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To re-execute a recently typed command, retype the first few letters of the command and press F8. The command will expand to the latest command in the history that matches those letters. Press F8 again to keep going back in time. Note that the matching is case sensitive.

If you want to see a list of commands previously typed, just press F7 in the command window to get a menu of selectable commands. [more]

The order of shutdown on a multi-shelf SAN is important. This is especially so for situations where there are Vdisks that span the shelves in the SAN. There is apparently a timestamp (specifically on the MSA 2000 series) that the controller keeps current on each of the drives in the Vdisk set and these must match for the controller to bring the Vdisk online after a power cycle.

You should power off the main controller shelf first, then any secondary shelves so that the timestamps written by the controller will be consistent.

When powering on, power on the secondary shelves first and then the main controller shelf.

There are some four and five finger gestures on the iPad (iOS 4.3) that can be enabled by downloading Apple’s development kit, Xcode. The gestures can be enabled on the iPhone, too, but they seem much less useful on the smaller screen. Xcode costs $5 to download and you have to install it on a Mac, but you do not have to purchase the developer license. This website explains how to download Xcode and enable the gestures. The gestures include:

• Pinching the screen with all five fingers to close an app and return to the home screen
• Quickly switching between apps by swiping four fingers across the screen
• Opening the multitasking bar by swiping four fingers up the screen

Oldversion.com and oldapps.com host old versions of many Windows and Mac programs. A recent example where this came in handy is this. Roboform's latest release no longer exports the full site URL. Roboform even changed the previous version so that it no longer has this feature either.  If you want to migrate to LastPass, you need those URLs. So the old version of Roboform is what you need. Another example is PRTG - It used to be very simple to install and set up. The most recent version is much more powerful, but you have so much setup to do just to do some simple monitoring. Of course, be careful running older versions because there may be security concerns.

A local IT support customer who does CPA work, was getting errors submitting tax returns electronically. They were instructed to install an update to install the new forms needed. During the installation by one of the employees, it stopped responding and only half installed. They had been instructed to reinstall the old version over the current  install then run the update again. I was asked to perform the procedure. Every time I attempted to re-install the older version it would hang and then give me an error that it was the wrong operating system.  I attempted the install from a Windows 2003 and Windows XP system which is how it is normally installed.

After consulting with ProSystems support found that the problem was that the Microsoft installer was trying to run with the installation. The tech said “right after starting the install, open the task manager and kill any instances of MSIEXEC.exe that is running”. I did this and the install ran without any problem. I then apply the updates and it installed the needed updates, using the built in update agent, without any issues.

The nice thing is that when I asked the tech if this was documented anywhere, his response was “nope”.

I came across a problem with OWA where it kept redirecting the external server address to the internal server address (Ex.  Mail.public.com -> servername.domain.dom).
 
After doing some thorough research, I discovered that there is a property in the IIS Metabase file that controls whether or not the server name is always used.  Microsoft KB article 834141 says that “The UseHostName property will instruct IIS to always replace the SERVER_NAME variable with the fully qualified machine name.”  This property is a Boolean value.  Setting this property to false stopped the automatic redirects and kept the external server name in the web browser. [more]
 
In order to edit the metabase, you must use commands with adsutil.vbs.  You must have the site ID of the website you want to edit the value for.  I show in the screen shot below how you can view the log file name in order to determine the site ID number.  I then show the commands used to get and set the UseHostName property for the website.

My iPhone was having many different problems, the main one of which was my GPS not functioning as it should. After doing some research I found that when you restore from an older model iPhone to a new one, it carries over some residual data that can cause issues.  I had moved from a 3G to a 3Gs to 4 and each time just restored my old settings. I decided to rebuild my iPhone, I backed it up and made sure all my purchases had been transferred. I then wiped my iPhone 4 and set it up as a new phone. I did not restore from backup. I proceeded to reinstall all my apps, data and email account info. I have yet to have a problem with my GPS and my phone actually hangs up at the end of a call, without me having to push the end call button 10x. [more]
 
During this process I also found that having multiple backups of iPhones can chew up a lot of drive space. Just by removing old backups I cleared over 12GB.
Just make sure you don’t delete one you may need.
 
In Mac OS X your iPhone files are backed up at the following location:

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/

Windows XP stores all of your iPhone backup files in this location:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Windows Vista and Windows 7 backs up the iPhone files to here:

C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Obviously if your main drive is not C: then you’ll have to change that, same goes for ‘user’

Note to Windows users: the Application Data and AppData directories and their contents (iPhone backups included) are considered ‘hidden’ so you will need to enable ‘Show hidden files’ within Windows Explorer before you will be able to see the files.

We had an issue come up with a group of Citrix Presentation Servers that were recently introduced as a pilot for one of our customers. All the Citrix servers are newly built using mostly application defaults. Our first application silo contained routine applications like Office, IE, and file share resources. Setup and testing went very smooth. However, the second silo we built published a core application that was launched using a batch file. Testing of the application by our network engineers and by the customer’s head of IT raised no concerns. Everything worked as expected. The application was published to a small set of regular users chosen as a pilot group and we were quickly alerted that none of the users could launch the application. Here is the error that was displayed: [more]

“The desktop you are trying to open is currently available only to administrators”

We were aware of some ongoing Terminal Server licensing issues that this customer was experiencing so we automatically assumed that was the problem. We scrambled to put another Windows 2003 server on the network to run TS licensing thinking it was only a matter of time before the other Citrix servers started having issues. By the end of the day, we had the new TS licensing server online and all the settings deployed via group policy to the problematic servers. A reboot of the servers would fix it…not so much. After the reboot, the issue persisted. Back to square one. After digging through all the settings a few times, I finally found the following setting:

On the surface this setting doesn’t look like it would cause any issues. After all, we were using a published application and it looks like this setting would only prevent users from opening a published desktop on the server. However, after doing some testing, we found that the ICA protocol doesn’t consider launching a batch file to be a published application. Only files with .exe extensions count. Our testing failed to uncover this issue because we had unintentionally done all of our testing with administrator accounts and all the applications published on the first silo were standard .exe apps. Unchecking this box fixed the problem.

While working with a client, I recently promoted a new Windows 2008 R2 virtual server to a domain controller.  Prior to running dcpromo.exe everything looked and performed great, but I noticed a large amount of system resource issues following the promotion.  I also ran into several cases of not being able to open various management console snap-ins or other applications.  After troubleshooting various issues I finally decided that they all must have had a singular root cause. 

After digging around in the event viewer and scratching my head a bit, I asked another network engineer what I was missing. He looked around for a few minutes and asked me if disk quotas had been enabled via group policy.  I opened up the Group Policy Management console on another server and discovered a disk quota group policy object for terminal servers that had been applied to the Domain Controllers OU.  After excluding the new domain controller from receiving the policy, and then manually removing the existing disk quota entries the server was running at full speed with full functionality.