What a surprise, this morning I came into the office only to find that all of my people running Outlook 2010 were now having it open in Safe Mode and I immediately thought, OK this had to have been a Windows Update issue. This seems to be the norm for old Microsuck these days, as I’ve had these sort of problems with Outlook happen twice within the last month. Perhaps they should come up with a new slogan, “Microsoft: Raising the Bar in Repudiation”. Continue reading “Outlook 2010 – Only Starts in Safe Mode”
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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”
Putty – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings
This one is simple enough, to export your saved sessions and your settings for PuTTY, just navigate to the following key in the registry, select it, right click, select Export, give it a name, and save it somewhere. Continue reading “Putty – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings”
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”
CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?
Being the badass network admin that you are, you try to keep your servers up to date with all the latest Windows updates, you run antivirus on all your machines on your network and scan daily, you have made sure that none of your users have local admin rights to their machines so they can’t install any software, and so you think you are fairly well covered when it comes to viruses and spyware, well think again.
My company just got hit pretty hard with this new CryptoWall 3.0 virus. If you are unfamiliar with it, basically it encrypts any user accessible data on local and network shares that it has permissions to and holds it ransom for BitCoin payments. Continue reading “CryptoWall 3.0 Ransomware – Ouch, It Hurts So Good…Get Out the Backup Tapes. You’ve Got Those Right?”
VBScript – Get a Folder/File Size or Verify That a Folder/File Exists
Here are some snippets of VBScript I pieced together from various sources out on the web to be able to find the size of a folder or file or check that a folder or file exists. This is pretty handy because it also works for UNC path names or files and folders out on network shares, as long as your user has permission to access that path. Continue reading “VBScript – Get a Folder/File Size or Verify That a Folder/File Exists”
VBScript – How to Access Environment Variables -OR- How to Get the Username, Domain, or a User’s SID
Here is a simple example of how to use VBScript to access environment variables, use the variables to obtain a user’s SID, and then print them to the screen. Continue reading “VBScript – How to Access Environment Variables -OR- How to Get the Username, Domain, or a User’s SID”
VMware vSphere Client – Remove Cached Entries on Connection Screen
For a long time, I’ve just dealt with having a massively long list of old VM servers in my vSphere client but today I finally decided to take a minute to do something about it as it was just getting too ridiculous to navigate to find the servers I wanted to use. A quick scour of the web led me to the following registry key, all you need to do is edit the comma separated list, delete out the entries you no longer want, and be on your merry way.
HKCU\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\RecentConnections
Batch Script – Ribbon UI Customization: Take Ownership and Change Permissions of the CommandStore Subkeys in the Registry
This is just a follow up to my experiences customizing the Ribbon UI icons in Server 2012 and where the path has taken me thus far. After many hours of research and development and a lot of head scratching, I’ve written several posts on how to disable the different icons in the Ribbon UI which requires the adding or editing of keys in the CommandStore section of the registry for Windows Explorer. For more information on how to disable the icons, see this post.
My whole goal as of late was to be able to add these registry items to the RDS server’s GPO to be able to deploy these settings to all 7 of my RDS servers but then I found out you can’t take ownership of the CommandStore subkeys with the local “SYSTEM” account. Yet another deliberate Microsoft setback meant to discourage people from editing the Ribbon UI, oh well, fuck ’em. I’ve encountered so many problems with this RDS server project it is unreal and this was just icing on the proverbial cake. Continue reading “Batch Script – Ribbon UI Customization: Take Ownership and Change Permissions of the CommandStore Subkeys in the Registry”
Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy
Boy do I sure feel like a dumbass sometimes. I researched and wrestled with this damn issue for a week or more only to find out that I had come across the answer to this problem about a dozen times but was looking in the wrong freaking spot. For whatever reason, when people were referring to disabling the mouse pointer shadow, I immediately thought of the place in windows System Properties > Advanced Tab > Performance > Settings > Visual Effects Tab > “Show shadows under mouse pointer” but that wasn’t fixing my problem and now I know why. Here’s the whole story.
I’ve got a mix of around 100 Neoware CA19, CA21, and HP T5145 thin clients, all with 128MB of flash running HP ThinPro build T3X31012 and rdesktop version 1.6.0 that I’ve been testing with on Server 2012 and this was a major problem. I was just about finished locking down this 7 server RDS deployment I’ve been working on and when I had my first few users start to log in to test everything, they had no mouse cursor, fucking awesome!
At first, I thought this may have been a VMware tools problem, so I had reinstalled it and had scoured all the forums there, trying various different little tweaks, registry keys, and what have you, but that was only the beginning. Then I tried adjusting the various RDP settings on the thin client with no luck. I tried all the different things on the various Windows forums and still no luck. I got to know all the ins and outs of HP’s thin client architecture, their use of the Manticore registry, config files and everything that goes along with it and how it all works.
Continue reading “Server 2012 – RDesktop: Fix Disappearing Mouse Cursor with Group Policy”