Yesterday I was at a client site where everyone prints directly to the printers, rather than sharing via a print server. One of the PCs kept showing a printer as offline, even though everyone else was printing to it. From the PC you could ping the printer and even browse to the builtin web server to see that it was low on cyan.

After chewing on this for quite a while, I found the issue: a checkbox on the Ports tab “SNMP Status Enabled”, which when checked (along with SNMP turned off on the print device) will result in the printer being listed as Offline. Once the box was unchecked, it was back online and the customer was back to printing once again.

Following Paul Thurrott’s blog such as I do, today’s post listed a way to see a hidden GUI. There is quite a list, some of which are not normally exposed but via the Registry.

This is really a pretty simple hack:

Create a New Folder, rename it GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

You can actually name it whatever you want before the dot, i.e. LinusMode, Dave, Matrix, etc. The icon will change to the one used for the Control Panel, and when opened it will list a plethora of settings.

Have fun, and be careful.

A good friend gave me an old HP Omnibook of his, which was used by a former employee and he hadn’t used it in well over a year. It turned out to have a BIOS password, which he didn’t know.

I thought I was in for some laptop disassembly to remove the CMOS battery or change a jumper; perhaps even worse, to send it back to a repair depot for reset; but it was amazingly easy. 

All that had to be done was hold down the insert key while the system was booting to reset the BIOS back to default. Okay, I had to do this three times before it worked, but it worked.

Although I was relieved to be done with this in just a minute or two, making it this easy to do a reset completely invalidates the security afforded by having a BIOS password in the first place.

Anyhow, it is now happily running Fedora 11; which BTW required 515 updates for 1.6GB (and people complain about Windows updates).

Although it took some searching, this nugget was quite simple.

One of my clients has a Linux Certificate Authority and none of the Windows systems would give an invalid or unknown certificate authority error when visiting a company website that used a cert created by the CA.

Get your root certificate ready, then fire up the Group Policy Management Console (or gpmc.msc). Either create a new group policy or use the Default Domain Policy to deploy it to every system.

Right-click the policy of your chosing and select Edit… go to Computer Configuration > (Policies, if you are using Windows 2008 ) > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Public Key Policies > Trusted Root Certification Authorities, right-click and choose Import… and using the import wizard browse over to your root certificate and you are done.

Within a few days most computers on the domain should have the certificate, aside from the stragglers who never seem to be on the network.

Good thing we had that free eBook to learn Exchange 2010, because the announcement on the official Microsoft Exchange Team Blog says it is out the door and available worldwide.

You can grab the 120 day trial here. And this time there is no 32-bit version, as with the Exchange 2007 trial.

And if you are a TechNet or MSDN subscriber, the full (non-expiring) version is available for download as well.

Well if this isn’t the week for free books… Now there is a free eBook download from Microsoft: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2.

The “Introducing” series of MS Press books are hardly a technical treatise on whatever subject they happen to cover, but in my opinion, free information regarding their latest products is always a good thing.

And thanks again goes to Bink.nu for this post.

I nabbed this news item from Bink.nu, a very worthy site for the latest in Microsoft news.

You can head on over to Red Gate Software’s site for a free eBook on Exchange 2010. I guess I should start reading, it’ll be here sooner than later.

Not sure how long this will last, so get’em while they’re hot.

Okay not really, but everyone else is making claims and spreading exaggerated news. Why not a catchy headline for me too?

Windows 7 has been unleashed upon the world today; enjoy!

PS. For those of us who have TechNet or MSDN, we’ve had the official release version for many weeks. Next time be one of the first with Windows 8 128-bit ;^)

A few months ago I had an Exchange Server 2007 install stop cold, caughing up this error:

Error:
Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed to reach  status ‘Running’ on this server.

Apparently if you disable IPv6 on a Windows Server 2008 the error will occur. Not to be picky, but how many networks are actually using IPv6 and why is it installed by default anyway?

So re-enable it, reboot and try the install again.

Microsoft has been using the Windows Installer Tool for quite some time now to make installing, patching and repairing programs a snap (installers using this will typically have an MSI extension).

One of the many benefits of this tool is the ability to script a program or patch installation using the available command-line switches, e.g.: adobe_reader.msi /qn which will install the application quietly without a UI. This can be key when making a batch file to install numerous applications and patches on a new system.

For the many available switches to use check out the full list from Microsoft.