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

By the way, in case you didn’t know, Microsoft is offering free support
on SP1… business hours only:

Free unlimited installation and compatibility support is available for
Windows Vista, but only for Service Pack 1 (SP1). This support for SP1
is valid until March 18, 2009. Availability of chat or e-mail support
differs depending on your geographic location. For customers residing in
North America or Canada, chat and e-mail support is available. Some
issues may require more advanced support for which there is a charge.

No-charge Unlimited support requests: (866) 234-6020

Microsoft publishes these numbers at support.microsoft.com/gp/oemphone
so you can get in touch with your manufacturer if you have an oem
windows license installed:

Acer (800) 816-2237
IBM (800) 426-7378
Averatec (877) 462-3462
Lenovo (866) 96-THINK (968-4465)
Compaq (800) 652-6672
Maxdata (626) 935-0050
Dell (888) 560-8324
EMachines (408) 273-0888
Medion (866) 633-4660
Fujitsu (800) 831-3183
NEC Corp (800) 338-9549
Panasonic (800) 527-8675
Gateway (800) 846-2301
Sharp (800) 237-4277
Hewlett Packard (800) 474-6836
Sony (888) 476-6972
Toshiba (800) 457-7777
Samsung www.samsung.com
Hitachi www.hitachi.com

Speaking of learning something new every day… we all know that command
line tools and spaces don’t get along… but the way to make them behave
is to surround values containing spaces in quotes, right?

So the other day I’m writing this query to extract all users in my
active directory (easy enough: dsquery user -name * -limit 50000 | sort
> users.txt).

But all the names had spaces in them and my next query, to list all the
groups each user was in (for /f “delims=~” %%i in (users.txt) do echo
%%i >> foreachuser-showgroupmembership.txt && cscript //nologo
EnumGroup.vbs %%i >> foreachuser-showgroupmembership.txt) kept bombing
out on the spaces.

So after banging my head against the wall for a couple hours, it dawns
on me to look at the help file for the FOR command.

The trick is to define a delimiter that the program will never find…
so since I knew there weren’t any ~s in the names, I set the delimiter
to ~ and re-ran the command.

This may come in handy again someday.

Get all groupnames (short):
dsquery group -limit 50000 -o samid | sort

Get all groupnames (distinguished name):
dsquery group -limit 50000 | sort

Get all users:
dsquery user -name * -limit 50000 | sort

Get all users in each group:
for /f “delims=~” %%i in (groups-SHORT.txt) do echo %%i >>
foreachgroup-showitsmembers.txt && dsquery group -name “%%i” | dsget
group -members >> foreachgroup-showitsmembers.txt && type crlf.txt >>
foreachgroup-showitsmembers.txt

Get all groups that each user is in:
for /f “delims=~” %%i in (users.txt) do echo %%i >>
foreachuser-showgroupmembership.txt && cscript //nologo EnumGroup.vbs
%%i >> foreachuser-showgroupmembership.txt && type crlf.txt >>
foreachuser-showgroupmembership.txt

So, just like hosts and lmhosts, there is a file in
\windows\sytem32\drivers\etc names ‘services’.

Now I’ve been building and maintaining PCs and networks for about 20
years and have never had to touch this file… but last week I finally
needed it.

There was an application trying to talk to a service named OLCCA… what
the hell is OLCCA? Beats me, but the developer told me it used tcp port
8562.

But how does “OLCCA” get translated to 8562? I’m glad you asked… by
defining it in the services file like this:

OLCCA 8562/tcp

You learn something new every day… if you’re paying attention.

Ran in to an interesting problem last week… the firewall on a Vista
machine wouldn’t start. Every time you tried to start it it would fail
with a “service specific error code 5″.

With not much to go on I scoured Google and support.microsoft.com but
came up empty – for a while. Then I ran across this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943996 – “Some services do not start in
Windows Vista”.

The error means “Access is denied”. This may happen if the “MpsSvc”
account doesn’t have the necessary permissions for the related registry
keys.

The NT Service\MpsSvc account needs permissions for the following keys:

1) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\
SharedAccess\ Epoch: Query Value;Set Value

2) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\
SharedAccess\ Parameters\ FirewallPolicy: Full Control;Read

3) HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Services\
SharedAccess\ Defaults\ FirewallPolicy: Full Control;Read

Sounded like a long-shot, but sure enough, MpsSvc had no permissions to
one of the three keys and when I added it back in, it worked. No reboot
was necessary.

