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BackupExec 2012 – How to Limit CPU Usage and Disk I/O on RALUS with Cron Jobs

Backup Exec on Linux, otherwise known as RALUS, is great but it has no provisions for limiting it’s disk I/O or CPU usage during different periods of the day. Unfortunately, BE for Windows doesn’t have that option either, so get on it Symantec, nudge, nudge.

If you’re like me, you might have backup jobs on File Servers that span several terabytes worth of data that can essentially run for a day or two on their own. The problem is that people get really bitchy when things don’t run at the normal speed that they are used to and the inconsiderate assholes don’t give a shit when you explain why.

Well here are a few cron job tasks that I came up with to help relieve some of that pressure on your file server. Continue reading “BackupExec 2012 – How to Limit CPU Usage and Disk I/O on RALUS with Cron Jobs”

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Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures

Today I had a user that just had this problem pop up seemingly out of nowhere. I tried repairing Outlook, starting it in Safe Mode, disabling all Add-Ons, finding and deleting out Outlook’s temp files, and the problem still persisted.

After a brief web search, it appears the latest batch up Windows Updates, specifically KB3097877 that had installed automatically last night, was the culprit. Uninstall it, reboot and hopefully you’re good to go. Here are my references: Continue reading “Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures”

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Server 2012 – Enable/Disable Spellcheck Highlighting and Auto-Correct with Group Policy

Courtesy of this fancy post where they use big words and pictographs here, you can use this info to enable or disable the built-in global spell checking/highlighting and auto-correct features of Windows 8/Server 2012 to deploy these settings as a group policy preference.

One can only hope that this feature is any better than the auto-correct on Android phones which makes me want to smash my spy phone into tiny little pieces with a claw hammer or test it’s aerial durability/impact resistance with the closest nearby wall at times, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Continue reading “Server 2012 – Enable/Disable Spellcheck Highlighting and Auto-Correct with Group Policy”

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WinSCP – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings from a Computer that is Offline

If you want to backup your saved sessions from WinSCP, that is easy enough, as long as the computer is still in a working state, you can use the backup and restore feature from within the software. But what if the computer doesn’t boot or you swapped the drive into a different machine? So long as you can still access the drive and have access to that user’s registry file, you can easily extract the data you need. Continue reading “WinSCP – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings from a Computer that is Offline”

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Windows – Play a WAV file with PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class

At work, they wanted to ability to play a soundbyte on a schedule as a reminder to our sales employees. I think I may have found this on stackexchange but I can’t quite remember at this point to give the full creds. A lot of the solutions I found tried to use Windows Media Player to play sound files or MP3’s, but unfortunately, there was no way to close the program after the file had played. This way uses Windows PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class to play the file. Continue reading “Windows – Play a WAV file with PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class”

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Adtran TA924 PRI Conversion – Routing Inbound DIDs to FXS Ports or via a SIP Trunk to Asterisk and Allowing Bi-Directional Communications Between the Two

I have to say, I’ve worked with the Adtran TA924 Gen1 and Gen2 in the past and thought it was a great product then, but here recently I’ve just rediscovered the amazing flexibility of this unit and I am extremely impressed.

I’ve used the TA924 with a SIP trunk from both a Metaswitch and Asterisk before to convert to analog FXS ports and have had great success. It has always been rock solid but even back when the device was still in it’s infancy stages, it had a few limitations. I remember specifically when the unit could only do a PRI into a PBX and that is certainly no longer the case any more. There doesn’t seem to be anything this unit can’t do at this point. <3

At work, we had around 20 plus regular POTS lines through AT&T and were getting massively raped over the past several years (every year our prices have went up and at the time of porting our numbers out, we were looking at $74 dollars per POTS line and not including usage charges. Effing ridiculous. That is why I hate AT&T and refuse to support them, not to mention all their NSA spying garbage.) and I got a great deal on a PRI through our fiber internet provider so I needed a way to sort of peel out some of the channels into fax lines with DIDs and then bring the rest of the lines into my Asterisk server. In comes my old TA924 Gen2, that was collecting dust on a shelf, to the rescue. Continue reading “Adtran TA924 PRI Conversion – Routing Inbound DIDs to FXS Ports or via a SIP Trunk to Asterisk and Allowing Bi-Directional Communications Between the Two”

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Cisco SPA Series IP Phones – How to Backup and Restore a Config

All of this info was found on a forum post on the Cisco website and I have tested and verified it works.

To backup your Cisco SPA 50x Series IP Phone’s config, in your web browser, enter the URL of your device’s web management page followed by “/admin/spacfg.xml”.

http://192.168.0.1/admin/spacfg.xml

In the web browser, go to File > Save As and rename the file ending in “.cfg” Continue reading “Cisco SPA Series IP Phones – How to Backup and Restore a Config”

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Windows – How to Run Elevated Scripts as a Regular User with Task Scheduler -OR- How to Restart Services as a Standard User

Here is a neat workaround you can use in Windows to run a batch script or any other command that would regularly require elevated administrator credentials. Using this method, you can essentially bypass UAC and allow a script to be ran as a standard user without them having to enter in an admin password. In theory, you could probably even use this same approach to install software as a regular user if you wanted to. For my example below, I was able to allow a standard user to kill processes and then restart the services.

The problem that I had to overcome was that one of my VPN users who used Shrewsoft VPN client would occasionally get disconnected and then never be able to fully connect again. Oddly enough, the client would show connected on the user’s end and immediately disconnect but it never made a connection on the server side. The problem was that the “iked” process would get hung up and then the VPN client would subsequently never fully connect all the way. Continue reading “Windows – How to Run Elevated Scripts as a Regular User with Task Scheduler -OR- How to Restart Services as a Standard User”