10 ways to survive a critical system outage - TechRepublic
Change back the message list look in Outlook 2013 | MSOutlook.info - Don’t like the way Outlook 2013 looks? Try this to take it back to 2010 styling
How to turn old photos into new holiday calendars | Macworld
Install Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 - Petri
Pretty dorky but kind of cool… Mac Pro Trash Icon | jonathanHirz.blog
A fix for some full page pop-unders in Safari - Mac OS X Hints
Configure a Hyper-V Virtual Machine - Petri, an extremely useful measure for determining good VM candidates!
22 Crazy Perks You Should Ask Your Boss For | LinkedIn
Challenges for the Next Generation of IT Pros - Petri, again
10 tips for spotting a phishing email - TechRepublic
Dropbox issue where we couldn’t install or configure for an imaged machine--
First, set attributes based on this: https://www.dropbox.com/help/271/en
Then go in, as the current user, and delete the Dropbox\ks sub key
System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Virtual SoFS Lab
Package Based Roundcube Setup For OS X Server | Krypted
Google (finally) lets you download your Gmail and Calendar data, here's how | PCWorld
How to change your email address without losing your friends | PCWorld - along these lines, in the more tech-savvy circles of people, there is definitely some prejudice against domains such as AOL, Earthlink, and even more so, your ISP’s provided mail domains. If you are going to use a free mail service, Gmail.com, Outlook.com, and Yahoo.com are those that won’t cause eye-rolling from your tech friends
The absurdly simple guide to backing up your PC | PCWorld
How Microsoft Office will automatically extract useful info from your email | News | TechRadar
How to manually edit defaults plist files in Mavericks | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
Navigate the spotlight search in OS X | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
Petri IT Knowledgebase Customizing the Start Screen in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012
Microsoft introduced a means to enforce Start screen layout using Group Policy in the Enterprise and RT editions of Windows 8.1, but it's likely that most organizations will want an easy way to provide a default Start screen for users that they can then customize. PowerShell provides two cmdlets that can be used to capture a customized Start screen and then import the configuration to the default user profile, which is used as the basis for creating profiles as new users log on to a device for the first time.
Begin by deploying a machine that has all the apps installed that you want to pin to the Start screen. Customize the Start screen and pin applications as required. Once the Start screen has been customized manually on a reference machine, open an elevated PowerShell window.
Now that we have a Start screen customization file, you can use the following import command to customize the default user profile, either on a live machine from an elevated PowerShell console, or as part of a script to build a new machine, or a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Microsoft Deployment Tool (MDT) task sequence.
import-startlayout -layoutpath c:\customstartscreenlayout.bin -mountpath %systemdrive%\
To run the command from a batch file:
powershell -noninteractive -command import-startlayout -layoutpath .\customstartscreenlayout.bin -mountpath %systemdrive%\
Note in the above command line I haven't specified an explicit path for customstartscreenlayout.bin. It must be located in the working directory, i.e. the directory from which the batch file is launched. The mountpath parameter in the examples above, forces the command to change the default user profile on the local machine. If you want to run the command against an offline image, specify the path to your .wim image using this parameter.
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Fixing Microsoft: Missteps and Solutions - Petri
Scanner buying guide 2013: Find the right scanner for your needs | Macworld
Still 'Rolling': My top five Bob Dylan video moments - USA Today (!)
Ooma Office review: This VoIP-based phone system makes small businesses seem big | PCWorld
Hyper-V Server 2012 R2: Introduction - Petri
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A Note from Pogue — Nest Protect: Another Unloved Appliance, Reborn
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On the day the new Graton Resort & Casino opened last week, northbound traffic on Highway 101 backed up from Rohnert Park all the way to Novato. It took drivers an hour to travel just 22 miles.
The casino is expected to add up to 10,000 vehicles per day to the already overburdened artery, highlighting the need to complete a long-planned Highway 101 overhaul, widening bridges, reconfiguring interchanges, and other improvements.
