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From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
 
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) also currently has the following second level domain names reserved which can be used as examples.
        example.com
        example.net
        example.org
 
From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5737
 
The blocks 192.0.2.0/24 (TEST-NET-1), 198.51.100.0/24 (TEST-NET-2), and 203.0.113.0/24 (TEST-NET-3) are provided for use in documentation.
 
From https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3849
 
The prefix allocated for documentation purposes is 2001:DB8::/32

For several years I have used a single iTunes account for purchases for my entire family.  This has worked fine, but with the introduction of iCloud and iMessage it's now much "cloudier".  If you don't set up separate iCloud accounts for each user/device it can introduce unintended sharing of contacts, bookmarks etc.  Here are several links to sites that explain this in more detail: [more]

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2011/10/how-to-use-icloud-in-a-family-setting-share-apps-but-not-contacts

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1248112

One of our customers has a device that re-pins debit cards.  During the migration from moving users off the old Citrix farm to the new CoNetrix Citrix farm, users were having issues with this Magtec Application.   When we launched the application it would pop up a “Request Pin Timeout” error.  This meant that the application was unable to detect the Magtec IntilliPen device through the Citrix client.  We were on a very strict time schedule so a coworker began looking into the issue first as I continued to migrate users.  Four hours later after numerous tests, Magtec still wasn’t working. [more]

After we finally finished migrating all the users, (2 weeks later) my coworker tagged me to help tackle this issue of why this was not working.  After numerous tests,  I was sure that something in the intCat.ini file wasn’t set up correctly.  We could launch this application and it would connect fine on the old farm but on the new farm it would not work.  After calling Magtec support 3 times, explaining to them “I KNOW YOU HAVE SEEN THIS PROBLEM BEFORE” I finally got a technician to send me over a document that was Citrix and Terminal Server friendly.

In this document I found 2 changes that needed to be added to the intCat.ini file

a.       [Communication] add IPType="REMOTE_RS232"

b.      [Motorized_Intellicoder] change to DeviceName="MCPUM_COM2"

The communication part I believe is the most important piece as it tells the application that instead of using the local COM1 port it uses the Clients Com1 port.  After adding this in the intCat.ini file the device connects up immediately.

I had a recurring issue months ago with Acronis causing my laptop to shut down during some backups (an occasional backup would succeed).  The shut downs were not blue screen crashes but rather, an abrupt shut down, with no warning, as if the power button were pressed and held down.

In the past 10 months or so, I’ve received a new laptop, and rebuilt it (to move to Windows 7 Enterprise and BitLocker), so I don’t remember if uninstalling/reinstalling Acronis, installing a new build of Acronis or one of the other changes to my laptop made the issue go away…temporarily.  Unfortunately, the issue apparently returned a few weeks ago.  I recently discovered by scheduled backups to an external hard drive had not been working for a couple of weeks.

A coworker suggested I use Windows 7 native Backup and Restore and, so far, it appears to be working well.  While not offering the granular backup configuration options Acronis offers, it allows for system image backups in addition to standard backups which provide for easy restoration of individual folders and files.  That, and, it doesn’t shut down my laptop.  :D

Last week, one of our customers experienced a system wide outage due to a new MAC on the network. That’s right… it is typed correctly. During the setup of a MAC OS Lion 10.7 installation, one of the users had a home folder set in their Active Directory properties. When the MAC user logged in and the laptop attempted to map the user’s home folder, the EMC Celerra NS40 NAS that serves as the back-bone of the network serving CIFS shares and about a dozen iSCSI LUNs to Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and VMware hosts, experienced a kernel panic and crashed….very ungracefully I might add. The outage only lasted about 2-3 minutes while the datamover failed over to the standby. However, it took nearly two hours to clean up the carnage post-failure. Not to mention, two hours outside of business hours to fail the unit back to the primary datamover.

Specifics about the exact cause are not 100% clear, but two things are known. First of all, MAC OS 10.7 uses a different SAMBA client than previous versions. Formerly, MAC OS used a bundled open source SAMBA software for Windows file share and network directory services. With 10.7, they have rolled their own and replaced the open source code with their own flavor of SAMBA. According to EMC, the root cause of the issue is that MAC OS 10.7 passes a NULL value in one of the SAMBA message headers. Obviously, this is a problem for the Celerra. No word as to how gracefully Windows file server handle this issue.

Recently, I was tasked to work on separating 2 companies in Postini that were no longer under the same organization. In order to create the new account, I had to first delete the domain under the old Postini config which also required deleting all the users. I ran into a slight issue with this.

• In order to delete the Org, you must delete all the domains under the Org.
• In order to delete the domain, you must delete all the users under the Org.
• You are not allowed to delete pdefault@example.com because the Org must have a default user.
• You cannot create a new account for domain.com because the domain is in use under another Postini account.

The trick here is to assign a new default user for the org and then delete everything. Simply go to the Org General Settings and scroll down until you see Default User.

From here, you can change that to any user that already exists under your account. Even one under a different domain and Org. While this was a very simple solution, it was a little hard to realize what needed to be done because of the steps I went through to attempt to simply delete an Org from a Postini account.

When troubleshooting file shares not working to several computers, I was presented with an error saying I could not connect. The specific message was “Not enough server storage is available to process this command.” I was able to find an article discussing this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/225782/.  After increasing the registry key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\... LanmanServer\Parameters\IRPStackSize by a decimal value of 3 and rebooting, the file share immediately started working. The value should be increased by increments of 3.

My laptop data backups to an external hard drive quit working.  I am using Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 and a scheduled backup would always result in a “bad username and password” error.

I double checked my windows domain credentials, created backup accounts and checked those credentials, used the default local administrator and checked those credentials. None of them worked.

Here is the solution from Acronis support: [more]

When you edit the manual backup plan to schedule make sure that you select the backup Location and renter the Online location credential and then move on to scheduling it and save it to perform the backup.
Once you edit the existing backup plan you would have to re-enter the location where you want to backup or else it would not take in the previous user name and password.

So basically, you have to change the backup location in order to get it to recognize the plan credentials.  Glad they had the answer. Don’t know I would have every thought to re-enter the location, since it wasn’t changing.

I had bought a new Wireless HP Laserjet printer and connected it to my wireless router.  Print jobs tested from wireless devices on the same subnet worked flawlessly.

Next, I needed to be able to print from my PCs directly outside of the wireless router.  A brief overview of my network at home is:

Cable Modem -> Cisco 851 Router (hardwired PCs, IP Phone, VPN) -> Linksys E4200 Wireless Router (Laptops, Printer).

I configured port forwarding on the wireless router to forward port 9100 to the printer’s IP address.  I setup a new network printer and told it to use the IP address of the outside interface on the wireless router.  The printer started printing, but then it would not stop.  The PC kept sending the job over and over, and it would never clear out of the print queue. [more]

Within the ports tab of the printer properties on my PC, I had to uncheck “Enable Bi-Directional Support”.  Bi-Directional printing can allow the printer to communicate back to the PC to tell it that the print job has completed.  Turning this off tells the PC to send the job to the printer and then remove it from queue