What is this site?

As you can probably guess this site is used for me to dump documents and notes and ideas so they can be found easily when I need them – think of it as a “do once use many process” Sorry if you are not acknowledged as the source for my notes – drop me an email and i will link back to the source document. Many of these internal notes were never intended for publication.

Microsoft URLS

Sick of trying to migrate the Microsoft website – I know I am – So I am collecting links that take you to the page you actually want rather pages which tell you  how brilliant microsoft are – let me know if you have any others

List of links to useful pages:

Action Pack – download software

https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/pcv/partnership/benefits

office365 OWA (Without going to the waffle to start with!)

mail.office365.com

Lexmark MS310DN E260DN reset dhcp settings

Quick notes on factory reset  of eprom to clear static IP on the little Lexmark

  1. open front of printer as if you were changing toner
  2. hold down the go/ ok/ green  button while turning on  the printer two lights should flash on the right (if you want you can press ok to print off instructions but the are below)
  3. press the X / cancel button until you get to the sequence where the last  2 lights flash (about 20 times)
  4. press the ok/go button again all the lights should flash sequentially
  5. restart the printer press the ok/go button twice to print the test sheet which will show if DHCP is working
  6. I found some printers took more then one attempt to do this

office 365 older versions of office

If you need to use an older version of office on office365

login as the site admin

go here:

https://portal.office.com/default.aspx#DownloadsPage

You can then download some older pc and mac versions of office

Troubleshooting web performance

Been working on a tricky problem which shows how you have to be methodical to try and find the problem

Our helpdesk database was running very slow

so i upgraded the instance ram – this made loading pages faster but seem to make any writes to the mysql db slower!

Now this is a lightly loaded server so should be lightening fast

I looked at the apache logs – nothing obvious but a couple of errors

I upgraded the system to the latest version – this enabled me to spot the first problem

Schema updates had not been applied – this is fairly painless – take a back up and run

rt-setup-database-4 –action upgrade

This boosted the load times but still did little for the saving

after trailing round the RT forums it occurred to me that there must be a simple solution

I disabled various ad-ons – no real change

Then i realised the problem was SENDING emails – the way its setup it waits for sendmail to send the message BEFORE loading the next webpage

So why was it taking so long to load?

In the end it was our old friend DNS – removed the dead dns server  from resolv.conf (which was obviously timing out) and much much faster

With hindsight – it was taking a little while to ssh to the server – this was caused by the same problem, but wasn’t really  a problem.

So next time i get slow ssh’s into a server i will remember – check your dns setup!

I could change the configuration to not wait for sendmail to finish  – but lets see how it goes…

 

 

 

 

Yosemite will not download

delete all instances of “Install OSX Yosemite”  from /Applications/ and eject my old USB key, which was labeled “Install OSX Yosemite_10.10.1” before my computer would download the latest (10.10.2) installer.

virgin superhub2 some more notes

Probably most of my hits come from people configuring these things

In modem mode to reboot

http://192.168.100.1/VmRgRebootRestoreDevice.asp

To view the status page (you need to login)

http://192.168.100.1/VmRgNetworkStatus.asp

still working on the terrible ping response times from this device over time – i might just connect a timeswitch to reboot it every day

 

also working on how you get it to login in modem mode if you are a business customer as dhcp fails to work

 

Handy Geek Links with instuctions

Troubleshooting DNS:

kloth.net

Troubleshooting the misbehaving website:

rexswain.com http viewer

Troubleshoot MX records:

mxtoolbox.com

Track down the random ISP .txt records or the exchange server that will not work remotely….

Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com

IF all else fails … did you check the hosts file??

 

Article #7: Changing product Keys In WIN7 command line

Needs a tidy up but you get the idea….

Class: Procedures
Key Change in WIN7

Content

Description Freefield: Changing the windows product key in windows 7 can be done through the command line;To Start open cmd, by typeing cmd into the start menu search bar, When the cmd icon is shown right click it and select open as administrator.With your administrator cmd prompt open you then type in “slmgr.vbs -ipk ” replacing with the windows key, making sure to include the Dash’s i.e. “4j3h3-3543j-xxxxx-xxxx-xxxxx” and then press enter.

This should then bring up a small box informing you if the key was correct and installed successfully, if the key is incorrect make sure that the key was typed properly and that the cmd prompt is being ran as an administrator.

After successfully installing the key it needs to be activated this can be done by typing slmgr.vbs –ato into the Administrator cmd prompt and pressing enter.

This will then bring up a box informing you if the key activated successfully or not.