1. Run Registry Editor (RegEdit.exe).
2. Press Ctrl-F to open search box, and search for OGAAddin.connect registry key.
3. In the right pane, right click on Load Behavior and select Modify.
4. Change the value data from 3 to 0.
5. Repeat for each and every OGAAddin.connect found.

This fix worked for me on Windows XP w/Office 2003. There are other ways to accomplish this that may be required if using a different version. See the link below for other options.

Note: originally posted here.

Using Exchange Management Shell, execute this command on the Exchange server:

      Update-GlobalAddressList -Identity "Default Global Address List"

After running the command above, go back to the BES Admin Service (aka BAS), try to search for the user again (Create User > Enter part of their name in the Search Criteria fields > click Search). They likely still won’t show up but you’ll see a new option at the bottom labeled “Refresh available user list from company directory.” Click on that option and you’ll get a notification that the update request has been queued. Wait about 2 minutes before searching again. The user should now show up and allow you to activate them for BES.

The alternative is to wait until BES updates its addressbook…I’m not positive what the update interval is. This procedure should only be necessary if you’re creating a user and then (almost) immediately afterwards trying to activate BES on their account.

1. Using Microsoft Terminal Services (Windows 2003 or 2008).
2. Sound redirection disabled at the server or turned off at the client

Certain system events will still cause the system to ‘beep’ out of the system speaker. Turning off Windows Sound Schemes doesn’t stop the notification beep. Note this is sound is NOT out of the normal soundcard/external speakers but will be out of the internal speaker on the motherboard. If you’re having this problem, you’ll know how incredibly annoying it is. After hours of digging online and trying different scenarios, I stumbled across a fix and have documented it here.

On the terminal server, open Regedit and navigate to the following key:

DisableBeep Registry Entry

Here’s another one of those blog posts that’s mostly self-serving but hopefully helps a few other Joomla hopefuls.

To install Joomla 1.5 on a LAMP (Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) server:

1. Download the tar or zip file from the www.joomla.org website
2. FTP the contents of the file to your web server
3. Browse to the URL of your web-server (the URL of where you uploaded it)
4. Walk through the wizard, enter all information as needed.
5. Once you’re at the ‘Congratulations’ page, reconnect via FTP and delete the ‘installation’ folder from the server.
6. That’s it! You can now manage your Joomla site by going to the http://sitename.com/administrator address.

What’s great is that with the newer versions of Joomla, the admin console actually connects to your web-server using FTP to make changes to your config files and to upload Themes/Plugins, etc.. No more chmod’ing files on your web-server!

To ping and IPv4 IP:

 ping server.domain.com -4

To ping an IPv6 IP:

 ping server.domain.com -6

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip6Parameters\

Create DWORD32:  DisabledComponent

Value: FFFFFFFF

Background: Installed Win2008 + IIS7 + PHP 5.3 using the FastCGI method (used the Windows installer to configure IIS7).

Symptoms: PHP worked fine in my Default Site but when attempting to execute any scripts in Virtual Sites or Virtual Directories, every single PHP file would yield a 404 error message.

Solution: The problem ended up being that the ‘open_basedir’ config variable from the php config file is applied to ANYWHERE that PHP is run…regardless of what the actual home folder should be for a site (PHP picks up the basedir during installation and statically enters it in your php.ini file). The default ‘basedir’ will be whatever the root of your ‘Default Web Site’ in IIS is (usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot\). If you comment out this line (enter a semicolon before the line) and restart IIS, it will solve the problem. If you’re running PHP as a FastCGI module, you’ll actually have to rename (or copy) the php.ini file to a file named ‘php-cgi-fcgi.ini’ in the same folder as your php-cgi.exe executable. Be sure to restart IIS!

Check out the video on YouTube

I’ve got some hacks that I’ve put together for a very specific purpose. I’m sure they’ll be useful to others but I can’t share them yet. I’ll post back here oneday when sharing them will be constructive :)

So we setup the OS, installed Microsoft Outlook + Business Contact Manager and started to setup users…then we hit the brick wall. When we started setting up the users’ e-mail accounts to point to our Exchange Server (another hosted service I provide), we learned that, according to Microsoft, you can’t use Outlook in ‘cached mode’ on a terminal server. The whole concept of cached mode seems like it wouldn’t be necessary on a terminal server anyway since you would likely have the TS in the same datacenter as your Exchange server (which we DO). In our case though, we needed to enable cached mode because Business Contact Manager REQUIRES it to function.

Off to Google I went, searching for a solution. I found plenty of people saying it couldn’t be done who all ended up abandoning the idea altogether in favor of Microsoft CRM or ended up deploying PPTP VPN connections (which I avoid at all costs).

In the end, I found an article on David Overton’s blog that explains how to do it, although I had to modify the process a bit. I’m not sure if the changes were necessary because I’m using Win2008 whereas his article refers to Win2003 or not…but I got it working eventually. Here’s what worked for me:

My setup:

• All users were members of my Active Directory (AD) domain and in a group called “BCM Users”
• The terminal server (TS) is Windows 2008, is a member server, and has Office 2007 + Business Contact Manager installed.

What I did:

1. Added the “BCM Users” group to the local “Administrators” group on the TS
2. Logged onto the ‘console’ of the server using RDP from my client (Start > Run > ‘mstsc /v:ts.domain.local /admin)
3. Setup the Exchange account in Outlook on the TS (Start > Control Panel > Mail > …..). The mail account setup wizard DID show the ‘cached mode’ box greyed out….ignore it for now.
4. Launch Outlook and confirm that it can login to your account. You’ll probably get a warning that BCM will be disabled due to cached mode not being available…click OK and ignore this for now.
5. Close Outlook.
6. Open Regedit on the TS, navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\<OutlookProfileName>\13dbb0c8aa05101a9bb000aa002fc45a
7. In the right-hand pane, find the 00036601 key, double-click on it to edit.
8. Change it to 84 19 00 00
9. Click OK, close Regedit
10. Remove the “BCM Users” group from the local “Adminstrators” group.
11. Logout, log back in to the TS using a normal RDP session (i.e. not the console session)
12. Launch Outlook.
13. Business Contact Manager should work fine now!

Even after the steps above, if I view my Outlook account settings, it still shows that ‘cached mode’ is unchecked and greyed out. I think this registry hack just tricks BCM into thinking that it’s enabled but doesn’t actually enable it. No worries; it works for me!

Let’s explore the purpose of cookies, shall we? First, an example of what they do: Say you go to www.weather.com to check out your local forecast. The site has no idea where on the globe you’re located at so it asks you for your zip-code or some other location information. Instead of asking you for the same information each time you go to the site, the weather.com website will store a cookie on your computer with the location information YOU provided to it so it saves you some time in the future and makes using their service easier.

You might ask: doesn’t that mean any other website I go to can see that cookie and find out where I’m located at? No, actually it doesn’t. You see, web-browsers (that’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc…) are designed so only the site that creates the cookie can actually view it. So if you go to www.amazon.com, it can’t see the www.weather.com cookie at all.

My quasi-educated guess of why antispyware and antivirus applications detect cookies as malicious is so you feel like they’re doing their jobs and are worth doling out cash for every year or two in-order to get the latest version of their software. Now THAT is another scam I’ll dig into some other time.

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A note on the ‘weather.com example’ – Yes, I know IP geolocation data can be used here but for the sake of this article, let’s ignore that fact since most sites like weather.com don’t seem to use it….I’ve only ever seen IP geolocation data used in AdultFriendFinder.com-like ads anyway.