We are in the process of installing a policy and procedure management application at the hospital. It has been setup so that users are not required to enter their user name and password to access the site, it is done via LDAP. To get the single-sign-on benefits of the LDAP look ups we needed to add the domain name to the list of trusted sites in IE. This can be done via Group Policy, but, my experiences with this group policy setting has been mixed. Each time I configured this Group Policy Object setting it turned off the option for the user to add sites. Each new site needed to be added by me in to the GPO. While I limit what my users can change and access I do not like getting calls for simple stuff like this. What was I to do?
Category: Tech Help
Browse Safe with Firefox 3
Firefox 3 was released yesterday to much fanfare. The first tallies are showing over 8 million downloads in 1 day. Of that total 269,901 were by Canadians.
Update June 19: Download total is now over 11 million, 320,000+ by Canada.
I’ve been using it for about a day, here are my initial impressions.
I don’t have any stats to back it up, but Firefox 3 seems faster. Pages come up fast, there is very little lag when switching tabs and so far the memory used by Firefox 3 is not growing by the second. Now I never had the memory issues some users of Firefox 2 have had, but, I regularly have 8-10 tabs open a time, often even more, and Firefox 3 so far seems to hang around 120-140K. Much like my old install of Firefox 2. This may be because I keep the amount of add-ons I use to a minimum, so I was never affected by the memory issues.
After installing Firefox 3 the first thing I noticed was the update interface. Thankfully Mozilla didn’t mess with the standard browser placement like Microsoft did in IE7. I also noticed that a new folder showed up on my toolbar. Firefox 3 adds a “Most Visited” folder. I’m not sure if i will use it yet, but could see how it could be useful.
I’m still learning & playing with all the new features in Firefox 3, and getting used to the new url bar, but, so far I like the new version. This is a required upgrade to all Firefox 2 users. I also strongly recommend IE users to take the plunge and give FF3 a try. I really think you will be impressed.
Our Canon MP390 has been printing black text poorly for a weeks. Running the cleaning application did nothing to help the poor prints. Luckily the MP390 has a removable print head. Unlike most other printer manufacturers, Canon does not build print heads into the new ink cartridges. Instead of paying for a new print head I popped it out and took it to the sink. A few minutes running under warm/hot water flushed it out. I then used a paper towel to get most of the water off of it. Make sure to not rub the print head, dab it onto a paper towel only. A can of compressed air does a good job of getting the last few droplets off the print head. After reinserting the ink cartridges, a few print head cleanings, an alignment and the printer was back printing like when it came out of the box.
I’ve been looking for an easy way to backup my VMware images since putting 3 Virtual Machines (VM’s) into production. After having my SharePoint site crash a few months ago I redoubled my efforts to find such a solution. Since I use the free VMware Server I would have to either find a script online or roll my own script. This week I had some success finding numerous scripts. After testing many of these scripts and finding none that worked the way I wanted them to, I decided to take the ideas I learned from these scripts and started writing my own.
While poking around Word 2007 today I realized that I could be posting from Word instead of the WYSIWYG/html WordPress editor. What you see here is the 1st post from Word to WordPress on my site.
Setting up the connection info is a snap. You just have to enter in the URL of your site, the info of the user you want to post as and you are on your way.
I’m not sure if I will continue using Word 2007 to post as some of the advanced options for images and post layout are a bit finicky, but it is a great way for average users to use an application they are comfortable with to post to their blogs.
I was checking my WordPress.com blog stats this morning and noticed that I had a new incoming link to my site. I was curious to see who and what this back-link was about. It turned out to be some guy using an image I have posted in my Diskeeper review. I have been meaning to add hot-linking protection to the site, and after a quick Google search to find a good script to add to a .htaccess file I was on my way to accomplishing my task.
Yesterday was a nightmare. Nothing worked as it should. Nothing. Not one thing. Then to top things off I received my call back from tech support for my SSL VPN connection issue. I could connect the SSL VPN without a problem, I just couldn’t connect using VNC to an internal PC that I needed to get access to an outside contractor. The tech went over my SSL VPN settings and made one minor change to the order of my firewall rules. He made himself a user name to test the SSL VPN connection, and he attempted to connect the my site. He said couldn’t connect and said there was nothing he could do. I stated that I could connect and that my vendor could connect to the SSL VPN. I also said he could walk me through testing a few things on my end. To which he said something about being a break-fix tech and not actual tech support, where you know, you help customers with their issues so they don’t call back on the same issue. This guy said that since he was unable to connect to the SSL VPN he couldn’t do anything for me. SNAP! View full article »
It has been a long time since I've been able to get myself together to post something of worth here. Life has been very busy, yet at the same time nothing much of note has happened, tech wise at least. The baby continues to grow inside mommy, the babies room has been finished and a major overhaul to the basement and driveway has taken place. So you can see why I have had little time for a tech blog. View full article »
As a sys admin, the bane of my existence are printers. In fact I think I could make a list on how I hate them so, but that is for another time. Back to the story. In the past month I have had to take out my machete, enter the deep dark jungle of the registry and hack out all reference to printers and printer servers , twice. View full article »
