Personal IT Experiences

Looking for older versions of the free Acrobat Reader (7.x and 8.0)? Begin here and walk the directory tree to find the version you want:

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/8.x/8.0/enu

AT&T completed their assimilation of Bellsouth, my home phone service provider for these past 20 years.

My subscriber fees are now increasing. $1.00 a month. Not a big deal but telephone service these days is a commodity and AT&T is still pricing local phone service like they priced their long distance services back in the 1970’s.

I have the AT&T Complete Choice plan and pay additional fees for not listing in the phone directory and privacy director.

With the Complete Choice plan, optional services, Government Mandated charges (taxes) and Surcharges, my subscription phone service is $55 - $56 month. Long distance calls are billed in addition.

I could opt for the $16 month basic service from AT&T, but that includes no caller ID and I have a feeling AT&T would sell my name and number to every tele-marketer that beat a path to their corporate door. Not to mention having to continue paying AT&T surcharges like the $6.50 “FCC Authorized Charge for Network Access”.

With the latest AT&T increase, I decided to look around for other options. Comcast is my business-class ISP provider and it offer similar phone services for $30 per month for 6 months and then increases the fee to $40 thereafter. Vonage is not likely to survive in the long run, Sunrocket has gone belly up, Skype struggled for 2+ days before they solved their “algorithm outage” and Packet8 doesn’t have a great customer service reputation.

The WhichVOIP web site has accumulated user opinions for some of the various VOIP providers. I’ve decided to try out the VoicePulse Local Unlimited +200 service. $15 month (not sure what the Government Mandated charges will be) brings a lot of features (like filters for scraping off tele-marketers and voicemail services) compared to the $56 equivalent features from AT&T. Yes I know that when the power goes out, I won’t get service. So what? Nearly everyone has a cell phone these days. I carry a BlackBerry wherever I go and family members carry Sprint cell phones.

We’ll see how long it takes for delivery of the ATA device and getting the service setup. With a 30 day money back guarantee this is worth a try.

Windows and Linux users have a third party solution for creating and mounting virtual encrypted disks with the utility TrueCrypt. While the developers of TrueCrypt indicate a planned Mac OSX version, it doesn’t appear they’re testing one right now.

As the owner of a spanking new 24″ iMac, I wondered what other encryption utilities were available for the Mac. Guess what? You don’t need a third party utility - you have the ability right now to create encrypted disk images using the OS’s built in utility Disk Utility. Matt at Mac OS X Tips has an excellent step-by-step process.

Encrypt and Hide your Private Files | Finder | Mac OS X Tips

Experienced this problem with HP DL360 servers w/ 2-72GB disks, RAID 1.

After restoring a Windows 2003 DISK image (GHOST image) to the server, able to boot and work with drive C:. Unable to see and access drives E: and F: also thought to have been restored in the DISK image.

Solved by using DiskPart this way:

• At a command prompt, type Diskpart <enter>
• Type List Volumes <enter>
• Missing volumes are seen, but they don’t show labels or drive letter assignment
• Type Select Volume 2 <enter>
• Type Assign <enter>
• You’ll see an affirmative message.
• Type List Volumes <enter>
• Does the drive letter appear along with a volume label? Good.
• Type Select Volume 3 <enter>
• Type Assign <enter>
• You’ll see an affirmative message.
• Type List Volumes <enter>
• All drive letters appear with their volume labels?
• Type exit <enter> and close the command prompt.
• Reboot the server to verify drive letters appear normally.

• %HOMESHARE%
• %ERRORLEVEL%
• %APPDATA%
• %ALLUSERSPROFILE%

You can use the command shell to create and edit batch files (also called scripts) to automate routine tasks. For example, you can use scripts to automate the management of user accounts or nightly backups. You can also use the Windows Script Host, CScript.exe, to run more sophisticated scripts in the command shell. You can perform operations more efficiently by using batch files than you can by using the user interface. Batch files accept all commands that are available at the command line. For more information about batch files and scripting, see Using batch files

Microsoft Command Shell Overview

Works from a command prompt. It extracts files and maintains their target directory structure just like a new install.

Less MSIerables Utility

Backing up a GPO copies the data in the GPO to the file system. The backup function also serves as the export capability for GPOs. A GPO backup can be used to restore the GPO to the backed-up state, or to import the settings in the backup to another GPO.

Using the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) in a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Environment

Need a “supported hotfix is available…” fix that isn’t generally available on the technet web site? Are you dreading having to call and navigate the Microsoft call prompter (or HP enterprise support) to obtain a supported hotfix? Submit a simple web form to Microsoft and receive a link to the download.

Spat’s WebLog (Steve Patrick) : Get a hotfix — without having to call MS…

Article explains how to prevent OS X from creating new .DS_Store files when opening folders on remote volumes mounted using SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, and WebDAV. The creation of .DS_Store files (and more so, ._AppleDouble files which are not covered in this hint) is frequently the source of complaints against Mac users, who often leave a trail of these files scattered throughout the file system when “visiting” a Windows computer. Even with this hint in place, the .DS_Store files will continue to be created on local Mac volumes (which is a good thing).

To prevent the creation of these files, open the Terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

It may be necessary to log out and back in, or even to restart the computer (which is what the article states), for the change to take effect.

macosxhints.com - Prevent .DS_Store file creation on network volumes

It will unjoin a machine from a Windows domain and not even start to ask the domain for permission or even tell it it did so, zip, out of the domain, have a nice day. You will find that this will likely be faster than NETDOM for any unjoin ops. It allows you to specify connection creds and will also allow you to specify a reboot.

New Utility - Unjoin V1.1.0