"A traffic generator like the casino makes this project even more important," said Dianne Steinhauser, executive director of the Transportation Authority of Marin. "It emphasizes the need to do it."
Much of that work will be completed by 2017.
But even after all the improvements, the worst bottleneck in the area will remain: the freeway will still narrow from four lanes in Marin County down to two lanes from north of Novato to Petaluma. A lack of funding will leave that 10-mile gap in carpool lanes for at least seven more years, transportation officials say, and frustrate commuters who battle heavy daily traffic between Sonoma and Marin counties.
Thirteen years after embarking on the project to improve Highway 101 from Highway 37 in Novato to Windsor River Road — a nearly 40-mile stretch — construction crews are working on the last section between Petaluma and northern Novato known as "The Narrows."
The projects underway include improving all four interchanges in Petaluma, widening the overpass at Redwood Landfill, adding frontage roads through The Narrows, closing off unsafe highway access points, and widening the bridges over the Petaluma River and Highway 116. All of the work will be completed by 2016.
A future project to realign the freeway and build a new bridge over San Antonio Creek at the county line is fully funded and will break ground in 2015 with a two-year timeline.
When all the work is complete, the freeway will be safer and more modern, but no wider than it is today. Funding for the last piece — a carpool lane in each direction from northern Novato to Old Redwood Highway in Petaluma — is still $250 million short, and officials don't know when it will come, or even who will pay.
"Where's the money going to come from? We don't know the answer to that yet," said Suzanne Smith, executive director of the Sonoma County Transportation Authority. "If someone wrote me a check tomorrow, we could have the whole thing done in four years. Optimistically, we could see funding in two to four years."
The six miles of unfunded Sonoma County carpool lanes are estimated to cost $125 million. Marin County's four-mile gap is $110 million short.
The Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria, which owns the casino, will pay $2 million over the next 10 years for transportation infrastructure to offset the increased traffic from the gambling palace.
So far, the Sonoma County side of the project has been funded by Measure M, the 20-year sales tax measure voters approved in 2004, and the state and federal money that it has leveraged. But the Measure M fund is largely depleted. Officials borrowed most of the money up front, and the rest of the expected revenue will go toward servicing the debt, Smith said.
Regional transportation planners must now get creative to make up the funding gap.
Extending Measure M at this point is not an attractive option, Smith said, because the cost of borrowing that far ahead is expensive.
Marin County's Measure A sales tax is not supporting the Narrows project, Steinhauser said. Those funds were spent on Highway 101 widening around San Rafael.
Marin is widening its side of the freeway incrementally, including in two spots that should be ready early next year — an additional southbound lane from Novato Creek to Franklin Avenue and a northbound lane from Atherton Avenue to just south of Redwood Landfill.
Agencies are looking for state and federal funding, but Smith doesn't expect money from Sacramento or Washington in the near future.
"In terms of state and federal funds, we don't expect to see a lot of that on the horizon," she said.A Congressional ban on earmarks makes federal funding for specific projects hard to come by, Steinhauser said.
In the meantime, officials are preparing the highway for the final 12-foot wide strip of asphalt — whenever funds become available — and preparing drivers to expect bottlenecks until at least 2020.
"We made a choice to do the safety improvements first," Steinhauser said. "While we are able to make the roadway safer, we are not able to widen the road all the way at this time. That's going to be frustrating for drivers."
You can reach Staff Writer Matt Brown at 521-5206 or matt.brown@pressdemocrat.com.
