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showing posts tagged with 'computer'
Regenerating SSH host keys
edited by on August 19th 2010, at 16:19

If for some reason you lost your SSH server keys, sshd will fail to start with error:

Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key

You can recreate your host keys with these commands:

ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key

After recreating the keys, you will probably have to let your clients know as with the change of keys, they'll probably get warnings about it (Linux SSH will not even connect until you kick out the old keys).

 
Outlook sends out RTF mails despite HTML or plaintext setting
edited by on August 19th 2010, at 16:00
Had a nasty run-in with Outlook 2007 the other day: despite the internet message format being set to HTML, recipients not using Outlook would still receive mail with attachments as RTF with an unreadable winmail.dat file attached to it.



and



Clueless, I started poking around and finally resorted to Google to find out what was going on. Apparently, there is a separate setting per e-mail address in your contacts list, stating what format that recipient should be able to receive. By default, it is set to Let Outlook decide which basically tells to use the default in Outlook options (thus, being HTML).
However, this is also the choice of Always use RTF, which basically forces Outlook   ...
 
Screencast with Microsoft Expression Encoder
edited by on August 17th 2010, at 13:10

Microsoft has a free edition of Microsoft Expression, which has the basic functionality of creating screencasts. This way you can create screencasts, and encode them to WMV (or to Silverlight). The free edition is limited to 10 minutes per clip, but this should be adequate for simple short clips.

Microsoft Expression Encoder can be downloaded from the Expression website: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/; scroll to the bottom to find it.

 
Upgrade your (recent) Office 2007 to 2010 for free
edited by on August 6th 2010, at 14:30
Microsoft has introduced the technological guarantee, stating that if you have recently purchased a license of Office 2007, you are eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2010. Depending on which version of Office 2007 you purchased, you may upgrade to the 2010 counterpart, or possibly a higher one (e.g. Small Business 2007 upgrades to Professional 2010, neat!).

To be eligible, you need to have purchased, installed and activated Office 2007 between March 5, 2010 and September 30, 2010.
When you qualify, surf to http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/tech-guarantee/ and fill out the form. You can choose to get the electronic download, or order a DVD for an additional fee. The license upgrade it  ...
 
The big HP t5530 management page
edited by on August 6th 2010, at 13:48
At work, we've been working with the HP t55xx series thin-clients, mainly for one of our customers.
This article contains some things we've found to be very useful. It is not a real howto, but rather a collection of smaller items, telling you how to do certain things, and those things are not easy to find in the manuals.

There are 4 ways to reset a t5530 to factory defaults:

Open Control Panel, open the System applet, then click on the button that says Reset.

When powered off, press and hold the F9 key on your keyboard, then power up the device, and keep it pressed, until the system has booted. You will be greeted with the first-run wizard again. Note that this does not w  ...
 
Slow or no video after installing LogMeIn
edited by on August 4th 2010, at 09:57

If you have an nVidia video card and are experiencing slow video performance or no video output at all, after installing LogMeIn, you should download and install the latest drivers from nVidia.

This solves a conflict between the LogMeIn mirror driver and older versions of the nVidia display driver.

 
Get rid of ads in Windows Live Messenger
edited by on August 3rd 2010, at 13:40

It never was easier to get rid of those pesky ads in Windows Live Messenger. Simply download A-patch: http://apatch.org/.

 
Download link of APC PowerNet MIBs
edited by on July 5th 2010, at 16:47

The latest MIBs for APC's PowerNet SNMP is available here:

ftp://ftp.apc.com/apc/public/software/pnetmib/mib/

 
Turn on character overwrite in Word 2007
edited by on July 5th 2010, at 16:39
Apparently, Office 2007 no longer has character overwriting enabled by default. Pressing the Insert key on your keyboard does nothing at all. While most rarely use this function, a customer was blaming his keyboard from nothing working properly. A quick look around showed that, indeed, pressing Insert no longer enables the overwrite function in Office 2007 (Word in particular was tested).

Microsoft has decided some time ago to turn off this function by default, because it is indeed rarely used - it's the first time I noticed it was gone, and have never received a question up until now, and because there were complaints about users inadvertently turning on overwrite mode and overwritin  ...
 
Print spooler crashes with HP LJ 1020/1022
edited by on June 30th 2010, at 18:04
Ever so often, owners of a HP Laserjet 1020 or 1022 may run into a problem with the print spooler crashing over and over for no apparent reason. Restarting the spooler causes an immediate crash, and the only way to get rid of the problem is by removing (sometimes by force) all printers. The observant type has already noticed (the title of this post says it all) that the common dominator is indeed the 1020/1022 printer, and that the problem usually occurs upon attempting to print one or another PDF document.

In truth, the problem is caused by newer versions of the HP Host-based printer driver. For some reason, a part of the HP driver crashes upon parsing certain PDF documents (usually scan  ...
 
Activating SSH on ESXi 4
edited by on June 30th 2010, at 17:12
While not documented, it is possible to activate remote SSH access to an ESXi 4.0 (free or paid license).

You need console access to the machine to turn on SSH access; it cannot be done with the vSphere client.

At the console, press Alt+F1 to switch to the console. You will not see a prompt, but you will be able to type in the logon name.

Type in unsupported then press Enter; you will see a Password: prompt. If you did not set a password in ESXi, type in unsupported. If a password was set for the root account, type in that password.

Once logged in, navigate to /etc, and open the file inetd.conf.

~ # cd /etc/etc # vi inetd.conf

In the file, find and uncomment the line(s) f  ...
 
