mode you want to use:

Safe Mode:
REG ADD “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Minimal\ MSIServer”/VE/T REG_SZ /F/D”Service”

Safe Mode with Network:
REG ADD “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\Network\ MSIServer”/VE/T REG_SZ/F/D”Service”

Then start the Windows Installer service by typing “net start msiserver”.

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody’s job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

Moral of the story: make sure you identify WHO is responsible for everything you request. Don’t send an email addressed to a group of people and expect that any one of those people will just assume responsibility. Just because it’s important to you, doesn’t mean it’s important to the people you sent your email to. Focus your attention on an individual, and confirm their acceptance of responsibility.

Have a machine you want to connect to, but remote desktop isn’t enabled? As long as you have administrator access to that machine you can enable remote desktop very easily from another machine on the same network. Just use Regedit and connect to the remote machine’s registry and make one change.

Change Dword value: hklm/ system/ currentcontrolset/ control/ terminal server/ fDenyTSConnections from 1 to 0

Of course you can do this from the command line if you have PSExec:
psexec \\computername/ipip reg add “hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server” /f /v fDenyTSConnections /t REG_DWORD /d 0

You should also be able to do this with WMI:
wmic /node:”FQDN Name” RDTOGGLE WHERE ServerName=”HostName” CALL SetAllowTSConnections 1

For XP you may need to do this instead:
wmic /node:”HOSTNAME” path win32_terminalservicesetting where servername=”HOSTNAME” call SetAllowTSConnections 1

You can connect to the “console 0″ session from a command line:
mstsc /v:x.x.x.x /console – for rdp clients before v5
mstsc /v:x.x.x.x /admin – for rdp clients v6 or higher

Exchange memory management follows the “Law of Two Year Olds”, which goes something like this:

If it’s in my hands, it’s mine.
If I like it, it’s mine.
If it looks like mine, it’s mine.
If I saw it first, it’s mine.
If I can take it away from you, it’s mine.
If I had it a while ago, it’s still mine.
If I’m doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.
If you put something down within my reach, it’s mine.
If it’s mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.
If it’s broken, I didn’t do it.
If you have one, where’s mine?

Pretty much sums it up, doesn’t it?

Mon.itor.us is a free server and traffic monitoring service and part of Monitis family, which provides professional, premium all-in-one monitoring service, integrating application performance with backend infrastructure with cloud monitoring.

There are others out there (siteuptime, internetseer).

Anyone using any of these services? Comments?

It’s no joke… Next meeting is April 1, 2010 – Video Conferencing

This month we’ll take a look at video conferencing technologies.
Our guest speaker, Jeff Giampa from Polycom will discuss:
* State of the industry
* Cost justification by elimination of travel expenses
* Current real-world capabilities
* Bandwidth requirements
* Polycom vs. Cisco Tele-presence
* The others: Skype, Microsoft OCS, etc.

Meeting Location:
Hilton Garden Inn, 100 High Street, Portsmouth, NH, 03801

Some of the folks over at the SANS Internet Storm Center have created a new blog dedicated to describing command line tools: http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/

Do you support Oracle databases? Are you looking for a tool to give you insight in to its performance? Check out Spotlight on Oracle from Quest Software: http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-oracle/

I ran across this webcast today – Some interesting details about how to deal with massive amounts of data and how to serve large amounts of small data and managing multiple copies of databases across datacenters.

“High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook”
By Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology, Facebook
Recorded at Calit2 Auditorium, University of California, San Diego

See the webcast at: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/JeffRothschildFacebook.asx

If you have remote offices (even internationally) and need remote hands support, consider using one of the consolidaters such as Crater Communications (http://cratercommunications.com).

Essentially you hire/pay Crater to find a qualified resource in the local area. Billing rates are the same or less than you would be able to find on your own, and it removes all the time/hassle involved in locating local resources on your own. All your disputes are handled centrally and if you’re not happy with the on-site staff assigned to you, Crater will find someone else.

These guys are especially good at finding emergency staff and can have someone on-site in under 4 hours almost anywhere in the world. Your mileage may vary.