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Have you noticed how Windows Explorer sorts files with numbers in their name not how you would expect?  If you have items named IE4, IE401, IE5, you would expect them to be listed like this:
IE4
IE401
IE5

Instead, they are listed like this:
IE4
IE5
IE401

This is a little strange, since this sort order is used nowhere else by default.  Windows lists the entries in this order because the number 401 is larger that 5.  I got tired of this, so I finally did some searching and found an old Microsoft Knowledge Base article from 2007, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319827, which still works on Windows 7.  You just create this registry entry: [more]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoStrCmpLogical"=dword:00000001

P.S.  There is -v option to the ls program on most UNIX type systems to sort directory output like this.  The v is for version - to list files with version numbers in order.

The growth of the cloud is ever expanding and people are creating new services allowing you to connect to your data and resources from essentially anywhere in the world. The latest addition to cloud services is Google Cloud Print (http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cloudprint.html) and I've been playing around with it at home. This beta service allows you to print to your printer from any computer or smart phone, regardless of your location.

The main requirement is Chrome version 9.0.597.1 (or greater) on the computer connected to your printer.  Once installed, enable the Google Cloud Print connector in Google Chrome. When you enable that setting your printers are “shared” with your Google account and available for use.

Currently only available for your mobile browser and for Google Docs or Gmail, to use this service, simple expand the menu and click Print on a message or click the “Print” link that appears next to the attachments. Here is what it looks like from a mobile browser: [more]

A window will appear letting you know what printers are available.

Simply select one and your document will be submitted for printing!

I recently got very annoyed that I couldn’t open 2 instances of Excel.  After a little bit of research, I found out if you open up Excel and go to File -> Options -> Advanced, scroll down to the bottom, and underneath the General section check the “Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange” option.  Here is a screen shot of the setting:

I was recently assigned a task for one of our customers in West Texas to get their servers checking in with WSUS correctly.  After talking to a coworker, I found out that since we deploy every virtual machine from a template that has the OS already installed on it.  Each virtual machine deployed will have the same “SusClientID” for WSUS that the template has.  Here are several steps that you can go through in order to issue each machine a new “SusClientID”: [more]

• Stop the Windows Update service “net stop wuauserv”
• Delete “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\ SusClientId”
• Start the Windows Update service “net start wuauserv”
• In a command prompt, run “wuauclt /detectnow”

Following those steps will recreate the string and that system should begin reporting in with a different SusClientID.

I recently worked on a problem where a user had a PC with a network printer added utilizing HP’s Univeral Print Driver. The user RDP’s to a Terminal Server and this “local” network printer is redirected through to their Terminal Server Session. When the user attempted to print to the redirected network printer, they received the following error message:

"The selected printer 'HP Universal Printing PCL6' is not a supported HP device"

Printing from the PC to the network printer as well as printing from the TS directly to the network printer worked. [more]

Knowing that the UPD utilizes bidirectional communication when printing, it is my best guess that this was not working via the TS port that was created when the redirected network printer was auto-generated at login. This behavior does not occur with all model printers.

I enabled and configured SNMP with an established SNMP community name on both the network printer port on the print server as well as through the Web Interface on the network printer. Once that was done, printing via the redirected network printer worked.

I was recently helping a bank network support client install an update to a Jack Henry application named Yellowhammer. Normally we save the installation file to the network of that certain program just for organizational purposes. 

Upon reading the instruction I just save the .exe file to the user's PC because I wanted to see what files needed to be updated.  However, upon running the installation it just opened a GUI that setup a connection back to Jack Henry.  We closed out the program to begin saving the program to the network.  When we did this ALL THE DESKTOP ITEMS DISAPPEARED from the user's PC. [more]

After looking into what files were unzipped I came across a file name “cleanup.bat” which deleted whatever folder these files were located, and in our case it happened to be the Desktop folder. 

I am just curious as to what would have happened if I saved this anywhere else.  So for future reference, check for a cleanup.bat file in any Jack Henry Installation.

While checking the syslog messages around the times of the Internet disruptions at customer site, I found that the timestamp recorded by the ISA server sometimes did not match the timestamp recorded by the border router.  After some digging, I found that the clock on the ISA server was extremely slow, and would get off by five minutes in a matter of hours.  Since five minutes is the magic number before domain authentication fails, this made me concerned. [more]

I found that the ISA is set to synchronize time with the VMhost, and that the VMhost’s clock had not been properly set.  It had a date of January 26 (on February 17).  VMware time synchronization is a little funny, in that if the guest is behind the host then the guest’s time just gets updated, but if the guest is ahead of the host then the host slows the guests clock until the time gets synchronized again.  Thus, the ISA server’s clock was slow because of the VMware time synchronization, and the native Win32Time process was correcting the problem periodically.

Our current best practice is to a) synchronize the VMhosts to public time servers, b) synchronize virtualized domain controllers to the VMhosts, and c) utilize native Win32Time to synchronize domain members.

Within Microsoft Word, there is a feature to split a document screen into two sections so you can view two parts of a document at the same time.  To split the screen, double click on the small rectangular box located above the vertical scroll bar (see figure 1).  You can resize the panes by holding down the left mouse button (when the mouse is hovered over the split box), and dragging the split box up or down (see figure 2).  To remove the split screen, simply double click on the split box. [more]

Figure 1

Figure 2

VMware PowerCLI is a set of Windows PowerShell snapins that provide access to the VMware infrastructure just like the vSphere client.  It has 165 commandlets.  This will connect directly to hosts just like the vSphere client will, so it can be used to manager smaller installations.  While very powerful scripts can be used for doing just about anything, here are some simple examples:

• copying ISOs to and from the datastore
• powering on or off machines
• rebooting machines
• seeing how much space a machine is taking up

There are many scripts already written and available on the net, so search around before going to very much trouble to write your own. [more]

You can download PowerCLI from http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/automationtools/powercli.  This page has several links, including a link to a getting started guide.