IPSEC on multi-WAN linux firewall
edited by on June 23rd 2010, at 17:14
Working on implementing Multi-WAN at our office (more about that later), in which we use a rather special routing setup, we got this error message on our IPSEC tunnels:

Quote
ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec U2.4.12/K2.6.26-2-amd64...
ipsec_setup: no default route, %defaultroute cannot cope!!!

While the reason was obvious to me (there's indeed no default route in the main routing table, this is by design), fixing the problem was not.
I tried adding options like leftnexthop=ip-address but it did not really matter; the error persisted.

After searching around Google, I came across a post with a similar error, along with an unusual solution: adding the following line solve  ...
 
Fallout 3: notorious CTD upon saving
edited by on June 18th 2010, at 20:27
Ran into a problem with my Fallout 3 saving, oddly enough for the first time ever. Every time I tried saving my savegame, the game crashed with an access violation. As long as I did not save, there was no problem, but hey, what's the use about not saving your game...
The problem started appearing right after I started the Broken Steel quest line, but even outside the quest line, I have this problem.

As a member of Fallout Nexus, I was nosing around the mod repository when I stumbled upon an unusual post: Crash To Desktop Begone. It explained a plausible reason for the problem: upon saving a game, a conflict occurs with the animation sequences and saving, causing the crash. Considerin  ...
 
Fiddling with Shorewall
edited by on June 3rd 2010, at 20:03
Linux has always been a great player in internetworking, thanks to a very advanced networking stack. In addition, the filtering capabilities provided by Netfilter are only surpassed by a very select group of devices. It doesn't come as a surprise there are a lot of firewalls and internet gateways out there that are running this powerful combo.
Detailing the features of linux as a firewall/internet gateway would take up an entire article so I'm not going to elaborate on it. It suffices to say that whatever you can think up of setting up, the linux + netfilter combo can probably do it. Worst case, there are other third party applications (Squid as a web proxy and content filter, for instance)   ...
 
Belgacom introduces unlimited internet for 10 EUR/month
edited by on June 1st 2010, at 09:33

Starting this month, every type of subscription can be upgraded to have unlimited (i.e. no volume limits) internet access for an additional fee of only 10 EUR/month. Belgacom is doing this to counter the offer of Telenet; they have removed volume limitations to their higher subscription types (TurboNet and FiberNet).

About four months ago, both Belgacom and Telenet announced the ending of the volume limits in Belgium. This policy gained more and more resistance from various companies, claiming that the limitations were preventing from certain services to be expanded succesfully. Belgium was one of the last countries in Europe to have a volume barrier.

 
Advanced 7-Zip SFX creation
edited by on May 31st 2010, at 10:57

By default, 7-Zip SFX (self-extracting executable) creation only has basic configuration options. With 7-Zip SFX Maker, you can expand those options with a whole lot more.

This piece of software allows the creation of customized SFX, taking 7z files as input. Things like changing the icon, captions, default extraction path and more, are all implemented. This makes 7-Zip SFX Maker a handy tool when you require a little more than a standard SFX but less than a fully-fledged installer.

Download link: http://teejee2008.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/7-zip-sfx-maker-v20-2/.

 
Remote Desktop Connection: enable redirection of DOT4 printer
edited by on May 31st 2010, at 10:51
Printers that use ports that do not begin with COM, LPT or USB are not redirected in a remote desktop or terminal services session. To force all ports to be redirected, the filtering type has to be changed. This is done in the registry.

Do a Start, Run, type in regedit and press Enter. This starts the Registry Editor.

Navigate to the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR.

Right-click in the right pane, choose New, then DWORD value.

Name the value FilterQueueType, press Enter.

Double-click the newly created entry, and set the value to FFFFFFFF, click OK.

Restart the client, log in to your session, and all ports should be r  ...
 
EDPnet keeps classic dial-up available
edited by on May 18th 2010, at 10:41
EDPnet is currently the only ISP in Belgium to retain the classic dial-up services. EDPnet keeps to servicing those that only require internet occassionally for checking their e-mail. For this purpose, Free EDPnet is provided.

Similar to a classic dial-up subscription from the old days, Free EDPnet requires an analogue dial-up modem or ISDN dial-up modem. Most systems no longer have this by default, although external USB variants (e.g. US Robotics) still exist.

Free EDPnet requires no registration or activation costs, other than the fee you pay your telephone company for the duration of the connection. There are several (national, no longer regional) numbers available for Belgium, Nethe  ...
 
McAfee's take on svchost.exe
edited by on April 23rd 2010, at 20:42
One of my clients at work was also a victim of the latest McAfee false-positive trouble. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, read the official statement (and remedy): https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?id=KB68780&page=content.
Basically the issue is that McAfee wipes svchost.exe from your system because it thinks there's a virus in it. And this file is in fact quite critical for Windows to function properly.

My client managed to skip by the worst part of the trouble, and only had this issue on two of their desktop computers (running Windows XP SP3). Their systems were not entirely crippled as they would still boot and log in, but they were otherwise unable to use networking, s  ...
 
Print server properties in Windows 7
edited by on April 20th 2010, at 13:36
The print server properties have been misplaced a bit in Windows 7. Before, you could right-click in the window showing your printers, then choose the dialog from the menu. In Windows 7, this no longer works, as they've kicked out that particular menu entry.

But all is not lost: it still exists, but is not directly accessible anywhere. You need to use MMC, add the right snap-in, and that one provides you with full acess to the server properties.

Start mmc (start -> run, type in mmc);

From the menu, choose File, then Add/remove Snap-ins

In the available snap-ins list, scroll down until you find Print Management, click the Add > button, then click OK.

In the following window, click   ...
 
showing posts tagged with 'computer'
 
 
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« Debating Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac is pointless: they all have their merits and flaws, and it ultimately comes to down to personal preference. »
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