Microsoft has a great feature called autotuning. Autotuning though can be problematic when it comes to network connections with Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer 7, RDC and even some file sharing protocols over the WAN. This is mostly because not all firewalls support TCP Window Scaling for non-HTTP-based protocols. If you’re running into problems where these applications give you errors like “Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server Exchange_Server_FQDN” then you can try disabling autotuning to see if that is your problem (usually this involves wan connections, btw). To disable autotuning, use netsh to set tcp for autotuninglevel to disabled: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled To…
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NTP, OS X, Windows, Cisco and You
At this point, most Mac admins know to how to enable ntp on a Mac OS X Server and set clients to the server. Most Mac admins also know how to use managed preferences to set ntp as well. We all know that time is pretty important and most are using ntp at this point. Network time should, almost by definition, be continuous, which allows ntpd in Mac OS X can update clocks in small denominations. Thus, managing corrections with little overhead or impact to the system enables ntp to be an inexpensive method for managing clocks. But ntp is also built to keep things running smoothly even when there…
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RDP from the Command Line
Let’s face it, connecting to Windows Servers is a must for many of us. And some of us want to do so programatically. I did look at populating the CoRD database in a previous article. But now, luckily CoRD has recently introduced a command line interface for managing just these types of connections on the fly as well. And, it is very straight forward. There are two ways to call CoRD from the command line. The first is similar to how we handled VNC in an earlier article. Simply leverage the open command and call the URL with a rdp in the beginning. For example, if you want to open…
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Show Desktop Icon for Windows & Windows 7
Ever delete the Show Desktop icon from Quick Launch? One of my favorite features of Windows, it is a big part of my everyday use of the OS. So when I accidentally deleted it I had to figure out how to get it back. And it wasn’t nearly as easy as I would have thought (in my case) as I had deleted the actual scf file. To recreate that file was a bit complicated. So I wanted to document my steps. First, create a new file called Show Desktop.scf. Then open the file in your favorite text editor and paste in these contents: [Shell] Command=2 IconFile=explorer.exe,3 [Taskbar] Command=ToggleDesktop Save the…
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Programatically Clipboarding in Windows
My last article showed how to interface with the clipboard in Mac OS X. Windows 7 comes with the same feature, but instead of pbcopy it’s simply clip. Since you don’t ls, we’ll pipe the output of dir into the clipboard: dir | clip Enjoy & no more complaining that I like one platform more than the other – you know who you are!
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My Top 10 List of Firefox Add-ons
Here is a quick list of my favorite 10 Firefox Add-ons: AdBlock Plus – Block annoying advertisements AppTabs – Allows you to shrink your Firefox tabs by right-clicking on them and clicking on AppTab, showing just the address bar icon (favicon) of the site. BabelFish – Automatically translate pages you visit. Better Gmail – Useful add-ons specifically geared to Gmail users. ColorfulTabs – Allows you to assign a color to a tab. Firebug – Edit CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc. GreaseMonkey – Customize how pages appear to you. ShortURL Generator – Shorten URLs without going to a special page. SiteDelta – Get informed when your favorite sites change. Xmarks – Synchronizes…
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Get A Dock in Windows
In addition to getting a theme for Windows that makes it look more like a Mac you can also now install a Dock in Windows! rocketdock.com
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Lots of new stuff: Command Line Wiki Integration
The Mac Commands page and the PowerShell Commands page are both now wikis and users with accounts on this site can edit them. Additionally I added a number of new pages worth of commands, FTP Commands, Windows Commands, Final Cut Server Commands, Amazon S3 Commands, Podcast Producer Commands and Xsan Commands; both of which are wikis as well.
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That Wacky Adobe Security Flaw
Information about the exploit: Wacky Security Flaw Patch thyself: Adobe’s Mac patch site Adobe’s Windows patch site That is all I have to say about that.
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Bubble Alerts w/ Silent Installs
When you push software to a Windows computer there’s an annoying little alert that pops up to tell the user that new software was installed. In one organization I was recently at this accounted for approximately 20 calls to the help desk every time they pushed out an update (patch Tuesday for them is one week after patch Tuesday for Microsoft). To turn off the bubbles in your image, right-click on the start button and click on properties. Then click on the Customize button. Click Advanced and uncheck the box for Highlight newly installed programs. Not too bad. But don’t want to touch all of the existing machines. Open HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerAdvanced…