Tech Notes &amp; Other Musings

Saturday, November 17, 2012

America's Hometown Parade. Plymouth MA.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

How to recover a SPAM false positive from GFI Mail filtering application.

Affordable Computer Geek of Salem MA

1. Problem:

User reports that they believe a legitimate incoming email may have been blocked by the GFI Mail filtering software.

2. Solution:

Access the GFI Mail console either directly from the Exchange server. Or from your desktop browser @ http://yourexchangeservername/MailEssentials/pages/Default.aspx.

Open the Dashboard and click on Logs tab. Enter the recipients email address a date/time range to search. Note, there is no Submit button. Just enter your variables and it will begin searching. Once you see the email in question in window below click on Details in the view column.

A second window with more details about the mail in question will open. Inside of that window click on the link next to Scan Result.

In the next browser window that opens review the Item Information & Message Text to verify it is the message the recipient was expecting. If it is you can either Approve, which will allow only this message only this one time to be transmitted to the recipient. Or choose Whitelist and approve tab. This will allow this message and any future messages from this same sender to be allowed past filter.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin

Affordable Computer Geek of Salem MA

Friday, October 26, 2012

How to change the order of items in the SharePoint Quick Launch area.

I am very new to SharePoint Administration so something such as ordering an item in Sites in the Quick Launch pane may be simple to those with more experience, but it was a bit of a challenge for me to figure it out.

After adding new items to Sites and refreshing my page I noticed that the two items I had added were not put in alphabetical order but rather inserted at the bottom of the list.

See the screen shots below.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Can't assign IP to NIC after a P to V conversion.

“IP address already assigned to another adapter” error message received after performing a P to V with VMware Converter.

This error occurs due to a hidden NIC that does not appear in Network Connections panel already having the static IP assigned to it that you wish to assign to a NIC that is visible. After entering your desired IP you get this error message:

Open Device Manager. Go to View and select Show hidden devices. Look for the NIC/Adapter in question. In my example it is Broadcom…..(NDIS VBD Client). Right click on the NIC/Adapter in question and click Uninstall.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin

Thursday, October 4, 2012

How to change size of a Drive or Partition during P to V using VMware vCenter Converter

Problem:

Server 2003 Physical machine has an oversize or undersized drive that you want to change during conversion. In my example the physical was partitioned with a very small C:\ and a very large E:\ drive. After my first run at P2V of this machine I attempted to use GParted to re-size the drives to no avail.

Solution:

I have omitted many of the steps in configuring the Conversion wizard and will focus on the HDD aspects of it.

When on the Options page under the Source volumes tab of the Wizard select or deselect the HDD in question. In my example I did NOT want to convert the E:\, which was actually a partition that was carved out of the physical C:\. This in turn improperly sized the C:\ at only 50GB. Not nearly enough space for a Server 2003 machine.

Now select Destination layout tab on the Options page. In my example I want to re-size the C:\ from 50GB to 65GB. In the Size/Capacity column drop down list select <Type size in GB> and type in the size that you desire. When you boot up the machine the C:\ will be at it's new 65GB size.

In my example the easiest way for me to deal with the E:\ drive of the physical machine was to create a new drive in vCenter then move the data over from P to V across the network as it was not a large amount of data.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin

Friday, September 21, 2012

Trip to the dog park.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

ARRRGGHHH! Deleted photos off SD card by mistake.

Affordable Computer Geek of Salem MA

We took a trip to the dog park the other day and while shooting some pics discovered that the card was full. So from the cameras controls I deleted a handful of pictures and continued shooting. Fast forward to return home....

As I have many pics from the dog park and will most likely take more I am not all that upset. But there is always a different mix of dogs and there is always that one great shot. Plus I like to share them with the dog parks Facebook page for the other dogs people. What I am upset about is the fact that I just did a downright dumb move and broke my own rules about copying pics from the card.

Fast forward to return home....

I will usually remove the SD card and insert it in my laptop and COPY the pics off to the laptop. Always, well almost always I copy them off THEN delete them off the card. Why I didn't do it this way this time I have no idea.

Step Zero....DO NOT do anything to the storage (SD card) location. Do not remove the storage, do not delete anything else. Nothing!

Once I realized what I had done I turned to two different programs to help me out. Pandora File Recovery and Recuva. Both free. Pandora seems to be free outright. Recuva accepts donations for the free version and also has two paid versions.

Both are very easy to install and even easier to use. Probably even very easy for a novice computer user. Both did an equally good job in recovering my "deleted" photos.

Why air quotes on deleted? Well without getting very in depth when you press delete on your camera or on your computer it doesn't really mean delete. Not in all situations. What happened when I pressed delete on my camera and my laptop that day causes the space on the card of that particular picture I am deleting as open or free or better yet empty. The Master File Table (MFT) now knows that the particular location where your deleted photo was is now available to be overwritten.

What the file recovery programs do is read that MFT and find those locations and extract the photo information. It is not perfect, sometimes you get results as I post below. If you look closely you will see that it is actually a couple different pictures in the same file.

Thanks for reading,

Tony

Anthony C. Goodwin