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The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) issued statements today notifying financial institutions of the risks associated with cyber-attacks on Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and car authorization systems and the continued distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. [more]

To read the Press Release, visit http://www.ffiec.gov/press/pr040214.htm

To view the Joint Statement, Cyber-attacks on Financial Institutions' ATM and Card Authorization Systems, visit http://www.ffiec.gov/press/PDF/FFIEC%20ATM%20Cash-Out%20Statement.pdf

To view the Joint Statement, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Cyber-Attacks, Risk Mitigation, and Additional Resources, visit http://www.ffiec.gov/press/PDF/FFIEC%20DDoS%20Joint%20Statement.pdf

While trying to install Exchange 2010, the process failed with the following error:

Organization Preparation Failed

Error:

The following error was generated when "$error.Clear(); install-ExchangeSchema -LdapFileName ($roleInstallPath + "Setup\Data\"+$RoleSchemaPrefix + "schema0.ldf")

" was run: "There was an error while running 'ldifde.exe' to import the schema file 'C:\Windows\Temp\ExchangeSetup\Setup\Data\PostWindows2003_schema0.ldf'. The error code is: 8224. More details can be found in the error file: 'C:\Users\administrator.{your-domain}\AppData\Local\Temp\2\ldif.err'".

There was an error while running 'ldifde.exe' to import the schema file 'C:\Windows\Temp\ExchangeSetup\Setup\Data\PostWindows2003_schema0.ldf'. The error code is: 8224. More details can be found in the error file: 'C:\Users\administrator.{your-domain}\AppData\Local\Temp\2\ldif.err' [more]

A quick try again and it failed at the same spot. Fortunately, a friendly blogger had run into a similar situation and provided some workarounds - http://www.petenetlive.com/KB/Article/0000442.htm

Basically, we need to run the organization prep tasks manually. I logged onto the Schema Master with my setup DVD attached and ran “Setup.exe /PrepareSchema” and then “Setup.exe /PrepareAD”. Now, since the Schema work has already been taken care of, when I ran the Exchange 2010 setup on the new server, it passed those checks easily and allowed me to continue the install.

A location was logging errors that EIGRP Hold Timers expired.  This was happening at random anywhere between 30 minutes to 2 hours.  When this happened, it would drop reset the EIGRP neighbor and trigger their failover connection causing users to get disconnected.

The default EIGRP hello timer is 5 seconds and the hold timer is 3 times the hello timer (15 seconds).  I read that for less stable connections that setting the hello and hold timers to a higher value could help. At first, I tried 20 second hello / 60 second hold timers and noticed that EIGRP was staying up longer between 2 – 6 hours. I then increased to a 30 / 90 second timer, and EIGRP has not dropped since.  You must put the hello and hold time commands on both ends of the tunnel for them to take effect.

A Windows 8 machine was being backed up with the Windows 7 backup. The backup completed all the file level backup but it failed backing up the system image. I found various articles indicating that the problem was in creating the shadow copy, and apparently it tries to create the shadow copy on the system partition instead of the larger “C” partition (in this case). In this case, the system partition (partition #1 on the physical disk 0) was 1GB and the C drive (partition #2 on the physical disk 0) is about 450GB. [more]

I used the partition program Mini Partition Home Edition V7.7 (downloaded from http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html) to resize the C drive smaller, then shift it so the system partition can grow contiguously. I increased the system partition size to 2.5GB. Then, the Windows 7 backup program ran to completion and backed up the system image also.

In using the Mini Partition program, I had to remove all USB drives from the system. If USB drives are found, then the Partition Wizard will error out when it reboots to apply the partition changes. This problem is discussed in the FAQ’s for the Partition Wizard found here: http://www.partitionwizard.com/faq.html

There is a firmware issue on the Crucial M4 drives that can manifest itself during an abnormal shutdown.  When attempting to boot the drive (or access it if it is NOT the boot drive) the bios will tell you during boot that the drive is not accessible. The solution is to to a “Power Cycle” on the SSD. The instructions to do so are found here:  http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD-Knowledge/Why-did-my-SSD-quot-disappear-quot-from-my-system/ta-p/65215

[more]

The procedure is to apply power only to the drive for 20 minutes, remove power for 30 seconds, apply power again for 20 minutes, then the drive magically heals itself.

The real solution is to apply firmware version 040H or later.

If you have a battery, especially AA or AAA, that might be good or might be dead and you don’t have a meter to check it with, you can see if it will bounce. Hold the battery about an inch above a hard surface and drop it on its end. If it’s a new, fully charged, battery it won’t bounce much at all. In fact, it’s not unusual for it to just land with a thud and stay standing on its end. However, if it’s low on voltage, it will bounce much more than a fresh battery will. The difference is clearly obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_m6p99l6ME

If you want to apply Out of Office settings on several email accounts at one time, you can use PowerShell. By running the PowerShell command below it will enable Out of Office and allow setting an internal and external message.

Set-MailboxAutoReplyConfiguration <alias> -AutoReplyState enabled -ExternalAudience all -InternalMessage <Message to internal senders> -ExternalMessage <Message to external senders>

This works great except the message will wrap text; however, this PowerShell command does support HTML, so you can use HTML tags to apply paragraph and line breaks if you want.

A user was converted from a workgroup to a hosted domain containing a domain controller and a terminal server. They use the terminal server primarily for an application. After setting up the user on the domain, the user complained that the font on her screen was very small when using the application through RemoteApp on the terminal server. I found a registry key that you can change to change the DPI of the font, but this only changed some menus. The main window was still very small, and her application ran very slow. I could log in as myself and the application seemed to run fine. What I finally found was that her screen resolution was set to a non-standard size of about 1500x1600, and the terminal server gets it’s resolution from the client PC. I set the screen size to 1024x768 and the application started running much faster, so I suppose it just had trouble resizing the pages to fit the odd screen size. She had also set the font on her computer to 150%, so the font size on her computer was much bigger than the terminal server. After setting her screen resolution to a normal size and setting the font back to 100%, the application is running quickly and the font is large enough for her to view.

A system was running GUID partition tables (GPT) in place of MBR and UEFI instead of BIOS. After a restor from backup, when trying to enable BitLocker, I got an error saying, “Element not found”. This vague error message did not provide any helpful results on Google, so I tried running BitLocker from the command line. Running the command “manage-bde –on C: -tpmandpin” gave me an error code (0x80070490) to go with the vague message. A Google search for the error code yielded this link to TechNet that says this is a known issue when moving hard drives between systems using the UEFI boot firmware and that running “bcdboot %systemdrive%\Windows” command will fix it. The command did not fix the problem, but it pointed me in the right direction. Some more searching led me to this link that talks about how to manually delete the “bootmgfw.efi” file in the UEFI boot partition. After deleting the file and then running the “bcdboot” command from the TechNet article, BitLocker encrypted the drive.