Best Free Tools for System Administrators - Petri
Five free apps for encrypting email - TechRepublic
Design a Standalone Hyper-V Host - Petri
Cloud Computing and Outsourcing: Why Bad IT Pros Deserve It - Petri
Target Offering $200 Gift Card for iPad Trade-in, Including First Generation - Mac Rumors
Work From Anywhere Like a Pro | PCWorld
Forward / Reverse Lookup Zones: Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 - Petri
Dynamic Access Control: Central Access Policy & File Servers - Petri
3 Best Free Disk Management Software for Sysadmins - Petri - These are great!
MacworldWhy (and how) I'm saying goodbye to Gmail
It was great while it lasted, but I finally broke up with Gmail. Though I had relied on Google's popular email service for years, my level of satisfaction had been dropping steadily for a while, and changes in the Mavericks version of Mail (about which I've ranted at some length) were the last straw. Now I'm returning to a good old-fashioned IMAP server, and I'm not looking back.
Lots of people are blissfully content with Gmail. If you're one of them, far be it from me to change your mind. But I want to tell you what I found problematic about Gmail—and exactly what I did about it.
Gmail does a great job of filtering spam and searching for content, and Google offers Gmail users a generous 15GB of free storage space (shared with other Google services). If you want to use your own domain name with your Gmail account (a necessity for me), you can sign up for Google Apps for Business, which starts at $5 per month per user and includes various additional features. At one time Google offered a free edition of Google Apps, and users like me who signed up while it was still free got to keep their accounts, for up to 10 users, at no charge. All in all, a pretty sweet deal.
I was never greatly troubled by Google's use of keyword scanning or the reports of government back doors to data. My main gripes were more practical.
Many people who've been turning away from Gmail these days cite privacy as their main concern, but that was a comparatively minor issue for me. I was never greatly troubled by Google's use of keyword scanning to display targeted ads; as for the reports of government backdoors into Google's data, I've always assumed that I have to encrypt email myself if I want to keep it completely private.
My main gripes were more practical. For example:
Outages: Several extended, widespread Gmail outages have occurred in the past few years, leaving me without email access at critical times.
Nonstandard handling of messages: Many people swear by Gmail's idiosyncratic approach to processing and labeling email, but it didn't suit my needs. Instead, I always wanted Gmail to work like a conventional IMAP server. Even though you can access Gmail via IMAP, Gmail's IMAP implementation is highly nonstandard—and I could never achieve exactly the behavior I wanted.
Limits on simultaneous IMAP connections: Gmail limits the number of simultaneous IMAP connections to 10, which seems like a reasonable number—except that a single copy of Apple Mail uses several connections at once. As a result, I couldn't have Mail open and connected to my Gmail account on all of my Macs and iOS devices at the same time; when I connected to more than three devices (give or take), I'd start getting error messages.
Problems sending mail: Sending outgoing mail via Gmail from my Web server—which I did, for example, when transmitting online contact forms—produced odd results, such as always including my own email address as the From address.
Buggy implementation in Mavericks Mail: Apple Mail in Mavericks treats Gmail differently than previous versions did; and on paper, that's a good thing. For example, it can now eliminate duplicate messages that previously wasted disk space and bandwidth. Unfortunately, Mail's performance with Gmail was so poor and buggy during my first week or so of using Mavericks that I wound up leaving Gmail open in a Web browser the whole time.
Some of my complaints are specific to Apple Mail, and I did consider switching email clients. But I've never found one that offers the features I rely on from a combination of Mail and third-party plugins.
Some of my complaints are specific to Apple Mail, and I did consider switching email clients. But though I've tried many other clients (such as Bloop's $2 Airmail, the $10 Postbox, and Google's $10 Sparrow), I've never found one that offers all the features I rely on from a combination of Mail and half a dozen third-party plugins. In any case, even a perfect client wouldn't solve Gmail's privacy issues, outages, and wacky IMAP implementation.
Once I decided to drop Gmail, I had to settle on an IMAP provider to use instead. I investigated dozens of paid services, including FastMail, Hushmail, and Pobox. Although each provider had its strengths (some are especially good at spam filtering, while others have extra bells and whistles), I settled on a rather obscure choice: EasyDNS. I've long relied on this Canadian company to provide DNS services for several of my domains, and its $40-per-year DNSPro package, which I was already using, includes a full-featured webmail/IMAP service called EasyMail. Since my domains were already managed there, setup was extra easy—and switching to EasyMail Apart cost me no extra money.