Do your force the PCs in your office to shut down when not in use? If you do you can save money on the electricity you consume and pay for, but will lose some manageability of the PCs. Best bet is probably a hybrid approach – set the monitors to go to sleep and leave the PCs on all night – or at least most of the night.

Use this calculator to estimate your energy and dollar savings from activating power management on your computer monitors and your PCs. Enter the number of units to be power managed and the price of electricity (a national commercial average of 7.1 cents per kWh is the default).

http://pmdb.cadmusdev.com/powermanagement/quickCalc.html

Problems occur after installing XP SP3 or Vista SP1 with a Norton 2008 product installed.

Numerous registry keys are added when you upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows Vista Service Pack 1 with a Norton product installed. Because of these registry keys, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

* Windows Device Manager is empty
* Missing Wireless network adaptors or other hardware devices
* Unable to connect using a wireless adapter

During the upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows Vista Service Pack 1, a tool called Fixccs.exe creates a series of registry keys in many locations (some of them within the Symantec registry keys) but is unable to remove them.

Symantec has developed a tool to remove the registry entries that were added during the Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows Vista SP 1 upgrade. Download and run the tool to automatically remove the registry entries.

Here’s the link: ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tutorials/SymRegFix.exe

And a link to the article:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/norton2008.nsf/0/ 9b91a879710fb80a6525744b006506eb?OpenDocument&seg=hm&lg=en&ct=us

There’s a lot of OS religion out there – most of it based on purely subjective data.

Engadget posted a comparison chart of OSX vs. Vista features. Interesting that by their scoring OSX takes a win with a score of 46 while Vista gets a close 41. I don’t think they weighted important features higher than features that no one really cares about. For example, stereo Bluetooth and video editing get the same points-value.

Also interesting is that they include the fact that neither has antivirus built-in but don’t mention anti-spyware.

Link: http:// www.engadget.com/2007/10/27/leopard-vs-vista-feature-chart-showdown

Computerworld put out a call for the 10 best free security tools available today. Here’s the list:

Secunia Personal Software Inspector

(PSI) scans your PC, downloads a current vulnerabilities file, and alerts you to any software on your machine that is missing security patches. It also warns you if any software is out of date and no longer supported by the vendor.

SendShield (beta)

Whenever you send PowerPoint, Excel or Word documents via Outlook, it examines them to
see if they have any of private information. It then details what it finds and lets you remove the information with a single click. It deletes the information only from the copy of the file you send via e-mail, not the original on your hard disk.

Avast Antivirus

It’s lightweight and takes up barely any RAM or system resources, it’s simple to use, and it’ll do everything you need by providing live, resident protection as well as canning.  The independent testing site AV-comparatives.org rates its effectiveness as Advanced+, the top level.

HijackThis

Everybody should be using spyware-detection tools such as Lavasoft Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy — preferably both. But some malware is so nasty that it escapes detection from any spyware scanners — and can’t be removed by them, either.  The program examines your settings and the Windows registry, particularly those sections that are most likely to be vulnerable, and then saves all those settings in a log file. Those settings are the key to finding out if you’ve been infected.

SpywareBlaster

It stops the installation of ActiveX-based spyware, browser hijackers and other malware, and can also block spyware cookies.  It includes extras as well, such as disabling Flash running in Internet Explorer. And it also lets you create a system snapshot, so that if at some later point you get infected with spyware, you can always revert to a clean system.

F-Secure BlackLight Rootkit Eliminator

It scans your PC for hidden processes, folders and files, then reports on what it finds. If your PC is clean, it will tell you so. If it finds anything hidden, it tells you that as well and lets you clean it up.

NoScript

A great Firefox extension called NoScript, which not only blocks scripts, plug-ins and various types of code, but also protects against cross-site scripting attacks. It lets you block scripts, plug-ins, and code on a site-by-site basis.

Comodo Firewall Pro

There are plenty of free firewalls out there, but my favorite is Comodo Firewall Pro, which provides top-notch protection from both inbound and outbound threats. It offers other types of protection as well, including what it calls Defense+, which keeps you safe in several ways, including locking down certain files and folders so that they can’t be altered.   Another very good free firewall is Online Armor.

McAfee SiteAdvisor

When you do a search in Google or Yahoo, it places a small icon to the right of each search result, indicating whether the site is safe, questionable or known to be harmful. A red X indicates danger, a green check indicates the site is safe, and a yellow exclamation mark indicates that it’s questionable.

CCleaner

CCleaner gets rid of many different kinds of unneeded files, such as temporary files, Windows log files, chkdsk file fragments and a lot more. It can also check your Registry and clean it of bad or broken entries and help you stop programs from running on start-up.