The steps involved in moving your email from Gmail to another provider vary depending on the type and configuration of the server that the new provider uses, as well as on how you manage your DNS records. But in broad strokes, these are the main steps:
Start with a local copy of everything: I'm assuming that you use IMAP with Gmail, and that your email client is configured (as most are, by default) to store local copies of all your messages. You should also have a backup of all those messages (using the backup tool of your choice), just in case.
If you used a custom domain name, you must change DNS records that used to point at Google so they point at your new provider. EasyDNS automates that entire process.Change your DNS settings: If (and only if) you used a custom domain name with Gmail, you'll have to log in to your domain registrar's or DNS provider's site and change the records that currently point to Gmail's mail servers so that they instead point to your new IMAP provider. (Your new provider should be able to tell you what settings to use.)
Set up new mailboxes and aliases: You'll need one mailbox on your new IMAP server for each user you're moving. If you used a custom domain, you'll want the new email accounts to be exactly the same as the old ones. If you had set up any aliases (that is, extra addresses that point to a single account) in Gmail, configure those for the new provider, too.
Forward your Gmail: If you did not use a custom domain—meaning that your address ended in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com—log in to your Gmail account on the Web (just as before), click the gear icon, and choose Settings from the pop-up menu. Click Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and then click Add a Forwarding Address. Type the address of your new account, and follow the prompts to confirm it. By performing this step, you'll ensure that email sent to your Gmail address will still reach you.
Add a new account in Mail, choose 'Other', and follow the prompts to set up your new IMAP account.Add the new account in Mail: In Mail, choose Mail > Preferences, click Accounts, and click the plus (+) button. Select Add Other Mail Account and follow the instructions to add an IMAP account with the username, password, and server addresses of your new provider. After you enter your credentials, Mail will attempt to automatically configure the account; if automatic configuration fails (which is likely), Mail will prompt you to enter the necessary details manually.
At this point, you have both your old Gmail account and your new IMAP account set up in Mail. Incoming messages will start flowing into the new account shortly, but you'll still be able to access your Gmail account. That's important, because it enables you to perform the next step.
Drag a mailbox to your new IMAP account in Mail's sidebar to copy it. But note that you may also have to drag and drop the contents of the old mailbox into the new one to copy all your messages.Move your mailboxes and messages: Choose Mailbox > New Mailbox and create a mailbox (any name will do) in your new IMAP account. Doing this forces that account name to appear in Mail's sidebar. Now you can drag a mailbox from your Gmail account in the sidebar to the new IMAP account label to copy it to the new location.
In some cases, this move copies only the mailbox and not its contents; you may have to go back to the Gmail mailbox, select everything inside it, drag it to the corresponding mailbox on the new IMAP server, and repeat as needed. (I recommend choosing Window > Activity to keep an eye on the progress; it can take a longtime.)
Once you've confirmed that all your messages and mailboxes have moved from Gmail to the new account, you can remove the Gmail account from Mail. In Mavericks, you must select the account in the Internet Accounts pane of System Preferences and click the minus (-) button.
Moving from Gmail doesn't mean you can't continue using all the other features of your Google account—Google Drive, Google Calendar, and so on.
Moving from Gmail doesn't mean you can't continue using all the other features of your Google account—Google Drive, Google Calendar, and so on. They will keep working with your existing credentials, even with Google Apps for Business. You just won't receive any more incoming mail in your Gmail Inbox.
Note that if you used Gmail's server-side filters to process incoming messages, you'll have to re-create them on your new provider's website, and you may have to fiddle with rules in Mail (or another client) to make them work correctly with your new account.
But most of the hassle is simply the tedium of the transfer process. Once that's done, you can relax and join me in enjoying a Gmail-free IMAP experience.
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